"Trade liberalization is a central part of South Africa's post-Apartheid development strategy. However, despite considerable reforms, the country has failed to generate pro-poor growth, with both unemployment and inequality worsening over the last ten years. This has raised concern that trade...

The improved performance of the agricultural sector in Africa south of the Sahara during the most recent decade (2000–2010) has raised questions about the drivers behind the growth. Skeptics argue that rising commodity prices, as world markets experience a commodity boom, are the main...

Contents: 1.The Changing Profile of Poverty in the World/Shaohua Chen and Martin Ravallion. 2.Characteristics and Causes of Severe Poverty and Hunger/Akhter U. Ahmed, Ruth Vargas Hill, Lisa C. Smith, and Tim Frankenberger. 3.The Poorest and Hungry: Looking Below the Line/Akhter U. Ahmed, Ruth...

"The paper develops a framework for the design and analysis of pluralistic agricultural advisory services and reviews research methods from different disciplines that can be used when applying the framework. Agricultural advisory services are defined in the paper as the entire set of...

"High food prices from 2007 through mid-2008 had serious implications for food and nutrition security, macroeconomic stability, and political security. The unfolding global financial crisis and economic slowdown have now pushed food prices to lower levels. Yet the financial crunch has also...

"Agricultural advisory services play an important role in supporting the use of the agricultural sector as an engine of pro-poor growth and enabling small farmers to meet new challenges, such as accessing export markets, adopting environmentally sustainable production techniques, and coping with...

"Much of the technology development for bioenergy to date has been geared toward competing with cheap fossil fuels. Bioenergy technologies have focused on reducing the cost per unit of energy produced, often exclusively by exploiting very cheap feedstocks and processing them on a large scale....