Evaluating the impact on market performance of investments in agricultural market information systems (MIS) face several methodological challenges. These fall into two broad categories: (a) defining the dimensions of market performance to measure (which is a function of whom the MIS is designed...

This paper provides a systematic definition of food security, focusing on its different dimensions; examines the nature and magnitude of the different dimensions of food insecurity in developing countries; discusses the difficult tradeoffs that policy makers face in trying to address food...

This paper examines the environment within which West African countries are designing their regional self-reliance food security strategy following the Uruguay Round Agreements on Agriculture (URAA). The self-reliance strategy combines regionally-coordinated domestic food production with food...

To improve national food security, successive Mali governments have always focused on expanding and intensifying production in the government-managed irrigation schemes (Office du Niger), which account for about 50% of domestic rice production. Because the cost of expanding and rehabilitating...

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...