This paper explores the race between these two countervailing forces, with the goal of informing two important policy questions. First, how do rural Ethiopians adapt to land constraints? And second, do land constraints significantly influence welfare outcomes in rural Ethiopia? To answer these...

Although food security measurement has been substantially expanded in recent decades, there persists significant dissatisfaction with existing measurement systems, especially in the wake of the global food and financial crisis. In this paper we first set out a list of criteria that an ideal food...

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...

Evidence assembled in this special issue of Food Policy shows that rising rural population densities in parts of Africa are profoundly affecting farming systems and the region’s economies in ways that are underappreciated in current discourse on African development issues. This study...

Since the seminal works of Malthus and Boserup, scientists have long debated the impact of population growth and land constraints on the wellbeing of rural people. Today these concerns are particularly relevant to Africa, with its rapid population growth, very small farms, and chronic food...

Agricultural productivity growth is widely seen as an essential instrument of poverty reduction, food security and broader economic growth. Paradoxically, however, the agricultural sector is often neglected by African governments in what is often termed ‘urban bias’. This paper explores what...

Much of the world’s chronically poor and malnourished population lives in an increasingly volatile world. The dangerous nexus of climate change, rapid population growth, conflict, and economic stagnation has already pushed several poor regions into states of permanent crisis, even as the...

We propose the development of a multicountry system of high-frequency, long-term sentinel sites in the world’s most vulnerable regions. If implemented along the lines we conceive, this system could be a high-return investment for resilience-building efforts, since it would serve multiple...