Nutrient adequacy for poor households in Africa would improve with higher income but not necessarily with lower food prices.

Healthy diets are not affordable to all in Africa due to a combination of high food prices and low incomes. However, how African consumers might change demand patterns if prices or incomes were to change remains poorly understood. Using nationally representative household panel survey data from five sub-Saharan African countries, we model consumer preferences and examine how nutrient intake responds to changing food prices, total expenditures and other demand determinants. Here we find a stronger positive relationship between growth in poor consumers' total expenditures and their nutrient intake adequacy than has been previously documented. We also find that poor consumers' intake adequacy is especially sensitive to food staple prices in countries where one food staple dominates poor consumers' diets. In countries with multiple food staples, no single staple's price is a strong determinant of poor consumers' dietary intake adequacy.

Profitability of climate-smart soil fertility investment varies widely across sub-Saharan Africa.

Soil fertility investments in sub-Saharan Africa, where budgetary resources are scarce, must be well targeted. Using a causal forest algorithm and an experimental maize trial dataset matched with geocoded rainfall, temperature and soils data, we modelled site-specific, ex ante distributions of yield response and economic returns to fertilizer use. Yield response to fertilizer use was found to vary with growing season temperature and precipitation and soil conditions. Fertilizer use profitability-defined as clearing a 30% internal rate of return in at least 70% of the years-was robust to growing season climate and the fertilizer-to-maize price ratio in several locations but not in roughly a quarter of the analysed area. The resulting profitability-assessment tool can support decision makers when climate conditions at planting are unknown and sheds light on the profitability determinants of different regions, which is key for effective smallholder farm productivity-enhancing strategies.

Labor productivity and employment gaps in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Drawing on a new set of nationally representative, internationally comparable household surveys, this paper provides an overview of key features of structural transformation - labor allocation and labor productivity - in four African economies. New, micro-based measures of sector labor allocation and cross-sector productivity differentials describe the incentives households face when allocating their labor. These measures are similar to national accounts-based measures that are typically used to characterize structural change. However, because agricultural workers supply far fewer hours of labor per year than do workers in other sectors in all of the countries analyzed, productivity gaps shrink by half, on average, when expressed on a per-hour basis. Underlying the productivity gaps that are prominently reflected in national accounts data are large employment gaps, which call into question the productivity gains that laborers can achieve through structural transformation. Furthermore, agriculture's continued relevance to structural change in Sub-Saharan Africa is highlighted by the strong linkages observed between rural non-farm activities and primary agricultural production.

Evolution of the knowledge system for agricultural development in the Yaqui Valley, Sonora, Mexico.

Knowledge systems-networks of linked actors, organizations, and objects that perform a number of knowledge-related functions that link knowledge and know how with action-have played a key role in fostering agricultural development over the last 50 years. We examine the evolution of the knowledge system of the Yaqui Valley, Mexico, a region often described as the home of the green revolution for wheat, tracing changes in the functions of critical knowledge system participants, information flows, and research priorities. Most of the knowledge system's key players have been in place for many decades, although their roles have changed in response to exogenous and endogenous shocks and trends (e.g., drought, policy shifts, and price trends). The system has been agile and able to respond to challenges, in part because of the diversity of players (evolving roles of actors spanning research-decision maker boundaries) and also because of the strong and consistent role of innovative farmers. Although the agricultural research agenda in the Valley is primarily controlled from within the agricultural sector, outside voices have become an important influence in broadening development- and production-oriented perspectives to sustainability perspectives.