Crop production forecasts are widely recognized as an important input into food balance sheets and for anticipating production shortfalls. However, the role of accurate crop production forecasting systems in mitigating food price instability and transitory food insecurity is often...

Africa has inherited highly arbitrary political borders that vastly complicate current efforts to accelerate agricultural growth and reduce hunger. Because Africa’s inherited political borders arbitrarily partition agro-ecological zones and natural market sheds, current country borders serve...

Decades of research have led to substantially improved understanding of the nature of food insecurity. Until the food crisis of 2007/08, a combination of economic growth and targeted programs resulted in a steady fall in the percentage of the world’s population suffering from under-nutrition...

Cotton is an unquestioned success of Zambia’s turn towards a market economy. After privatization in late 1994, seed cotton production rose from 32,000 metric tons (mt) to about 180,000 mt a decade later (three-year averages centered on 1994 and 2005). The number of farmers involved in the...

COMMON MARKET FOR EASTERN AND SOUTHERN AFRICA Twenty Fourth Meeting of the Trade and Customs Committee Nairobi, Kenya 2-4 November, 2009

Decades of research have led to substantially improved understanding of the nature of food insecurity. A combination of economic growth and targeted programs resulted in a steady fall (until the food crisis of 2007/08) in the percentage of the world’s population suffering from undernutrition...

The triple challenge of rapid population growth, declining agricultural productivity, and natural resource degradation are not isolated from one another; they are intimately related. However, strategic planning and development programming tend to focus on individual sectors such as the...

From 1997-2007, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Title II monetization programs sold more than US$200 million of food aid wheat and unrefined vegetable oils in Mozambique. This research has three objectives: 1) to document the lessons learned from past monetization...

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....

Paper to be presented at the Comesa policy seminar “Food price variability: Causes, consequences, and policy options" on 25-26 January 2010 in Maputo, Mozambique under the Comesa-MSU-IFPRI African Agricultural Markets Project (AAMP)