Rice sector contributes significantly to secure households with regard to their food needs but also to the creation of employments and income generation. The sector development and its evolution over the years have been marked by various policies and approaches. These development stages of the...

Discriminant analysis was used to identify the characteristics that distinguish between fully-certified organic, partially-certified organic and non-organic farmers in Umbumbulu district, KwaZulu-Natal (KZN), South Africa (SA) during October- November 2004. 200 farmers interviewed were drawn by...

Agriculture is the mainstay of the Kenyan Economy. However, agriculture has experienced low productivity over the years. Poor access to agricultural finance has been identified as a contributing factor to low crop productivity. Kenyan agriculture has undergone some fundamental changes which have...

A major problem confronting rural and emerging farmers is the marketing of their products. Most of the farmers encountered depend on the local or village markets which are often saturated or purchases are not backed by effective demand to make sales meaningful for the desired benefits. Small...

This paper examines the extent to which garment industry in Swaziland has contributed to the economic empowerment of the Swazi people through creation of new jobs and improvement in their overall welfare. In Swaziland as elsewhere in many African countries, unemployment has been and is still a...

Globalization and competitiveness of agricultural commodities could have significant potential benefits for food security and poverty reduction in West Africa. Participation in global trade and economy is potentially important but not enough to ensure benefits at all levels of the chains and...

We assess the level and determinants of relative technical efficiency of maize-based smallholder farmers using a translog stochastic frontier (TL) model and a symmetric generalized Barnett production function (SGB), both of which are tested for economic regularity conditions. In addition, we...

Guided by the frame work of a household model under credit market failure, this paper aims at investigating the impact of access to credit on the adoption of hybrid maize among households that vary in their credit constraints. The data used in the study is from Malawi collected by the...

This study uses survey data to examine the role of access to credit on cocoa production, in West African cocoa production countries under conditions of agricultural policy liberalization. The study specifies and estimates econometric models to simulate the counterfactual of what cocoa production...

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) underscore an overriding importance of human development for sustained economic, social, political and other development, and nutrition is the beginning of human development. Nutrition has, however, not been viewed as a development imperative in many...