The International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) was established in 1975 to identify and analyze national and international strategies and policies for meeting the food needs of the developing world on a sustainable basis, with particular emphasis on low-income countries and on the poorer groups in those countries. IFPRI is a member of the CGIAR Consortium.

Promotion and supporting the adoption of land management and conservation technologies (LMCTs) among poor farming households has been considered to improve crop yields as well as production technical efficiency (TE). This article compares production efficiency between adopters and nonadopters of LMCTs in Tanzania. Using national panel data, the study applied stochastic frontier model to estimate the TE of adopters and nonadopters. The findings show that adopters of LMCTs had a relatively significantly higher TE (0.73) than their nonadopter counterparts (0.69). Therefore, promotion and supporting the adoption of LMCTs among smallholder farmers is pertinent for improving their TE as well as for increasing crop yield, thereby reducing encroachment into forest areas. There is also a need to understand how adopters and nonadopters of LMCTs are affected by different factors when designing the policies that promote the adoption of LMCTs among the smallholder farmers for sustainable increase of agricultural productivity and TE.

Cooperation is essential to reap efficiency gains from specialization, not least in poor communities where economic transactions often are informal. Yet, cooperation might be more difficult to sustain under scarcity, since defecting from a cooperative equilibrium can yield safe, short-run benefits. In this study, we investigate how scarcity affects cooperation by leveraging exogenous variation in economic conditions induced by the Msimu harvest in rural Tanzania. We document significant changes in food consumption between the pre-and post-harvest period, and show that lean season scarcity reduces socially efficient but personally risky investments in a framed Investment Game. This can contribute to what is commonly referred to as a behavioral poverty trap.

This paper explores the link between entrepreneurship and child human capital development. We specifically examine how operating a non-farm enterprise (NFE) as opposed to working in agriculture relates to child labour and schooling outcomes. Accounting for timeinvariant unobservable characteristics in an estimation with individual fixed effects, we find a negative correlation between NFE ownership and child labour, especially in households with relatively higher levels of consumption expenditure. We find differentiated impacts by child gender and the type of enterprise: a lower incidence of child labour for boys and NFEs without employees and a lower incidence of child labour for girls and NFEs that hire at least one employee. Fatherowned NFEs correlate negatively with child labour for boys, both at the extensive and at the intensive margin, and positively with a higher likelihood for school attendance for girls. Given these findings, it appears that household entrepreneurship may contribute to decreasing the severe child labour problem in Tanzania, but resolving the problem of low school attendance rates will require a different strategy.

This paper determines the socioeconomic and physical characteristics that influence maize farmer’s choice of land ownership systems in Tanzania, i.e., owned, sharecropped, and rented title land. The paper uses the Tanzania National Panel Survey (TZNPS) data basing on 2,073 observations comprising of a sample size of 691 households in three consecutive waves 2008/2009, 2010/2011, and 2012/2013. Using a t-test for mean comparison, the paper found that there is a significant difference between male and female-headed households across socioeconomic and physical factors determining the choice of land ownership systems among maize smallholder farmers. Moreover, the paper findings revealed that 90 percent, 7 percent, and 3 percent of the sampled maize smallholder farmers chose to farm under-owned, shared, and rented title land system respectively. Furthermore, the econometric analysis which is grounded from the multinomial logit regression model showed that accessibility, farm size, quantity harvested, accessibility of extension services, gender, household size, and age are all pertinent in influencing the smallholder maize farmer’s choice of land ownership. The paper recommends that these characteristics of the smallholder maize producers should be critically considered when formulating any land and agricultural policies to enhance proper decision making by smallholder farmers on the choice of land ownership system that may led to sustainable agricultural production, productivity, and food security in developing countries particularly in Tanzania.