May 2012

Adoption of improved agricultural technologies among smallholder farm households in Nakuru District, Kenya

Households are institutions that nurture, develop and sustain capabilities, material and social resources and activities necessary for their members to sustain livelihoods. This is possible through socialisation, communication, diffusion and adoption of improved technologies. In developing countries like Kenya, adoption of improved agricultural technologies is critical in facilitating households’ productive and...

Author(s): Immaculate Njuthe Maina, Ingrid-Ute Leonhäuser and Siegfried Bauer

May 2012

Seasonality in cocoa spot and forward markets: Empirical evidence

This paper first describes the main features of supply and demand in cocoa spot markets. A state- variable model is proposed to describe the random evolution of cocoa forward curves over time, which essentially adapts to agricultural commodities, introduced by Borovkova and Geman (2006) for energy. In contrast to most of the literature on the subject, the first state variable is not the spot price, as it combines...

Author(s): Helyette Geman and Seth Sarfo