Academic article

This article elaborates on the involvement of youth in livestock production as key to the actualization of the Agricultural Transformation Agenda (ATA) in Nigeria. It scrutinizes the socio-economic role of livestock, the state of Nigerians livestock industry, youth involvement in livestock production and the constraints young people face to get involved in livestock production. The authors provide solutions to ensure the active participation of youth in livestock production. »

This article analyses the effect of specialty coffee certification on income diversification of smallholders and questions the benefits of this certification for them. Smallholder coffee producers are responsible for 80% of global coffee production and need farm certification to access specialty coffee markets. Although rural households are known to depend on more than agricultural production alone, the literature on specialty coffee and certification has rather narrowly focused on coffee income and production. In this study, broader impacts are explicitly taken into account. »

This article pays particular attention to the impact of co-operatives and contracts on dairy production and the income of dairy farmers in the local food chains in Northern Ethiopia. Farmer-induced collective action (co-operatives) or buyer-driven contracts are often in place in global agrifood chains. The authors suggest that strengthening co-operatives may enhance and upgrade the dairy sector/chain, improve the livelihoods of smallholders, and facilitate the link to global food chains. »

This article elaborated on the impacts of shorter supply chains on the prices of fresh food in Turkey. The market for fresh food is often characterized by a large number of intermediaries delivering the product from the farmer to the retailer. The existence of these intermediaries is often claimed to introduce market frictions that push fresh food prices up. Using data from a policy reform in Turkey in the market for fresh fruit and vegetables, the authors tested the hypothesis that scaling down these frictions reduces the level of prices. »

This article investigates the impact of trade liberalization in major rice trading countries of Southeast Asia. It focus its attention on the price stabilization mechanism that were adopted by governments in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines. »

This paper by Nassul Kabunga, Shibani Ghosh and Jeffrey K. Griffiths, aims to empirically infer potential causal linkages between fruit and vegetable (F&V) production, individual F&V intake, household food security, and anemia levels for individual women caregivers of childbearing age. Using a unique and rich dataset collected from rural smallholder Ugandan households, the authors show that the use of a qualitative tool to measure household food insecurity is robust and applicable in other contexts. »