This post originally appeared on VoxDev . By Tanguy Bernard, Alan de Janvry, Samba Mbaye, and Elisabeth Sadoulet.

Agriculture market reforms that allow quality recognition enable farmers to capture higher prices and lead to adoption of better technology

The FAO Global Information and Early Warning System (GIEWS) has released several new country briefs and updates for Africa south of the Sahara.

Variable rainfall could negatively impact agricultural production in southern Africa, according to reports from FEWS Net and the SADC’s Food Security Early Warning System (Agromet).

This piece originally appeared on the IFPRI.org blog .

By Xinshen Diao, Jed Silver, and Hiroyuki Takeshima

Ethiopia will continue to face significant food insecurity in 2018, according to several recent reports from FEWS Net and FAO GIEWS.

The agricultural sector in Africa south of the Sahara has taken on an increasingly complex role in the region’s overall development, playing a major part in poverty reduction, food security, economic growth, climate change resilience, job creation, and improved nutrition. West Africa has experienced substantial economic growth in recent decades, with many countries slated to enter middle-income status by 2030, according to a new IFPRI Discussion Paper .

The FAO Global Information and Early Warning System (GIEWS) has released updated country briefs for Ethiopia and Tanzania. These briefs provide up-to-date food security and agricultural information, as well as forecasts for cereal imports and production and other food security-related indicators.

This blog originally appeared in the AGRODEP Bulletin .

By Antoine Bouët , Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI

Smallholder farmers play a crucial role in global food security. However, smallholders also often do not meet their production potential, engaging in subsistence-level agriculture instead of producing excess outputs to then sell at market. Such farmers frequently do not have access to the capital they need to reach this higher level of production, nor are they trained in the skills required to successfully manage what is in effect a small business.

Last week, a panel of global and regional experts joined the Africa south of the Sahara Food Security Portal for a virtual dialogue on ICT use in African agriculture .  The dialogue centered on four main discussion questions:

By 2050, FAO estimates that the global population will have reached 9.1 billion people. To feed this population, the world will need to produce significantly more food: 3 billion more tons of cereal and over 200 million more tons of meat products per year. At the same time, however, we face a lack of arable land upon which farmers can expand their production, as well as increasing competition for natural resources and decreasing soil fertility.