Food aid has played a useful role in Government of Bangladesh efforts to increase food security in the last three decades, adding to foodgrain availability, supplying wheat for targeted distribution to poor households, and helping to finance development projects and programs. However, sustained...

This paper suggests practical methods for assessing policy research programs, both ex post and ex ante. Measuring the benefits of policy research is difficult: the path of causation between research and policy change is nearly always uncertain; multiple factors influence any particular policy...

This report combines a careful analysis of government policy and private foodgrain markets with a detailed survey of 757 households in rural Bangladesh in November and December 1998, about two months after the floodwaters receded. The report describes short- and medium-term government policy...

Like many other Asian countries, the causal relationship between agricultural productivity and the incidence of rural poverty has been a widely debated subject in Bangladesh. A number of studies argued that the real agricultural wage rate was declining during the period when the country had...

Like many other Asian countries, the causal relationship between agricultural productivity and the incidence of rural poverty has been a widely debated subject in Bangladesh. A number of studies argued that the real agricultural wage rate was declining during the period when the country had...

Tropical forests are disappearing rapidly with potentially high social costs in biodiversity loss and carbon emissions. While agriculture is critical to the long-term solution of sustainable livelihood and food security in the humid tropics, it is only part of the story. To take pressure off...

The right to food has always been recognized as a valid and fundamental right of the individual. In the absence of food, other political and economic rights and freedoms are meaningless. Global food supplies have for many years been more than adequate to feed the world's population. Nonetheless,...

Assuring food security for the next 25 years requires meeting a number of political, social, economic, and technical challenges. One of these is the successful use of new biotechnologies in agriculture. Research in recombinant genetics and biotechnology aims to develop plant varieties that...

By the year 2020 land degradation may pose a serious threat to food production and rural livelihoods, particularly in poor and densely populated areas of the developing world. Appropriate policies are required to encourage land-improving investments and better land management if developing...