Agricultural commercialization, or the transition from food to cash crops, has gained increasing attention over the past few decades. Plans for developing world farmers to focus on labor-intensive cash crops, to exploit their natural comparative advantage, typically depend on stable food markets...

Diversification into high-value cash crops among smallholders has been propagated as a strategy to improve welfare in rural areas. However, the extent to which cash crop production spurs projected gains remains an under-researched question, especially in the context of market imperfections...

Accelerating development in Sub-Saharan Africa will require massive expansion of access to electricity - currently reaching only about one-third of households. This paper explores how essential economic development might be reconciled with the need to keep carbon emissions in check. The authors...

The spatiotemporal distribution characteristics of soil temperature are a significant, but seldom described signal of climate warming. This study examines the spatiotemporal trends in soil temperature at depths of 10, 20, and 50 cm in the conterminous US during 1948–2008. We find a warming...

Phenology is critical to ecosystem carbon quantification, and yet has not been well modeled considering both aboveground and belowground environmental variables. This is especially true for alpine and pan-arctic regions where soil physical conditions play a significant role in determining the...

Wetland CH 4 emissions are one of the most uncertain components of the global CH 4 budget. The complex nature of wetland CH 4 processes makes it challenging to identify causal relationships that could be used to improve our understanding and predictability of CH 4 emissions. In this study, we...

In targeting poverty gains, sub-Saharan African governments have emphasized the alleviation of gender differences in agricultural productivity. The empirical studies on the gender gap, however, have frequently used data that were limited regarding geographic and topical coverage, and/or details...

Land area is a fundamental component of agricultural statistics, and of analyses undertaken by agricultural economists. While household surveys in developing countries have traditionally relied on farmers' own, potentially error-prone, land area assessments, the availability of affordable and...