Seasonal variations in agriculture is a major contributor to undernutrition in many agrarian economies. While recent studies have highlighted the role of markets in improving nutrition, the relative importance of markets in smoothing food consumption across seasons remains largely unexamined. Using data from Sierra Leone, this paper analyses whether access to local food markets mitigates seasonal fluctuations in household dietary diversity and food security. Our results confirm that agricultural seasonality imposes significant fluctuations on household dietary diversity and food security. Households, especially those in rural areas, are found to experience significant deteriorations in dietary diversity and food security during the lean season. Most importantly, the results also show that households with better market access consume more diverse diets and are more food secure in both lean and non-lean seasons than remoter households. An important policy implication of these results is that market-based interventions aimed at strengthening market access through improved market infrastructure and roads can significantly contribute to year-long food consumption smoothing, improved dietary diversity and overall food and nutrition security.

Insects represent an excellent source of food due to their density in unsaturated fatty acids, vitamins, and minerals, while their production is associated with lower emissions of greenhouse gases and resource use as compared to other conventional protein sources. In most Western countries, the human consumption of insects is very low and often perceived as culturally inappropriate. In this study, we analyzed the preferences of German consumers for insect-based products to intensify the knowledge about specific consumer segments that are willing to adopt insects into their diet. For this purpose, an online based choice experiment was conducted in 2016, in which respondents chose between an ordinary burger and a burger with a beef burger patty fortified with insect flour. We detect three homogeneous consumer segments in our sample. The largest group of respondents is willing to consume insect-fortified burgers with only a small price discount, while the other respondents had a prohibitively low willingness-to-pay. The readiness of consumers to adopt insects into their diet is strongly related to attitudinal variables, such as preferences for an environmental friendly production method and health aspects. On the other hand, disgust and the aversion towards insects seem to be the main reasons to abstain from eating insects.

Multiple covariate shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic, the Russia–Ukraine conflict, and pre-existing climate shocks pose serious threats to smallholder livelihoods. The cascading effects of these multiple shocks, including rising prices of fertilizers and food imports, have rekindled interest in the call for a policy shift toward agroecology. Agroecology in this study is defined as a set of practices based on ecological principles of diversity, synergy, and nutrient cycling of agroecosystems, which are capable of enhancing the resilience of smallholder food security while providing ecosystem services. Proponents of the agroecology paradigm argue that it is more sustainable and resilience-enhancing. Yet, the nexus among agroecology, resilience, and food security is less understood in the literature. Therefore, this study aimed to review the existing literature to examine how agroecology could enhance the resilience and food security of smallholders. A systematic literature search was performed on Web of Science, Scopus, and PubMed based on three keywords, viz. agroecology, resilience, and food security. Following the 2020 preferred reporting items on systematic review and meta-analysis (PRISMA) guidelines for systematic literature review, 47 articles were retained for the final review. The results provide empirical evidence that supports the potential of agroecological practices in enhancing the resilience and food security of smallholders. This study proposes a framework that links agroecology, resilience, and food security, showing the interplay among all three dimensions of agroecology—the science, policy, and practices—relevant for successful agroecological transitioning or transformation while identifying gaps for further research.

This study examines farmers’ decisions to engage in subsistence home-gardening and its impact on food and nutrition security among farm households in Rwanda under diverse conditions. The study uses a nationally representative dataset from Rwanda from 2012, 2015, and 2018. We employ an endogenous switching regression model to jointly estimate the drivers of home-gardening participation decisions and food and nutrition security outcomes, whiles accounting for selection bias from observable and unobservable factors. We also estimate the treatment effects of home-gardening participation on dietary diversity, food consumption score, and anthropometric markers of women and children. The treatment effects are calculated at sample means and connected to market-related variables, such as land ownership, commercialization extent, and market distance. We find that having a home-garden is linked to improved dietary diversity and better nutritional outcomes. If households have restricted access to land and reside further away from marketplaces, the benefits are larger. In contrast, the benefits of home-gardening are positive and significant regardless of the level of commercialization of production. We also discover that family size, gender, education, access to land, and livestock ownership are statistically significant drivers of home-gardening participation in Rwanda. However, the amount of commercialization did not affect a household’s decision to participate in home-gardening.

Transaction costs create inefficiencies in agricultural markets, and poor trade digitalization lowers agrifood productivity of developing countries. This paper argues that trade facilitation via digitalization cuts transaction costs thereby increasing agrifood trade because it streamlines trade and customs operational procedures. Our methodology represents trade digitalization by the variables paperless trade and digitalized non-tariff measures compliance. Additionally, our empirical strategy utilizes cross-country data employing a gravity model with fixed effects and socioeconomic controls. We find a high-bar evidence that a one-standard deviation improvement in e-trade facilitation at the exporter level and in non-tariff measures digitalization at the importer level increase agrifood exports by 9.7 per cent and 1.3 per cent, respectively, with larger magnitudes for processed products and for Sub-Saharan African and Asian countries. Consequently, trade facilitation via customs digitalization is inevitable to avoid trade diversion in an increasingly competitive globalized world. There are opportunities for developing countries to benefit from such digitalization because the relationship is stronger between agrifood exports and e-trade facilitation at the origin, which increases the agency of countries in the Global South.