This study evaluates the impact of Heifer International’s livestock donation program in the Copperbelt Province in Zambia. Using a panel data of 300 households and 4 survey rounds, this analysis assesses the impact of dairy cow, meat goat, and draft cattle donation programs on poverty and food...

With the increasing frequency of extreme climatic events, the new challenge is to develop rice varieties that are tolerant of drought, water submergence, and salinity. There are now new high yielding GSR cultivars developed at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) with increased...

In addition to multilateral trade agreements under the World Trade Organization (WTO), the world has seen a remarkable proliferation of regional trade agreements (RTAs) in the last two decades. This study investigates the impacts of these multilateral and regional trade institutions on food...

Social networks play an important role in generating learning externalities that can drive the diffusion of innovative, and potentially poverty-reducing, technologies. This is particularly the case in developing countries where rural education, extension, and agricultural information services...

A significant volume of research has investigated input subsidy programs in Africa, where government expenditures on such programs are non-trivial. This paper uses panel data from a sample of farm households in Zambia to compare how fertilizer use decisions change in the presence of a formal...

Climate change will directly affect food availability and security. Because food production is fundamentally a biological process that is a function, in part, of temperature and moisture, the agricultural sector’s potential vulnerability is particularly large. While there is ongoing scientific...

During the Global Food Price Crisis of 2007-2011, millions of people suffered from hunger because food had become expensive. To cope with this problem, the governments of several countries decided to establish public food reserves in order to stabilize domestic prices. In this paper we develop a...

We empirically address the implications of biofuel policy regarding major grains, to the subsequent evolution of the markets for calories from the three major grains, maize, wheat and rice. The implied market variables, namely, market price, consumption, and stocks, using a structurally...

This paper builds a model determining optimal capacities of diversion dams or water transfer projects. The model incorporates stochastic inflows to the dams and the role of the dam capacity in reducing overflows, and gives a closed-form expression of the marginal benefit of capacities....

This study examined the effects of China’s grain subsidy program, the largest food self-sufficiency project in the developing countries, on grain-sown areas within a context of liquidity constraints. A large household level panel was used to evaluate how the subsidy affects the cultivation...