The production of biofuels in many countries is largely driven by the government strategy and incentives that are in place. In South Africa the first round of the development of such a draft strategy took place in 2005 while the official stance on biofuels was finalized in December of 2007....

The Limpopo Basin is important to Botswana’s agriculture in terms of its land area of 80118 square kilometers. Climatic conditions in the Basin have ranged from droughts to floods in some years. The semi-arid nature of the Basin with the resultant low crop yields under rain-fed conditions has...

Livestock is the most important source of cash for small-scale farmers in the semi-arid tropics of southern Africa. However, with limited access to markets, farmers do not have the incentive to invest in improved livestock management. Livestock production and off-takes remain low and farmers are...

Due to the size of the European Union’s agricultural production and its market, the impact of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) reaches far beyond Europe and has major implications for trade in agricultural goods all over the world including the ESA region. Since the 1950s, the CAP...

This report is a summary of emerging issues affecting African agriculture, recent experiences and policy proposals that can guide interventions in improving the sector’s productivity. Agriculture is at the centre of rural poverty reduction in Africa and urgent measures are needed to increase...

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...

This paper highlights a market information and linkage system (MILS) developed and tested by the Kenya Agricultural Commodity Exchange Limited (KACE) that increases the efficiency of agricultural markets to work better for smallholder farmers and other small and medium sized agro-enterprises...

Au Cameroun comme dans beaucoup d’autres pays en Afrique subsaharienne, les recherches sur le VIH/SIDA se sont confinées dans les zones urbaines et ignorant en quelque sorte les zones rurales. C’est ainsi que ses liens avec l’agriculture et le développement rural n’ont reçu que peu...

Striga is an indigenous parasitic weed that attacks cereals and other crops in Africa. In maize croplands alone, Striga infests over 2.3 million ha resulting in 1.6 million tons of grain loss worth US $383 million annually. An innovative approach to controlling the parasite was to induce...

This paper investigates sources and determinants of agricultural growth in Africa, concentrating on the growth path during the last three decades. The analysis employs the broader framework provided by empirical growth literature and recent developments in Total Factor Productivity (TFP)...