Aflatoxins are poisons that occur naturally in the environment. They are produced mainly by the Aspergillus flavus and Aspergillus parasiticus fungi, which can affect many of important staple crops: maize, sorghum, millet, rice, oilseeds, spices, groundnuts, tree nuts, and cassava. Hot, humid,...

China underwent tremendous agricultural market reforms in the 1990s prior to its accession to the WTO, drastically decreasing domestic market distortions. We ask whether these reforms have led to agricultural commercialization and have improved the welfare of rural Chinese households measured by...

Raising the incomes of agricultural households is central to reducing poverty in Uganda. In many areas of the country agriculture has encroached into marginal or fragile lands, leaving little room for the expansion of agricultural lands (Kraybill, Bashaasha, and Betz 2009). Additionally, soil...

This paper studies the effect of local off-farm employment and migration on rural households’ technical efficiency of crop production using a five-year panel dataset from more than 2,000 households in five Chinese provinces. While there is not much debate about the positive contribution of...

This paper deals with the estimation of a random coefficient model. The virtue of this approach is that it considers firm heterogeneity, which conventional SFA models do not. When the model is applied to Polish farms, the results indicate that the conventional random and fixed effect models...

Climate change will directly affect food availability and security. Because food production is fundamentally a biological process that is a function, in part, of temperature and moisture, the agricultural sector’s potential vulnerability is particularly large. While there is ongoing scientific...

Global food commodity price inflation beginning in 2006 and continuing through mid-2008 became a priority concern for global consumers, producers and policy-makers alike. In response, many governments across the world implemented policies targeting high food commodity prices in their domestic...

We analyze the evolution of Sub-Saharan Africa’s agricultural total factor productivity (TFP) over the past 45 years, looking for evidence of recent changes in growth patterns using an improved nonparametric Malmquist index. Our TFP estimates show a remarkable recovery in the performance of...

Global general equilibrium simulations of “regional” (within Sub-Saharan Africa –SSA-) and “multilateral” (Doha and preferential) trade integration are compared to assess policy reform priorities. Their coherence with the objective of agriculture-led industrialization is tested. New...