Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Contents -- List of Boxes -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part 1: The Rural Economy in the Development Process -- 1. Poverty and the Rural Economy -- Low Productivity and Rural Poverty -- Hazards, Diversity, and Household Strategies -- Rural Political Economy -- 2. Structural Transformation -- The Process of Structural Transformation -- Institutional Aspects of Structural Transformation -- Technical Change and Productivity Growth -- Elements of Social Change -- How Structural Transformation Shapes Agricultural Development -- Policy Implications of Structural Transformation -- 3. Japan, the United States, and Structural Transformation -- Japan and the United States as CARLs -- Agricultural Change in the United States -- Agricultural Change in Japan -- Agricultural Productivity Growth -- The Political Economy of Agricultural Development -- Implications for Today's CARLs -- Part 2: From Structure to Strategy -- 4. Small Farms in a Broad-Based Agricultural Strategy -- The Balance of Land and Labor in CARLs -- Strategic Notions about Small Farms -- The Economics of Farm Size -- Technological Change in Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa -- Efficiency, Equity, and Technological Change -- Choosing the Path of Productivity Growth -- 5. Agricultural Strategies and Agrarian Structure -- Inequitable Land Distribution -- Advantages of Unimodal Agrarian Structure -- The "Six I's" of Agricultural Strategy -- Limitations of Agricultural Development Strategy -- Hard to Achieve, Easy to Lose -- 6. Links between Agriculture and Industry -- An Overview -- Adapting Technology to Factor Endowments -- The Rural Nonfarm Economy: The Key Link -- Farm Equipment: A Strategic Linkage -- Nourishing Linkages -- 7. Fertilizer Production: Strategic Pitfall? -- An Overview -- Technology -- Comparative Advantage: The Evidence, 1950-70

Metadata only record ; The world's 58 poorest countries share the characteristic of a labour force overwhelmingly dependent on agriculture. Challenging the assumption that mass poverty and chronic hunger are unsolvable problems, this book explores the multiple aspects of economic development in these countries, which are home to 60% of the world's population. A broad based development strategy to raise incomes through agricultural productivity growth and expanded rural employment is offered. Information on the rural informal sector and on agriculture-industry interactions are presented, and the impact of macroeconomic and social policies on the rural economy are analysed. Policy instruments aimed at bringing a broad based development are assessed, from fiscal policy to development of new seeds and farm implements. The book includes case studies of countries that have seized or missed development opportunities. Comparison of the successful economic transformations of Japan and the USA shows how key ideas have enabled policymakers to act with foresight. Analyses of strategic choices in China, the USSR, Taiwan, Mexico, Kenya, and Tanzania also show how development strategies that emerge from the real-world political economy reflect a mix of individual interests and strategic notions.

The conversion of primary forest to other land uses in the Amazon threatens biodiversity and releases carbon into the atmosphere, but makes economic development and poverty reduction possible. Small-scale farmers practising slash-and-burn cultivation account for a significant proportion of tropical deforestation. However, the conditions necessary for increased productivity of alternative land use systems (LUS) to improve farmer welfare and simultaneously reduce deforestation are not well understood. The research presented in this report attempts to determine the environmental consequences of different LUS in the western Brazilian Amazon, whether these consequences can be mitigated with appropriate technological, policy and institutional changes and what sorts of tradeoffs exist among the different social objectives facing policy makers. The research programme implemented during Phase II of ASB s project in Brazil was designed to better understand how the Government of Brazil, national and international research organizations and donor agencies can balance global environmental objectives with economic development and poverty reduction. The key question can be summarized as: can intensifying land use within forest and on cleared land simultaneously reduce deforestation and reduce poverty? ; Available in SANREM office, ES

This introduction to the special issue deploys a framework, inspired by realist synthesis and introduced in Section 1, that aims to untangle the contexts, mechanisms, and outcomes associated with investments that link poverty reduction and rural prosperity within a broad agri-food systems perspective. Section 2 considers changes in contexts: Where are agricultural research investments most likely to be an engine of poverty reduction? Over the past 25 years, there have been profound changes in the development context of most countries, necessitating an update on strategic insights for research investment priorities relevant for the economic, political, social, environmental, and structural realities of the early 21st Century. Section 2 briefly surveys changes in these structural aspects of poverty and development processes in low-income countries, with particular attention to new drivers (e.g., urbanization, climate change) that will be of increasing salience in the coming decades. In Section 3, we turn to mechanisms: What are the plausible impact pathways and what evidence exists to test their plausibility? Poor farmers in the developing world are often the stated focus of public sector agricultural research. However, farmers are not the only potential beneficiaries of agricultural research; rural landless laborers, stakeholders along food value chains, and the urban poor can also be major beneficiaries of such research. Thus, there are multiple, interacting pathways through which agricultural research can contribute to reductions in poverty and associated livelihood vulnerabilities. This paper introduces an ex ante set of 18 plausible impact pathways from agricultural research to rural prosperity outcomes, employing bibliometric methods to assess the evidence underpinning causal links. In Section 4, we revisit the concept of desired impacts: When we seek poverty reduction, what does that mean and what measures are needed to demonstrate impact? The papers in this special issue are intended to yield insights to inform improvements in agricultural research that seeks to reduce poverty. History indicates that equity of distribution of gains matters hugely, and thus the questions of "who wins?" and "who loses?" must be addressed. Moreover, our understanding(s) of "poverty" and the intended outcomes of development investments have become much richer over the past 25 years, incorporating more nuance regarding gender, community differences, and fundamental reconsideration of the meaning of poverty and prosperity that are not captured by simple head count income or even living standard measures.

Understanding how to source agricultural raw materials sustainably is challenging in today's globalized food system given the variety of issues to be considered and the multitude of suggested indicators for representing these issues. Furthermore, stakeholders in the global food system both impact these issues and are themselves vulnerable to these issues, an important duality that is often implied but not explicitly described. The attention given to these issues and conceptual frameworks varies greatly--depending largely on the stakeholder perspective--as does the set of indicators developed to measure them. To better structure these complex relationships and assess any gaps, we collate a comprehensive list of sustainability issues and a database of sustainability indicators to represent them. To assure a breadth of inclusion, the issues are pulled from the following three perspectives: major global sustainability assessments, sustainability communications from global food companies, and conceptual frameworks of sustainable livelihoods from academic publications. These terms are integrated across perspectives using a common vocabulary, classified by their relevance to impacts and vulnerabilities, and categorized into groups by economic, environmental, physical, human, social, and political characteristics. These issues are then associated with over 2,000 sustainability indicators gathered from existing sources. A gap analysis is then performed to determine if particular issues and issue groups are over or underrepresented. This process results in 44 "integrated" issues--24 impact issues and 36 vulnerability issues--that are composed of 318 "component" issues. The gap analysis shows that although every integrated issue is mentioned at least 40% of the time across perspectives, no issue is mentioned more than 70% of the time. A few issues infrequently mentioned across perspectives also have relatively few indicators available to fully represent them. Issues in the impact framework generally have fewer gaps than those in the vulnerability framework.