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Farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) use less fertilizer than farmers in any other region in the world. Low fertilizer use is one factor explaining the lag in agricultural productivity growth in Africa. A variety of market interventions to increase fertilizer use have been attempted over the years, with limited success. In the past several decades, Malawi has tried to alter that trend through a variety of innovative programs aimed at achieving national food security through targeted input subsidy programs. The best known of these programs is Malawi’s Starter Pack Programme. The Starter Pack Programme was amended twice into the Targeted Inputs Programme (TIP) and Expanded Targeted Inputs Programme (ETIP), and eventually replaced with the Agricultural Input Subsidy Programme (AISP). The efficiency and equity of the Starter Pack Programme and its successors have been the subject of debate. This report reviews the history, implementation, and perceived effectiveness of the various input subsidy schemes in the context of Malawi’s political economy. We find that AISP is credited with significantly increasing maize yields in Malawi. However, we also find that there are serious challenges facing the most recent input subsidy program, ranging from the rising cost of the subsidy to ongoing implementation struggles related to increased bureaucracy and corruption.
This report present a thorough review of relevant literature regarding labor constraints currently being faced in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). The review focuses on the impacts of labor supply issues, particularly as they relate to the use of new technology and management techniques, off farm labor migration, and the impacts of HIV/AIDS. The review is provides a basic breakdown of the different kinds of agricultural labor in SSA, before presenting the evidence on the causes and impact of agricultural labor constraints. Though labor constraints can be relevant on both the demand and supply side, especially for certain groups such as women and youth, our review follows the literature by focusing on the supply side issues. The literature reviewed was written between 1990 and 2008, and includes a combination of reports from government organizations and highly cited journal articles.
This brief presents an in depth analysis of the FAO’s methodology behind their calculations for hunger. The analysis includes a review of the key assumptions made by the FAO in their calculations, critiques of their methodology, and recommendations for future research. The critiques include opinions from the literature on the subject as well as from the authors of the request.
This brief presents an initial examination of the possibility of using Disability Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) as a way to evaluate agricultural interventions. We review DALYs, their formulation, and the data necessary to compute values. A review of relevant literature suggests that to use DALYs as an evaluative tool, an agricultural intervention must be tied to a specific disease, and from there, impacts on DALYs can be assessed.
As our understanding of the impacts of hidden hunger on human nutrition grows, understanding the link between fertilizer use and human nutrition becomes increasingly important. This report presents an analysis of both grey and peer-reviewed literature on the effects of fertilizer use on nutritional quality of food, particularly the staples of maize, rice, wheat, cassava and legumes. We find that some nutrient deficiencies, such as zinc, can be effectively addressed through fertilizer use while others, such as iron deficiency, are more difficult to address. Promising breakthroughs with fortified and complete fertilizers present the opportunity to correct multiple deficiencies. Current fertilizer products exist that, when applied with the proper agronomic methods, can have a significant effect on nutrition in the developing world. However, it is important to recognize that there are many factors in the developing world that have the potential to inhibit the benefits of fertilizer for human nutrition. Two significant factors are poor farmers’ difficulty in procuring the correct product and the relative sophistication required to apply fertilizers at the correct amounts and time to achieve desired results. In addition, researchers have not focused on fertilizer and nutrition studies until recently, particularly micronutrient fertilizer studies, and few studies specifically study the impacts of fertilizer on human nutrition. More research needs to be done to understand the most effective combinations and techniques, and to understand whether these methods truly increase the amount of nutrients bioavailable to humans.
This brief reviews the literature on the links between agriculture and human nutrition in rural South Asia, exploring why South Asia has experienced enormous growth in agricultural productivity without subsequent reductions in hunger. An annotated review of relevant articles is included in addition to the analysis. The articles are presented by sub-topic, including sustained economic growth versus lack of progress in nutrition rates and hunger in South Asia, primary determinants of improved nutrition at the household level, agricultural productivity/reform and interventions in nutritional status.
We conducted a literature review of strategic grain reserves (SGRs) are used to mitigate food crises. Our brief includes a short overview of the literature and a bibliography of top-cited articles relevant to specific sub-topics related to SGRs.