On farm conservation of crop diversity poses obvious policy challenges in terms of the design of appropriate incentive mechanisms and possible trade-offs between conservation and productivity. This paper compares factors explaining the inter-specific diversity (diversity among species) and...

The negative correlation between resource endowments and GDP growth remains one of the most robust findings in the empirical growth literature, and has been coined the “resource curse hypothesis”. The policy consequences of this result are potentially far reaching. If natural resources are...

Land use change is a key requirement for improving rural incomes and making a significant reduction in poverty levels globally. Over 70% of the world’s poor are located in rural areas, with land use as a major source of subsistence. Improving the productivity of their land use systems is...

Rural agriculture uses more than one-third of the earth’s land and employs more than 40% of the population, a figure that approaches 75% in developing countries. As a result, rural demographic change is of vital importance. This paper monitors four driving factors in rural demographic change...

This paper examines the economic determinants and impacts of agricultural research, particularly biotechnology research, with a view to understanding the potential of agricultural biotechnology to address the needs of the poor in developing countries. It surveys public and private agricultural...

The majority of biotech research and almost all of the commercialization of genetically engineered crops has been done by private firms based in industrialized countries. The dominance of the private sector in biotechnology research and product development has raised concern in developing...

The past four decades have seen two waves of agricultural technology development and diffusion to developing countries. The first wave was initiated by the Green Revolution in which an explicit strategy for technology development and diffusion targeting poor farmers in poor countries made...

Increasing problems of rural unemployment in Indonesia are at the core of this report. Numbers of unemployed increased dramatically after the 1997 economic crisis and millions of people searched to be reabsorbed in rural labour markets. Agricultural land is scarce, however, and entry barriers...

The FAO Food Security measure shows that the number of under-nourished Ghanaians has fallen from 64 to 12 percent between 1979-1981 and 1998-2000. Since income distribution is assumed to have remained constant the change is due entirely to increased food availability. The paper shows that most...

Increasing women’s access to land is crucial to fight hunger and poverty. However, gender disparities in land access remain significant in most countries, regardless of their level of development. A new FAO database helps to understand the factors that prevent women from accessing land; and to...