Even under optimistic assumptions about the rate of urbanization and growth of non-farm employment, agriculture will still be the main source of livelihood for the majority of Africans for at least the next several decades (Losch 2012). Non-farm wage jobs in Sub-Saharan Africa will be able to...

This study examines how extreme weather in the context of on-going economic shocks influence regional inequality and polarization within Mozambique. Utilizing satellite-based estimates of rainfall that we spatially analyze within a GIS, we establish a 16-year rainfall climatology and calculate...

From 2010 through 2012 harvest seasons, Zambian farmers produced three consecutive maize bumper harvests. The total maize production during this period was 8.6 million metric tonness, of which 4.6 million metric tonnes was a marketable surplus (CSO/MAL various years). This far exceeded the...

Nearly three decades after the initiation of agricultural market reforms in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), subsidies for fertilizer and seed are once again the cornerstone of many SSA governments’ agricultural development and poverty reduction strategies. Zambia is a prime example. In the last...

Replaced with revised version of paper 08/23/11.

The advancement of South America’s agro-pastoral frontier has been widely linked to losses in biodiversity and tropical forests, with particular impacts on the Brazilian cerrado, the Atlantic Forest, and the Amazon. Here I consider an important, yet largely overlooked, driver of South...

Islamic banking is a relatively new and rapidly growing phenomenon, particularly in the Muslim world. Islamic banking prohibits all kinds of financial transactions based on interest. Its primary approach to financing is the mudaraba profit-loss contract, where the financing partner, the bank,...

This report summarizes the financial and production records of 18 dairy farms across the Upper Peninsula (UP) of Michigan. To be included, the farms must have produced at least 50 percent of gross cash farm income from milk and dairy animal sales. The records came from Michigan State...