Agriculture renaissance means the renewed understanding and recommitment to the fundamental role of agriculture in the development process. Operationally it implies different approaches at the country level based on the stage of development. For the least developed countries of the world, it...

Over the past half a century developing regions, with the exception of Sub-Saharan Africa, have seen labor-saving technologies adopted at unprecedented levels. Intensification of production systems created power bottlenecks around the land preparation, harvesting and threshing operations....

Considering the deep pessimism about the limits to growth that prevailed throughout much of the 60s and early 70s, the rapid growth in food crop productivity and food supplies triggered by the Green Revolution was a remarkable achievement. The driving force behind this success was the...

The post-World War II era has witnessed a drastic increase in irrigation activities that have contributed substantially to the massive growth in agricultural production that enables humanity to feed its doubling population. However, a distinction has to be made between the overall positive...

This handbook devotes most of its chapters to reviewing sectoral policies related to agriculture. This chapter moves to a macroeconomic and macrosectoral view of the policy framework and its possible interaction with the agricultural sector. A previous handbook (Gordon Rausser and Bruce Gardner,...

Since the 1950s, agricultural growth in East Asia (China, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan) has reduced rural poverty and created a strong base for economic development. To gain a better understanding of the nature of this growth, we examine the sources of change in agricultural...

Agricultural productivity in the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries between 1961 and 2001 increased due to market regulation, economic openness, and estate reduction. In the six major sections of this chapter, we analyze the evolution of this productivity as well as the output and...

In most poor countries, large majorities of the population live in rural areas and earn their livelihoods primarily from agriculture. Many rural people in the developing world are poor, and conversely, most of the world's poor people inhabit rural areas. Agriculture also accounts for a...

Over the past decade, economic and agricultural growth in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) has resumed. The secular downward trend in agricultural prices ended in the early 1990s; growing incomes in Asia and Africa, combined with continued rapid population growth, are fueling food demand, which is...