Commodities

This paper investigates whether participation in Zambia’s social cash transfer programme (SCTP) improves household dietary diversity among ultra-poor rural households. While cash transfers are widely implemented across sub-Saharan Africa as social protection measures, empirical evidence regarding their impact on nutritional status remains mixed. This study focuses on dietary diversity, a proxy for nutrition quality, and uses data from the 2015 Rural Agricultural Livelihood Survey (RALS). The analysis employs propensity score matching to control for demographic differences between recipient and non-recipient households, followed by a regression analysis to examine the association between SCTP participation and dietary diversity scores. The findings reveal no statistically significant association between receiving social cash transfers and higher household dietary diversity. In contrast, positive predictors of dietary diversity included household remittances, own production of animal-source foods, and maize sales. Notably, households that relied on foraging exhibited significantly lower dietary diversity, suggesting foraging may be a coping strategy among food-insecure households. These results imply that while the SCTP may enhance household income stability, it does not necessarily translate into improved diet quality. This study contributes to the ongoing policy debate on the effectiveness of cash-based interventions in improving nutrition outcomes. It highlights the need to complement cash transfers with interventions that support food production and access, particularly in rural settings where market and infrastructure limitations persist.

Poultry price instability remains a critical challenge for food security in Nigeria. This study examines the relationship between poultry price volatility (PPV), exchange rate (LEXR), and inflation (LCPI) from 1991 to 2024 using the Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model. Descriptive results show that PPV had the highest variability (mean 0.65; standard deviation 1.07), while LEXR and LCPI were relatively more stable. Trend analysis indicates that poultry price volatility was high in the early 1990s but declined steadily after 2005, coinciding with persistent inflation and cycles of exchange rate depreciation and appreciation.Unit root and bounds tests confirm that the variables werecointegrated, with an F-statistic of 4.50 exceeding the upper bound at 5 percent significance. The long-run estimates reveal that inflation hada negative effect on poultry price volatility (−0.109), while the exchange rate exerteda positive effect (0.2702). The errorcorrection term (−0.336) indicates a 33.6 percent adjustment to equilibrium each period. In the short run, changes in inflation (0.942) and lagged exchange rate variations significantly influenced poultry price volatility. These findings underscore the importance of stabilizing exchange rates and controlling inflation to reduce price volatility in Nigeria’s poultry sector.

Global critical mineral production patterns differ markedly across the metals needed for advanced energy technologies. This study examines the extraction and processing landscape, in the year 2024, of six key commodities—lithium, cobalt, aluminum, nickel, manganese, and copper—to identify who the major players (countries and corporations) are in the critical mineral space and to understand what they are mining, where they are mining, and where are they sending their ore to be processed. This study aims to provide a snapshot of the critical mineral supply chain that serves as a useful resource for researchers and policymakers seeking to understand and improve the critical mineral supply chain. We analyze company financial filings, government datasets, and other public and proprietary sources for the year 2024. Then, we calculate production volumes and identify geographic and corporate concentration. The results show that copper and aluminum production and processing are relatively diverse, while lithium and cobalt extraction and processing are highly concentrated among a few countries and dominant firms. Nickel and manganese occupy an intermediate position, displaying moderate diversity with emerging signs of consolidation.