With the development of the global agricultural and food industry, demand for standards supporting food safety, trade, quality assurance, authenticity, and sustainability has increased. Yet the knowledge structure, thematic evolution, and emerging fronts of agri-food standards research remain insufficiently mapped. Using the Web of Science Core Collection, this study identified 151 English-language articles and reviews published from January 2000 to 31 March 2026 and conducted CiteSpace-based scientometric analyses of publication patterns, collaboration networks, keyword co-occurrence and clustering, document co-citation, author co-citation, and journal co-citation. Annual publication-growth comparisons were restricted to the complete 2000–2025 period. The results show that agri-food standards research has expanded from conventional food safety toward trade governance, authenticity verification, sustainability, and global value-chain governance. Recent-frontier signals, identified by late cluster mean years together with continued activity in timeline and mountain views, concentrate on food authenticity and chemometric detection, novel processing and allergen control, and voluntary sustainability standards with smallholder inclusion. Author- and institution-level collaboration remains fragmented, whereas international organisations and interdisciplinary journals operate as indirect knowledge integrators. The study conceptualizes agri-food standards as knowledge infrastructures linking scientific measurement, regulatory coordination, market governance, and stakeholder-based knowledge exchange.
Zambia’s electronic Farmer Input Support Programme (e-FISP) is intended to widen farmer choice and shift subsidised-input redemption toward private agro-dealers. This descriptive cross-sectional mixed-methods study examined stakeholder-perceived service performance and implementation constraints in purposively selected sites in Chongwe District. The planned stakeholder sample was 96 (82 small-scale farmers, 6 agro-dealers, 5 village heads, and 3 agricultural extension officers), whereas the archived quantitative summaries available for audit used n = 59 for farmer outcomes and n = 5 for dealer results. Analysis-specific denominators are therefore reported and no district-wide sampling precision is claimed. Rounded archived agreement percentages indicated favourable perceptions of timely fertiliser access (81%), reduced distribution delays (79%), certified-seed access (78%), and allocation transparency (78%). The archived n = 59 outcome summary reported only the categories ‘increased slightly’ and ‘increased significantly’: 50.8% and 49.2%, respectively, for household food security, and 83.1% and 16.9% for both income and productivity. Because respondent-level records were not available for independent reconstruction, these figures are treated as descriptive perception signals rather than verified population prevalences or causal effects. Qualitative accounts identified delayed activation, weak connectivity, identity mismatches, platform failures, stock constraints, and delayed dealer reimbursement. The study identifies implementation mechanisms and monitoring priorities, not attributable programme impacts. Future evaluation should link administrative process data with objective longitudinal agricultural and welfare outcomes.
Rural labor outflow raises a central land-use question for smallholder agriculture: can contracted land released by households that leave farming be reorganized into continued production? Using household and community panel data from the Chinese Family Database for 2017–2019, this study distinguishes partial household exit from complete household exit from farming and examines the association between complete exit and farmland abandonment intensity. We employ household and year fixed-effects models with county-clustered standard errors to estimate conditional associations, and we use interaction models to examine how these associations vary with reallocation conditions. Complete exit is associated with higher abandonment intensity, a pattern consistent with contraction of the household land-use choice set after self-cultivation becomes infeasible. Conditional analyses show stronger exit-abandonment associations when transfer-in demand is weak, land is expected to be expropriated soon, the household’s next generation does not engage in farming, or transferred land subsequently becomes idle. Supplementary institutional analyses associate plot-boundary-delinked land titling with higher transfer-out ratios, rents, and contract formalization. The exit-abandonment association is also larger in high climate-risk provinces than in low climate-risk provinces. The findings indicate that sustainable land use after labor exit depends on effective takeover and stable reallocation, not land transfer alone.
Food insecurity amid land scarcity challenges many developing countries. Optimal land allocation between crops can improve agricultural productivity and household income. The aim of this article is to analyze the effect of adopting agroecological practices on farm households’ decisions about how to allocate land among different crops in Burkina Faso. Roodman’s recursive Conditional Mixed Process (CMP) method is applied using data collected by LAQAD-S in 2017 as part of the second National Land Management Program, phase 3 (PNGT-II). The results indicate that the adoption of agroecological practices positively affects households’ decisions to allocate their land to sorghum and millet production and negatively affects their decisions to produce cotton, maize. The results also show that access to credit, land area, and agroclimatic zone determine agricultural land allocation decisions. To boost the production of traditional cereals, particularly sorghum, public authorities must encourage the adoption of agroecological practices, including Soil and Water Conservation techniques (SWC), by promoting these techniques and providing financial support to producers through better structuring of farmers’ organizations.
Efforts to enhance dairy productivity in Burkina Faso have historically relied on exotic breeds and crossbreeding to offset the low yields of indigenous cattle. This narrative review evaluates these interventions using peer‑reviewed and grey literature. We trace their trajectory, from the local adaptation of the Azawak zebu to artificial insemination and South–South live‑animal imports, and situate them within the institutional framework and productive performance of the broader West African dairy sector. Findings show that genetic, institutional, and productive outcomes are interdependent. The primary constraint on dairy improvement is rarely the biological potential of introduced breeds. Rather, a persistent mismatch exists between genetic potential and the institutional, financial, and managerial capacities required to sustain it. Current evidence indicates that crossbred cows achieve average daily yields of 7–12 litres, a three‑ to four‑fold increase over local breeds. Yet these gains remain fragmented and consistently trail regional benchmarks, such as Ethiopia and Rwanda. International comparisons underscore the role of genotype‑by‑environment (GxE) interactions. The Girolando breed, for example, achieved substantially higher yields in Brazil following decades of structured selection, while in Benin it produces only 2,115 litres/year. Similarly, Indian data reveal that management environments alone can cause twofold yield variation among cattle of comparable genetic composition. In Burkina Faso, documentation gaps, absence of phenotypic databases, limited herd monitoring, and insufficient economic evaluations, reflect systemic institutional deficits. Future research should prioritise GxE studies, representative genetic surveys, and evaluations of service providers.
