Drought is a recurrent and often devastating threat to the welfare of countries in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) where three-quarters of the arable land has less than 400 mm of annual rainfall, and the natural grazings, which support a majority of the 290 million ruminant livestock,...

This paper reviews hypotheses about the impacts of rural population growth on agriculture and natural resource management in developing countries and the implications for productivity, poverty, and natural resource conditions. Impacts on household and collective decisions are considered, and it...

Concerns about harmful environmental impacts are frequently raised in research and policy debates about population growth in the hills and mountains of developing countries. Although establishing wildlife corridors and biosphere reserves is important for preserving selected biodiverse habitats,...

In this original study Robert Paarlberg examines local policy responses to GM crop technologies in four important developing countries: Brazil, India, Kenya, and China.

The Green Revolution has had a tremendous positive effect on food security in the developing world. Increased use of modern varieties of wheat has helped belie the conventional wisdom of the 1970s that the world was going to run out of food. But IFPRI projections indicate that global demand for...

World population was about 2.5 billion in 1950; by 1988 it had doubled. Despite this unprecedented population explosion, global food supply kept pace with the additional demand for food. A technological revolution after World War II in the agriculture of the industrialized countries initially made...

Assuring food security for the next 25 years requires meeting a number of political, social, economic, and technical challenges. One of these is the successful use of new biotechnologies in agriculture. Research in recombinant genetics and biotechnology aims to develop plant varieties that...

This paper analyses the impact of quality based labelling on product prices, factor allocation and the resulting effects on producers within the context of an international trading system. A general equilibrium model, calibrated to 1998 data, describes United States and European Union labelling...

A biotechnology revolution is proceeding in tandem with international proliferation of intellectual property regimes and rights. Does the intellectual property impede agricultural research conducted in, or of consequence for, developing countries? This question has important spatial dimensions...

As patents and other forms of intellectual property become more pervasive in the next generation of biotechnologies, designing polices and practices to ensure sufficient freedom to operate (i.e., the ability to practice or use an innovation) will be crucial for non-profit agencies in the...