Cramon-Taubadel and Christopher B. Barrett. All rights reserved. Readers may make verbatim copies of this document for non-commercial purposes by any means, provided that this copyright notice appears on all such copies.

Sub‐Saharan Africa faces low agricultural productivity amid a confluence of trends that include rapid population growth, climate change, and the rise of the middle class. To raise productivity, governments—in partnership with donors and development organizations—have launched numerous initiatives to encourage the development of sustainable and competitive agricultural input markets. Despite these efforts, markets remain underdeveloped in most countries and access to affordable seeds and fertilizers remains a major challenge for smallholder farmers. This paper explores evidence from recent multicountry analyses of input delivery systems to assess the possibility of a Green Revolution in Africa. It describes use and adoption levels, challenges, policy and regulatory issues, and investments needed to expand smallholder access to these productivity‐enhancing agricultural technologies.

This chapter discusses enabling environments for competitive agro-industries. It is argued that fostering competitive agro-industries requires that conducive business climates, or enabling environments, are in place. Recent efforts to promote reform processes through business climate assessments, but it is concluded that these approaches were not designed for the evaluation of business climates for agro-industrial enterprises. To provide guidance on agro-industry-focused analyses of business climates, a hierarchy of state actions for characterizing and assessing enabling environments for agro-industrial enterprises, classifying actions as essential enablers, important enablers and useful enablers, is proposed. The hierarchy, however, is just a starting point. It is argued that, for effective reform to emerge, a nuanced appreciation of the roles that public policy makers can play in sustaining competitiveness is needed. An analytical framework for reform processes framed by two key dimensions, namely the level of risk and uncertainty agro-industries face when conducting business and the capacity of the state in shaping the environment for business, is introduced. It is argued that the framework can be used to identify suitable policy options for different enabling environment reform contexts.

The debate around genetically modified (GM) crops in Africa continues to grow especially among policy-makers, food manufacturers, farmer organisation and consumer advocacy groups and the general public. While other regions have taken a firm position on biotech crops, Africa remains largely ambivalent, with wide variation in GM policy across countries. The central objective of this paper is to analyse the factors that influence the adoption of GM crops in Africa. First we evaluate the current status of GM crop adoption in Africa. Second we identify the key enablers and hindrances to adoption of GM crops. The main factors include ministerial control of biosafety, peer country influence, stage of seed sector development, advocacy by key political figures, the media, activism, food security and technical capacity. We posit that, for most African countries, GM policy is guided by political rather than technological considerations with media and special interest groups playing a key role. Despite the numerous impediments, slow progress is being made in preparing the requisite enabling environment for biotechnology adoption in Africa.

The ability of genetically modified (GM) crops to increase yields and reduce use of pesticides is well established. Based on food security needs and the central role of agriculture, Africa may stand to benefit from green biotechnology given the low agricultural productivity and the looming food crises in most urban areas. However, the adoption of GM crops in Africa has been slow and limited to a handful of countries. The primary objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of GM maize adoption in South Africa by looking at wholesale spot prices. We apply a threshold autoregressive model to time series data on the price of maize and GM adoption rates in South Africa to address the following questions: (1) Does the adoption of GM maize excite the growth rate of price of maize in South Africa; (2) Does the error variance of the maize price growth rate exhibit regime-switching behaviour to impact the volatility? The results show evidence that the adoption of GM maize influences the dynamics of the maize price growth rate in South Africa. Further, there is strong evidence that the error variance exhibits regime-switching behaviour with the posterior mean for the error variance in the first regime about twice as large as that of the second regime.