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Indian agriculture was transforming from a cereal-based production system toward high-value crops (HVC) during the 1990s. However, food security concerns resurfaced during the first decade of the 21st century, and the policy environment tilted in favor of cereal-based production systems, especially rice and wheat. This paper revisits an earlier study to evaluate how the policy shift influences the patterns and the sources of agricultural growth in India and assesses their implications for regional priorities for higher, more sustainable, and more inclusive agricultural growth.
Increasingly, womens property rights are seen as important for both equity and efficiency reasons. While there has been debate in the literature about women are better off with individual rights in contrast to rights jointly with their husband, little empirical work has analyzed this question. In this paper, the relationship of womens individual and joint property ownership and the level of womens input into household decisionmaking is explored with data from India, Mali, Malawi, and Tanzania. In the three African countries, women with individual landownership have greater input into household decisionmaking than women whose landownership is joint; both have more input than women who are not landowners. The relationship with other household decisions is more mixed, as is the relationship between housing and input into household decisionmaking. No similar relationship is found in Orissa, India.
This study was undertaken to assess farmers preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) for various climate-smart interventions in the Indo-Gangetic Plain. The research outputs will be helpful in integrating farmers choices with government programs in the selected regions. The Indo-Gangetic Plain (IGP) was selected because it is highly vulnerable to climate change, which may adversely affect the sustainability of the rice-wheat production system and the food security of the region. Climate-smart agriculture (CSA) can mitigate the negative impacts of climate change and improve the efficiency of the rice-wheat-based production system. CSA requires a complete package of practices to achieve th...
This paper studies the effect of local off-farm employment and migration on rural households technical efficiency of crop production using a five-year panel dataset from more than 2,000 households in five Chinese provinces. While there is not much debate about the positive contribution of migration and local off-farm employment to Chinas economy, there is an increasing concern about the potential negative effects of moving labor away from agriculture on Chinas future food security. This is a critical issue as maintaining self-sufficiency in grain production will be critical for China to feed its huge population in the future. Several papers have studied the impact of migration on produ...
Almost two decades have passed since China first enacted legislation to protect farmland from conversion to nonagricultural use. Yet hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land are still developed to urban area each year, raising the question of whether the legislation is effective in preserving farmland from development. This paper examines the effectiveness of the Basic Farmland Protection Regulation in protecting high-quality farmland from urban development in China in the first decade after it came into effect (1995?2005). The theoretical basis for this study is a spatial urban development model with a splitting equation. The empirical evaluation is conducted with georeference...
This paper aims to empirically infer potential causal linkages between fruit and vegetable (F&V) production, individual F&V intake, household food security, and anemia levels for individual women caregivers of childbearing age. Using a unique and rich dataset recently collected from rural smallholder Ugandan households, we show that the use of a qualitative tool to measure household food insecurity is robust and applicable in other contexts. We also show, using robust econometric methods, that women living in F&V-producer households have a significantly higher intake of F&Vs than those living in nonproducer households. Furthermore, F&V-producer households are potentially more food secure, and women caregivers in producer households have significantly higher levels of hemoglobin, rendering the prevalence rates of anemia lower among F&V-producer households. We argue that these effects, modest as they are, could be further improved if there were deliberate efforts to promote the intensification of smallholder F&V production.
There is little rigorous evidence on the comparative impacts of cash and food transfers on food security and food-related outcomes. We assess the relative impacts of receiving cash versus food transfers using a randomized design. Drawing on data collected in eastern Niger, we find that households randomized to receive a food basket experienced larger, positive impacts on measures of food consumption and diet quality than those receiving the cash transfer.
Malnutrition can best be addressed by a combination of nutrition specific interventions and nutrition sensitive programs, including social protection. This study reviews mechanisms of transfer program in order to better design nutrition sensitive social protection. Social protection programs typically increase income as well as influence the timing and, to a degree, control of this income. Additionally, social protection programs may achieve further impact on nutrition by fostering linkages with health services or with sanitation programs, and specifically through activities that are related to nutrition education or micronutrient supplementation. This paper discusses what might be expected from such programs and reviews some of the evidence from specific transfer programs.
Evidence exists which shows growing disillusionment with and disinterest in agricultural-based livelihoods among the youth in Africa south of the Sahara. This disillusionment raises concerns for the future of agriculture for the developing world as it can lead to higher rural urban migration, unemployment and lowered agricultural productivity. The engagement of youth in agricultural policy formulation processes is seen as one avenue for motivating youth engagement in agriculture. This research seeks to develop a contextual understanding of the level of engagement of youth in agriculture thus providing evidence which can be used to stimulate youth involvement in the sector. Using a mixed-methods approach, this study analyzes the determinants of the engagement by southern African youth in agricultural policy processes using Malawi as a case study.
Since the publication of the World Development Report 2008, two related strands of research have emerged-one on the validity of smallholder-led development strategy and the other on agricultural intensification under population pressure. The former casts doubt about the role of agriculture in economic development in smallholders dominated countries and the later provides evidence that are contrary to earlier findings on induced innovation theory. Using a unique panel dataset, we examine whether these arguments are valid for Bangladesh--a densely populated country that has experienced significant growth in recent decades. The results suggest that (1) agriculture as a source of income declined significantly over the past two decades; (2) the operated farm size stopped declining in the late 1980s; and (3) that population density relates positively with a host of agricultural intensifications indicators with no evidence of threshold.