The impressive performance of improved varieties of high-yielding, heat-tolerant wheat developed in Sudan has convinced Nigerian decision makers that a viable solution to their country’s growing dependence on wheat imports is domestic production – a policy shift that will protect Nigerians from the vagaries of global commodity markets and strengthen national food security. The brief describes this solution.
This report summarizes the findings of the Nigeria Agriculture Public Expenditure Review (NAGPER). The NAGPER was undertaken to achieve four main objectives: (i) establish a robust data base on public expenditure in the agricultural sector; (ii) diagnose the level and composition of agricultural spending in the recent past; (iii) understand the budget processes that determine resource allocation in the sector; and (iv) draw preliminary policy recommendations for agriculture. These objectives are admittedly modest.
La conférence sur « Agriculture écologique : atténuer le changement climatique, assurer la sécurité alimentaire et l’autonomie pour les sources de revenus ruraux en Afrique » s’est tenue à Addis – Abéba (Ethiopie) du 26 au 28 novembre 2008.
This report synthesizes findings from seven country scoping studies on gender‐responsive approaches to rural advisory services (RAS) in Africa. The studies, which were conducted in Benin, Ethiopia, Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, Sudan, and Uganda, were meant to identify existing policies, programmes, approaches, and tools into which gender considerations had been injected, and then to provide them as RAS to farmers, with specific focus on women and youth. The goal was to propose a road map for mainstreaming RAS to promote sustainable agriculture in Africa
This paper proposes the adoption of small-scale friendly postharvest techniques in the form of small-scale postharvest practices (SSPPs). To justify this proposal, the impact of SSPPs adoption on self-reported losses were investigated in Rivers State Nigeria. The factors influencing plantain farmers and traders intention to use SSPPs were also studied. Multistage and snowball sampling techniques were used to obtain data from farmers and traders, respectively
Following the food price crisis in 2008, African governments implemented policies aiming at crowding in investment in rice value chain upgrading to help domestic rice compete with imports. This study assess the state of rice value chain upgrading in West Africa by reviewing evidence on rice millers’ investment in semi-industrial and industrial milling technologies, contract farming and vertical integration during the post-crisis period 2009–2019. We find that upgrading is more dynamic in countries with high rice production and import bills and limited comparative advantage in demand.
Fall Armyworm (Spodoptera frugiperda), or FAW, is an insect native to tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas. In the absence of natural controls or good management, it can cause significant damage to crops. It prefers maize, although it can feed on more than 80 additional species of crops including rice, sorghum, millet, sugarcane, vegetable crops and cotton.
The 2021 Global Report on Food Crises (GRFC 2021) highlights the remarkably high severity and numbers of people in Crisis or worse (IPC/CH Phase 3 or above) or equivalent in 55 countries/territories, driven by persistent conflict, pre-existing and COVID-19-related economic shocks, and weather extremes. The number identified in the 2021 edition is the highest in the report’s five-year existence. The report is produced by the Global Network against Food Crises (which includes WFP), an international alliance working to address the root causes of extreme hunger.
The challenge of food security in Nigeria hinges on several factors of which poor technical efficiency is key. Using a stochastic frontier framework, we estimated the technical efficiency of agricultural households in Nigeria and tested for the significance of mean technical efficiency of food-secure and food-insecure agricultural households. We further assessed the determinants of agricultural households’ inefficiencies within the stochastic frontier model and adopted a standard probit model to assess the determinants of households’ food security status.
More than 250 million Africans rely on the starchy root crop cassava (Manihot esculenta) as their staple source of calories. A typical cassava-based diet, however, provides less than 30% of the minimum daily requirement for protein and only 10%–20% of that for iron, zinc, and vitamin A. The BioCassava Plus (BC+) program has employed modern biotechnologies intended to improve the health of Africans through the development and delivery of genetically engineered cassava with increased nutrient (zinc, iron, protein, and vitamin A) levels.