Sustaining natural resource stocks especially those underpinning the capacity to produce food is key to most definitions of sustainable development. Yet troubling evidence has surfaced of instances where the rural poor were forced to sacrifice long-term sustainability for the sake of near-term...

The most severe challenges to sustainable development occur where many poor people struggle to eke out a living from marginal lands. In some cases, high human populations on fragile lands have led agricultural productivity to deteriorate (García-Barrios and García-Barrios, 1990, Mink, 1993,...

Groundnuts play an integral role in the livelihoods of the majority of the Zambian population, particularly the rural households. The crop is produced by nearly half of the estimated 1.4 million rural smallholder households, making it the second largest, after maize, in terms of production...

In Zambia, as in most of Sub-Saharan Africa, rural poverty, food security, and farming are inextricably linked. While the livelihoods of nearly two thirds of Zambia’s population depend directly on their agricultural productivity, average yields have historically been low and soil fertility has...

All governments require accurate information on how the economy functions in order to formulate and implement sound agricultural policies. Policies to ensure food security are no different. Efforts to keep food prices at tolerable levels require information about the competitiveness of the...

The goal of this paper is to provide evidence of shifts in food consumption patterns in the ECOWAS countries of West Africa from 1980 through 2009.1 In particular, the analysis is intended to identify major contributors to diets, changes in the levels as well as in the composition of food supply...