African LDCs such as Burkina Faso, Mauritania and United Republic of Tanzania recorded volatility coefficients as high as 0.40, compared with a modest 0.11 in the economies of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) (Beintema et al., Several of the latter have to some extent benefited from the Asian green revolution, which relied heavily on productivity improvements in the cultivation of a few staples: rice, wheat and maize. Sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, has very diversified farming systems, of which FAO has identified 14 major varieties, ranging from near-desert to forest-based systems, with significant diversity within each major category (AfDB et al.,