Food security and hunger are age-old problems that endure today. More than 820 million people are chronically undernourished because they are unable to obtain sufficient food by any means. Chronic malnutrition results from a continuously inadequate diet, reducing physical capacity, lowering...

In recent years, development policy has responded to an increasing concern about natural resource degradation by setting up innovative payment for environmental services (PES) programs in developing countries. PES programs use market and institutional incentives in order to meet both...

This book turns attention towards the role of environmental services in agricultural landscapes as they provide a living for many poor in developing countries. It is one of the first books to focus on the effects of payment for PES programs on the rural poor.

A study of distortions to agricultural incentives in 18 developing countries during 1960-84, by Krueger, Schiff and Valdes (1988; 1991), found that policies in most of those developing countries were directly or indirectly harming their farmers. Since the mid-1980s there has been a substantial...

This paper has two purposes. It first considers the impact on world food prices of the changes in restrictions on trade in staple foods during the 2008 world food price crisis. Those changes-reductions in import protection or increases in export restraints-were meant to partially insulate...

While barriers to trade in most goods and some services including capital flows have been reduced considerably over the past two decades, many remain. Such policies harm most the economies imposing them, but the worst of the merchandise barriers (in agriculture and textiles) are particularly...

Most of the world's poorest people depend on farming for their livelihood. Earnings from farming in low-income countries are depressed partly due to a pro-urban bias in own-country policies, and partly because richer countries (including some developing countries) favor their farmers with import...