A detailed examination of Amartya Sen's theory of famines shows that it is logically impossible: it cannot work in the real world. His attempt to apply it to the Bengal Famine of 1943 relies on repeated and consistent misstatements of the evidence in his sources. He relies almost entirely on the...

Mali is a Sub-Saharan African country with 19.1 million people. Almost half of this population lives in poverty, due to the dysfunction of activity sectors (agriculture, energy, education, employment, services, etc.). Natural resource management especially land and water together with...

This study explores the Impact of Food Prices Crisis on budget deficits in the Arab region. Panel data is used for the period of 2000 to 2012 in sixteen countries in the region. We run multi regression models which are used to estimate the Impact of food crisis on government debt in high, middle...

Potential poverty traps among the rural poor suggest a need to reduce poor farmers?vulnerability by stabilizing crop yields and limiting yield losses. Advances in biotechnology will help address this need directly with crops that tolerate climate fluctuation or resist biotic stresses. Evaluating...

The global financial crisis has potentially many adverse effects on the developing world: falls in exports of goods and services to the OECD, dramatic falls in commodity prices and resource exports, and falls in remittances. Many of the poorer countries are heavily specialized and dependent on...

Rapid urbanization is a fact of live even in the least developed countries (LDCs) where the lion’s share of the population presently lives in rural areas and will continue to do so for decades to come. At the turn of the millennium 75% of the LDCs’ population still lived in rural areas and...

Against the background of rising weather risks this paper seeks to understand how risks impact the income generating capacity of rural households in Southeast Asia. In this study, we use assets to predict households' income generating capacity and examine the role of different shock categories...

This paper analyzes the transmission from global commodity to domestic food prices for a large set of countries. First, a theoretical model is developed to explain price transmission for different trade regimes. Drawing from the competitive storage model under rational expectations, it is shown...

Agriculture plays an important role in terms of employment and its contribution to gross domestic product in many African countries. Thus, any policy initiative targeted towards poverty reduction in Africa should consider the agricultural sector as the major priority area. Unfortunately, the...

Indian agriculture sector has an impressive long-term record of taking the country out of serious food shortages despite rapid population increase, given its heavy reliance on the work of its pluralistic extension system. But so far today gap between technology developed/released and the...