Nigeria's once thriving plantation economy has suffered under decades of state neglect and political and civil turmoil. Since Nigeria's return to civilian rule in 1999, in a bid to modernize its ailing agricultural economy, most of its defunct plantations were privatized and large new areas of land were allocated to ‘high-capacity’ agricultural investors.

 
A partir de la experiencia de un proyecto especializado en los denominados “circuitos cortos de mercado”, el autor de este artículo presenta y desglosa las conflictivas relaciones entre la producción de la agricultura campesina  y los mercados urbanos. Es indudable, nos dice el autor, que en la actualidad y en un marcado contexto de modernización en los países andinos, existen nuevas oportunidades y riesgos de exclusiones. Por ello, hoy más que nunca, se hace imprescindible indagar alternativas e innovaciones de mercado para nuevas relaciones entre el campo y las ciudades.

Using newly collected national and
sub-national data, and historical case studies, this paper
argues that differences in innovative capacity, captured by
the density of engineers at the dawn of the Second
Industrial Revolution, are important to explaining present
income differences, and, in particular, the poor performance
of Latin America relative to North America. This remains the
case after controlling for literacy, other higher order

A guest post by Zemen Haddis Gebeyehu, Senior Agriculture Policy Advisor, USAID/Ethiopia

Rural extension services are an extremely complex affair. This is due to the wide range of constellations in which farmers operate nowadays, and also to the large number of players who are active in advisory services, with their different tasks, values and mandates. With reference to Germany’s rural extension services, our author shows who is taking on which role and where conflicts might potentially arise.

As with other countries, agricultural extension and advisory services (EAS) in Malawi are provided by public, private, and non-profit organisations. While it has become commonplace to refer to this collection of actors as a system, this claim is only valid in the loosest of terms, as many of the component parts do not functionally interact with others in an operational sense, tending rather to function as independent sub-networks within larger national, and international spheres of exchange.

This guide provides companies with an overview of the importance of traceability for sustainability purposes, outlines the global opportunities and challenges it represents and summarises practical steps for implementing traceability programmes within company operations. It

• defines traceability and explores its history, benefits and challenges, including an overview of current collaborative schemes on traceability,

The framework provides guidance to policy makers on how to approach the question of shared use. It highlights the operational models that are necessary for implementation, the key-success factors, the enabling conditions and how to ultimately better coordinate major investments in physical infrastructure by privately-owned natural resource concessionaires with national infrastructure development plans. The framework also equips policy makers with a set of questions that should help conduct the negotiations on shared use with companies.

This paper examines spending plans
suggested by the recent literature regarding Dutch disease
and examines their implications to Niger relative to its
expanding mineral sector. The key to the benefits of
significant mineral revenue lies with the productivity and
supply responses of spending. If significant output gain is
ensured, then there is little difference across the spending
plans in their effects on real consumption. The overshooting

This paper presents simulations for the
period 2013-2030 of measures that permit increased spending
on infrastructure and human development, the priority areas
in Liberia's 2013-2017 "Agenda for
Transformation" and for its national vision, Liberia
Rising 2030. The simulations are carried out with a Liberian
version of MAMS (Maquette for Millennium Development Goals
Simulations), a Computable General Equilibrium model.