Ugandan smallholder farmers produce the nation's major food crop using numerous banana varieties with distinctive attributes, while coping with important biotic constraints and imperfect markets. This empirical context motivates a trait-based model of the agricultural household that establishes...

"Modern crop production is based on only a few plant species. Particularly in marginal environments of developing agricultural economies, many less well-known agricultural or non-timber forest species, continue to be grown, managed or collected, thus contributing to the livelihood of the poor...

"This paper presents an empirical case study about farmer management of rice genetic resources in two communities of Nepal, drawing on interdisciplinary, participatory research that involved farmers, rice geneticists, and social scientists. The decision-making process of farm households is...

"The purpose of the research paper is to characterize biological diversity related to millets in the semi-arid regions of India at various spatial scales of analysis (e.g., farm household versus community levels) and place that evidence in a broader seed systems (includes both formal and...

" Hungarian home gardens are small-scale farms managed by farm households using traditional management practices and family labor. They generate private benefits for farmers by enhancing diet quality and providing food when costs of transacting in local markets are high. Home gardens also...

"In the subsistence-oriented, semi-arid production systems of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka, India, the environment is marginal for crop growth and often there is no substitute for millet crops. Across communities, farmers grow thirteen different combinations of pearl millet, sorghum, finger...

"Agricultural biodiversity is an environmental resource. Much of the agricultural biodiversity remaining in situ today is found on the semi-subsistence farms of poorer countries and the small-scale farms or home gardens of more industrialized nations. The traditional small farms of Hungary are...

This synthesis revisits the “maize success story” in Sub-Saharan Africa, drawing selectively from an extensive published literature about maize seed technical change and related policies. The review focuses on the countries of Kenya, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Malawi, where maize is most...

"Changes in India's seed regulations during the 1990s favored the growth of privately- as compared to publicly-funded sectors. Most advances have been made in the major millet crops, sorghum and pearl millet, as compared to finger millet and other minor millet crops, which in many ways dependent...

"A vast literature has accumulated since crop varieties with transgenic resistance to insects and herbicide tolerance were released to farmers in 1996 and 1997. A comparatively minor segment of this literature consists of studies conducted by agricultural economists to measure the farm-level...