Foot and Mouth Disease (FMD) is one of the most contagious animal diseases. Because of the easy transfer between animals, FMD is of importance to the domestic market, but also to international agricultural trade. Infected countries are often confronted with rigorous measures implemented by their...

Replaced with revised version of paper 08/04/09.

Global projections for increasing food demand combined with increasing demand for energy from all sources – including crop-based biofuels – point towards greater stress on food systems and their supporting ecosystems. In many parts of the world, increasing household incomes has translated...

This paper explores how farm productivity affects poverty, and how various factor market constraints affect farm productivity. The empirical analysis draws on representative surveys of farm households in Kilimanjaro and Ruvuma, two cash crop growing regions in Tanzania. We find that poorer...

The closely interlinked food, fuel and financial crises pose a significant new challenge to the global effort to reduce poverty. In short run, the oil-biofuels nexus was clearly the driving force behind the surge in food prices, but export restrictions and panic purchases turned a tightened...

This paper analyzes the sources of rural non-farm sector growth in the Philippines, which has become the main driver of rural poverty reduction. We find that agricultural growth has significantly positive effects on service sector growth (with elasticity of about 0.20) but little effects on...

In Rwanda for the past decade, rural households have lived with civil unrest and genocide, changing land laws, large population flows both into and out of the country, and climatic threats with droughts and floods. The illness and untimely death of prime age adults from a number of health...