Agricultural extension services play an important role in agricultural development.

Credit allows borrowers to access funds required to make an investment before returns materialize.

This note provides an overview of agricultural input access and utilization for the post-monsoon (dry season) 2023 based on a nationally and regionally representative sample of 5001 crop farmers undertaken in June – July 2023.

Changes in frequency and intensity of climate and weather events are a key challenge to agricultural production among farmers in Zambia.

Key Messages:

In March 2023, we interviewed more than 430 active rice millers to assess business disruptions and price changes at the midstream of Myanmar’s most important agricultural value chain. Key findings

To document changes in the mid-stream of Myanmar’s food value chains, a phone survey of commodity traders was conducted in April 2023 with a sample of 304 traders in 14 states and regions.

Key Findings

Global agricultural production is undergoing a remarkable shift due to globalization and market liberalization (Setboonsarng et al., 2008).

Key messages:

Farming is an inherently high-risk activity, and farmers’ livelihoods depend on a set of interlinked environmental factors including weather, soil conditions, disease, pests, and more.

Too often, smallholder farmers suffer severe financial consequences from extreme weather events, pests, and disease; and climate change will increase the frequency at which natural hazards occur.

The agricultural sector in Nigeria is characterized by low productivity that is driven in part by low use of modern agricultural technologies.

Smallholder farmers may suffer losses from ex-treme weather events, pests and disease. This is expected to worsen in the face of climate change.

Financial instruments such as savings, loans, and insurance are critical tools in managing risk for smallholder farmers across the developing world.

IFPRI, together with partners from India as well as the academic community, pioneered in testing whether smartphone camera data could strengthen insurance products in India.

Risk is considered one of the main barriers to investments in agriculture. The Picture-based Insurance (PBI) project in India, funded by 3ie, evaluates the impact of an innovative insurance scheme.

We developed, implemented, and evaluated an innovative personalized advisory service that complements picture-based insurance (PBI), an easy-to-understand low-cost insurance product for visible crop damage.

There is a need to undertake more thorough assessments of relevant agricultural machinery markets to determine why machine usage by farmers is potentially lower than it would be under ideal market conditions.

Custom hiring of labor- and cost-saving agricultural machinery services is increasingly common in South Asia.

In practice, however, warehouse receipt financing has generally failed to deliver the benefits to smallholders hoped for by development economists and practitioners.