More effective policies are needed to improve access and secure rights to land and other natural resources for various stakeholders, particularly smallholder farmers. Service delivery at all levels of governance needs to be restructured and strengthened in order to promote and improve economic...

Replaced with revised version of paper 06/16/10.

The world food and financial crises threaten to undermine the real incomes of urban consumers in eastern and southern Africa. This study investigates patterns in staple food prices, wage rates, and marketing margins for urban consumers in Kenya, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia between 1993 and...

Natural resource use, including land, and rural population location is an important topic for Zambia's development strategy. Among other efforts, the Government of Zambia (GRZ) has designated 22% of total land area, as Game Management Areas (GMAs) for human settlements and wildlife conservation....

Prepared for the COMESA policy seminar on “Variation in staple food prices: Causes, consequence, and policy options”, Maputo, Mozambique, 25-26 January 2010 under the Comesa-MSU-IFPRI African Agricultural Marketing Project (AAMP)

Accurate information on farmer and consumer behavior is the foundation for Identifying public investments and policies that can effectively promote national food security and income growth objectives. This report synthesizes recent findings on smallholder crop marketing behavior and urban...

Campaigns to prevent the spread of HIV require accurate knowledge of the characteristics of those most likely to contract the disease. Studies conducted in Sub-Saharan Africa during the 1980s generally found a positive correlation between socioeconomic characteristics such as education, income,...

Zambia’s maize crop grew by roughly 48% between the 2009 and 2010 harvests, leading to the largest crop recorded in recent history. The 2009 maize harvest was also very good, making the 48% rise in 2010 even more remarkable. The forces driving that increase, however, remain widely debated....

Effective agricultural and food security policies in Africa need to be based on a solid empirical foundation. In Zambia, it is widely perceived that poverty rates are increasing, agricultural growth is stagnant, and real food prices are higher as food production declines. This study examines...