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This paper deals with the problem of analysing women's changed role in agriculture and considers emerging class differences between women. It focuses on the effects of cash crop production on women from different socio-economic status among the tea producing Kipsigis of Kenya

AbstractThis study contributes to an expanding literature on historical African inequality, presenting five social tables and income inequality estimates for Uganda between 1925 and 1965. I find that income inequality was mostly stable and overall low compared to other African colonies. Decomposition reveals important underlying fault lines and shifts. Income gaps between the African majority and a tiny Asian and European income elite accounted for a large share of overall inequality. Over time, inequality among Africans increased. Income from self-provisioning was a major equalizer in Uganda's economy, which was characterized by land abundance and widespread smallholder cultivation of labor-intensive export crops.

The paper examined the prospects and challenges of cashew production in Nigeria. Qualitative and quantitative data which were used to identify these challenges and prospects were retrieved from research findings, literatures, journals and reports. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) analysis was used to highlight the strengths and weaknesses inherent in the internal environment of the cashew sector as well as the opportunities and threats from the external environment of the cashew sector. The paper takes a step further by employing Threats Opportunities Weaknesses and Strengths (TOWS) analysis matrix to come up with models that can be employed to improve the cashew sector in Nigeria. Some of the prospects identified include the potential employment creation, increasing cultivation area and evidenced value addition. While some of the challenges identified include poor pricing of cashew nuts, lack of proper policy intervention and underutilization of cashew apple. Government is advised to set up a cashew marketing board and provide proper policy intervention to improve prices, production levels and provide employment opportunities.

This paper investigates the dynamic impacts of rural road improvements on farm productivity and crop choices in Zambia's Eastern Province. There are several channels through which the feeder road improvements impact on farmers. Our aim is to estimate whether the differential outcomes in the five treatment districts and three control districts generated by the expansion of market agricultural activities among small to medium scale farmers could be explained by rural road improvements that took place after the new Chiluba MMD government in 1995 had completed an IMF rights accumulation programme bringing the principal marketing agent system to an end. Our district-level empirical analysis is an extension to the Brambilla and Porto(2005, 2007) crossprovincial level approach which proposes a dynamic approach accounting for entry and exit into the agricultural cotton sector to avoid biases in the estimates of aggregate productivity, when measuring productivity in agriculture applied to a repeated cross-sections of farm-level data from the Zambian post-harvest survey (PHS). Despite the limitations of the PHS data covering the period from 1996/1997 to 2001/2002 when the Eastern Province Feeder Road Project (EPFRP) was being implemented. The identification strategy relies on differences-in-differences of outcomes (i.e., cotton productivity) approach across two phases (pre-treatment and post-treatment). We use maize productivity to difference out unobserved household and aggregate agricultural year effects. Through our descriptive analysis we do find that changes in land allocation and in yields to Eastern Province's most important cash crop - cotton did occur at the district level. However, it is difficult to conclude that these changes are linked directly to the improved accessibility obtained from the implementation of the EPFRP based on our differences-in-differences estimator or our Tobit model.

AbstractHigh-value agriculture contributes to rural incomes, but does it also contribute to expanding "human capabilities" (Sen, Development as freedom, Knopf, New York, 1999) in a durable way? Through long-term qualitative fieldwork in three landlocked LDCs—Nepal, Rwanda and Laos—resulting in over 150 interviews, we found expansions of the three analysed capabilities: paid work, mobility and social relations. Yet, those improvements were characterised by precariousness: they were mostly not resilient in the face of the economic and environmental risks that high-value agriculture entails. The only example of a durable capability expansion was found in Nepal, where women claimed social spaces through collective organisation. All three study sites showed remarkable consistency in that the considerable risk involved in cash crop production was mainly borne by farmers and rural labourers. Research on mechanisms to guard against these risks at household or individual level is warranted.