Agricultural investments create risks as well as opportunities, for instance The Case Study of Integrated Tamale Fruit Company (2013) In recent years, Ghana has witnessed increased interest from private companies in developing agricultural investments. This trend is common to many lower/middle income countries.
A Case Study of Selected Agricultural Investments in Northern Tanzania (2013)
For early reports, see FAO’s Corporate Document Repository
In recent years, Zambia has witnessed increased interest from private investors in acquiring land for agriculture. As elsewhere, large-scale land acquisitions are often accompanied with promises of capital investments to build infrastructure, bring new technologies and know-how, create employment, and improve market access, among other benefits
A Case Study of Selected Agricultural Investments in Zambia (2013)
Much of the rural poor -- who are
growing in number -- are concentrated in ecologically
fragile and remote areas. The key ecological scarcity
problem facing such poor households is a vicious cycle of
declining livelihoods, increased ecological degradation and
loss of resource commons, and declining ecosystem services
on which the poor depend. In addition, developing economies
with high concentrations of their populations on fragile
In Africa, most development strategies
include efforts to improve the productivity of staple crops
grown on smallholder farms. An underlying premise is that
small farms are productive in the African context and that
smallholders do not forgo economies of scale -- a premise
supported by the often observed phenomenon that staple
cereal yields decline as the scale of production increases.
This paper explores a research design conundrum that
This paper studies the impact of a large
debt relief program, intended to attenuate investment
constraints among highly-indebted households in rural India.
It isolates the causal effect of bankruptcy-like debt relief
settlements using a natural experiment arising from
India's Debt Relief Program for Small and Marginal
Farmers -- one of the largest debt relief initiatives in
history. The analysis shows that debt relief has a
Report
The past decade has seen several African countries increasing their agricultural growth, a trend largely underpinned by increases in land area cultivated instead of productivity increases. Meanwhile, scholars debate whether Africa should pursue a strategy of large-scale or smallholder farms, paying little attention to a special group of smallholder farmers who have transitioned to become medium- and large-scale farmers. This study, therefore, begins to analyze this group of farmers, using qualitative data from in-depth interviews and focus group discussions in Ghana.
This research was undertaken to understand how information about a new agricultural technology is transmitted through social networks, and what effect information gained through social networks has on technology demand at the household level. The technology in question is laser land leveling (LLL)-a resource-conserving technology-which we introduced in eastern Uttar Pradesh, India as part of the study. Using an experimental auction, we obtain farmers’ willingness-to-pay for the technology and identify potential adopters.
Demand heterogeneity often makes it profitable for firms to price and promote goods and services differently in different market segments. When private consumption brings public benefits, this same heterogeneity can be used to target public subsidies. We explore the design of public–private targeting and segmentation strategies in the case of a resource-conserving agricultural technology in India.
China’s land policy has been in the news frequently over the last few weeks, since the Chinese government announced it will reform its land policy in the wake of the Third Plenum last November.
For those who do not know the Chinese land system follows a brief introduction: