Jatropha projects have been set up worldwide as solution to reduce competition between food and biofuel production. Jatropha is mostly produced on marginal land in developing countries and production is labour-intensive. The subject of this study is an existing Jatropha plantation in central...

Rural non-farm employment (RNFE) is thought to ease poverty, economic vulnerability and income inequality. Two key questions arise: (1) Do alternative income sources actually help to raise the welfare of small family farms? (2) How is the rural regional income distribution affected by mixed...

Access by smallholder farmers to markets has traditionally been constrained by lack of market information. Yet progress in smallholder agriculture is inconceivable without greater market participation. The desire to strengthen farmer access to market has thus resulted in the emergence of many...

Women rice farmers in Africa are often constrained in accessing resources and technologies adapted to their requirements. AfricaRice has targeted women in disseminating NERICA to consider their needs. Along with top-down strategies, also processes that strengthen women rice growers at the...

Consumers’ taste and preference for differentiated cocoa based on darkness and flavour quality has been rising over the years. Added value of such specialty cocoa is expressed by consumers’ willingness to pay more than the standard commodity price for the attributes and associations such as...

Markets for high-value agricultural commodities are growing and can contribute to reducing rural poverty. However, the poor may be unable to participate in such markets, and adverse environmental impacts may counterbalance short-term benefits. Hence, policies are needed that help reducing...

The management of natural resources is a challenging task owing to the complexity of the resources and the benefits they provide. Nowadays there is trend to transfer some management power to local communities driven by equality and sustainability assumptions. We studied two cases of local...

Since the Internet’s inception its impact has been felt across the United States, but the distribution and adoption of the Internet has not necessarily been uniform geographically. As more consumers and businesses rely on the Internet to access information, the data transmission...

One of the U.S. Department of Agriculture Rural Development’s most popular programs is the funding for public water and sewer infrastructure projects in rural communities. This article reviews the water and sewer infrastructure projects funded in the state of Oklahoma between 1990 and...

Although the negative externalities of large-scale hog production have been well studied, econometric estimates of its potentially positive labor markets effects are lacking.We use the geographic shifts in large-scale hog production between 1992 and 2007 to estimate such production’s...