Although many countries have made significant progress in the last decade, poverty and malnutrition continue to be major problems in Sub‐Saharan Africa. Experts estimate that rising food prices have driven about 44 million people into poverty in developing countries since June 2010, as food...

This paper traces the trajectories of successful commercial smallholders operating under differing sets of market institutions. Analysis focuses on maize, cotton and horticulture, three widely marketed crops with strikingly different market institutions. Maize receives intensive government input...

In this paper we examine empirically the effect of Information and Communication Technologies on the adoption of improved rice varieties and its indirect effect on productivity with focus of the rural radio in Burkina Faso. The econometrics framework adopted is the Rubin Causal Model that has...

Smallholder agriculture is not achieving its pivotal role of attaining food security in developing countries like South Africa. In rural areas, smallholder farmer’s efficiencies have always been hindered mostly by some factors beyond their control such Agro-ecological factors. The challenge is...

A Tobit model censored at zero was selected to examine factors explaining differences in production efficiency amongst resettled farmers. Efficiency scores obtained from Data Envelop Analysis (DEA) were used as the dependent variable. From the factors inputted in the model, age of household...

This study aims at identifying the dynamics of the innovation system for functional foods (FF) in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. Functional food is any healthy food claimed to have a health-promoting or disease-preventing property beyond the basic function of supplying nutrients. Health has been...

A key feature of food products is their perishability. Within the short marketing window that characterizes most food and ag products, demand is typically highly stochastic and difficult to predict. This combination of features poses substantial challenges to retailers when pricing products and...

The stickiness of prices and reasons for price changes are widely discussed in market analyses and marketing theory. Explanations and reasons of rigidities have shown that prices do not change as often in small retail stores and in markets with high concentration (Powers and Powers 2001, Hannan...

Grain markets in Germany, as in the rest of the world, are becoming more and more volatile. At the same time, the consolidation process on the level of the first hand, buying the grain from farmers, is moving forward in a strong pace, leaving farmers with less local alternatives to sell their...

This paper investigates the long-run relationship between spot and futures prices for corn and soybeans, for the period January 2004 -September 2010. We apply cointegration methodology in the presence of potentially unknown structural breaks in the commodities prices and we then study the...