To address intensifying social and environmental challenges, development policy must learn from inclusions exclusions of past discourses. We analyse Kenya's post-colonial agricultural discourse. Our analysis reveals a near-exclusive focus on the promotion modernisation based industrial farm inputs, bureaucratic state and/or ‘the liberalised market’. It was with this thrust to modernise that sma...

Corruption is a hot topic of academic and public policy research. Specifically, corruption is often characterized as directly impacting the economies of developing countries: “Corruption undermines governance, economic growth, and, ultimately, the stability of countries and regions” (Spector, 2005). Of particular concern are areas of the world, such as Sub-Saharan Africa, where corruption is pe...

Institutional innovations are increasingly seen as key to achieving not only agricultural growth, by overcoming market failures, but also to ensure that poor smallholders also benefit from this process. This paper analyses institutional arrangements for vegetable marketing in East Africa from a transaction cost perspective. Marketing of vegetables is still dominated by spot markets with some, b...

Please Develo Summary. — More than 10,000 years after the Agricultural Revolution started, millions of rural smallholders across the developing world may still derive as much income from foraging forests and wildlands as from cultivating crops. These steady environmental income flows come often from public forests, and are extracted by men and women alike. However, inflexible supplies from natu...

A significant proportion of deforestation in Latin America is caused by smallholders living at the frontier of modern rural markets. This paper develops a household model that examines the roles of market integration, subsistence, time preference, and non-timber forest uses in the household’s decision to clear forest for future agriculture. The model explores the possible impacts of development...

This paper discusses a methodology to model precipitation indices and premium prices for index-based drought insurance for smallholders. Spatial basis risk, which is borne by the insured, is a problem, especially in variable topography. Also, site-specific drought risk needs to be estimated accurately in order to offer effective insurance cover and ensure financial sustainability of the insuran...

We test the ‘efficient-but-poor’ hypothesis by estimating determinants of smallholders' choice over cash or food crops and whether their crop affects technical efficiency poverty using national household panel data in Nigeria. employ stochastic frontier analyses correcting for sample selection about farmers' choice. Our results indicate that smallholders are generally efficient resource allocat...