• The Zambia Urban Consumption Survey, a survey of 1,865 urban households in Lusaka, Kitwe, Mansa, and Kasama, was conducted in August 2007 and February 2008 by the Central Statistical Office in collaboration with the Zambia Food Security Research Project. • Survey results indicate that in...

The situation analysis and perspectives on food security West Africa shows a widening gap between the needs of consumption and nutrition and food availability at Global countries, households and individuals. Low gains productivity in food production and import capacity are the major constraints...

After two decades of de-urbanization, Zambia is again becoming increasingly urban. While the urban share of the population fell to 35% in 2000 due primarily to the decline of the copper industry, over half of Zambia’s people will be residing in urban areas by 2040. Given this urbanization...

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...

A key role for USAID and its partners is to identify how their resources can best contribute to increasing the capacity of the private and public sectors in Mali to scale up their investments, and increase the impact of those investments, in relation to the food security dimensions of...

Many of the ‘new’ agricultural input subsidy programs (ISPs) in sub-Saharan Africa list raising farm incomes and reducing rural poverty among their objectives, but are ISPs achieving these objectives? We use data from two nationally-representative surveys of smallholder farm households in...

Zambia's record-breaking maize harvest of nearly 2.8 million metric tons (MT) in 2010 is a major achievement and a testimony to what input subsidies, output price incentives, and favorable weather can do to elicit a major supply response. Maize-growing smallholders harvested more than in...

We test the hypotheses that subsidies on hybrid seed change maize production, total household income, the severity of poverty, and relative deprivation among smallholder maize growers in Zambia. The analysis contributes to the literature by measuring the quantitative effects of seed (as compared...

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...