Development partners and public investors assume that spate irrigation reduces household poverty and malnutrition. This article examines whether the poverty profiles of smallholder farmers and the nutritional outcomes of their children have improved as a result of using spate irrigation. The study areas were in two regional states in Ethiopia. Twenty-five users each, both from traditional and modern spate irrigation schemes, and an equal number of non-users responded to a structured questionnaire.

The agriculture sector is the backbone of Ethiopia’s economy and livelihoods. Yet, heavy reliance on rain-fed systems has made the sector particularly vulnerable to variability in rainfall and temperature. Climate change may decrease national gross domestic product (GDP) by 8–10% by 2050, but adaptation action in agriculture could cut climate shock-related losses by half. • Climate risk management interventions and long-term adaptation actions need to match localized vulnerabilities and impacts.

Nuestra especie entró en grupos pequeños al continente americano a través de Beringia hace 20-15 000 años. Compartió con Siberia Oriental el chamanismo y con él la búsqueda de plantas y hongos alucinógenos y, como consecuencia, el conocimiento detallado de la flora y el continuo interés por experimentar. Al entrar en el interior del continente americano, nuestra especie contribuyó –por la caza continua– a la extinción de su megafauna.

The global challenges of food security and biodiversity are rarely addressed together, though recently there has been an increasing awareness that the two issues are closely related. The majority of land available for agriculture is already used for food production, but despite the productivity gains, one in nine people worldwide are classified as food insecure. There is an increasing risk that addressing food insecurity through methods such as agricultural expansion or intensification could lead to biodiversity loss through destruction of habitats important for conservation.

Currently, the UK has a high self-sufficiency rate in barley production. This paper assessed the effects of projected climate and land use changes on feed barley production and, consequently, on meat supply in the UK from the 2030s to the 2050s. Total barley production under projected land use and climate changes ranged from 4.6 million tons in the 2030s to 9.0 million tons in the 2050s. From these, the projected feed barley supply ranged from approximately 2.3 to 4.6 million tons from the 2030s to the 2050s, respectively.

Declining size of the farm holdings in most high agricultural potential areas as a result of continuous land fragmentation is currently a major policy concern in Kenya. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the effect of land fragmentation and agro-ecological zones (AEZs) on food security and farm efficiency in Kenya. The study used data collected from 384 farm-households that were randomly selected from three AEZs in the Embu County, using a multistage stratified sampling technique.

ABSTRACTED FROM EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This study has been commissioned by the Land Information Working Group (LIWG) in order to determine the extent to which Land Use Planning has alleviated poverty in, and strengthened the rights of, rural communities in Lao PDR, and how the positive impacts can be enhanced. A literature review, online survey, interviews and field visits examined this question according to the four key themes of participation, land tenure security, food and livelihood security and conservation.

Over the past decade, the Lao government has developed the policy of ‘Turning Land into Capital’ (TLIC), a strategy for generating revenue and economic value from ‘state land’. The 450 Year Road Project built along the periphery of the Laotian capital, Vientiane, linking the national highway with the Thai border, was financed using a TLIC model. Additional land to the side of the road was acquired to be resold at rates significantly higher than the compensation provided to landowners.

We use four waves of panel data from Northern Ethiopia to investigate the link between Food for Work (FFW) participation and the diversity of food consumption and production. Food-based transfer programs have become a standard tool for addressing the problem of chronic food insecurity in developing countries. Such programs have the potential to expand diet diversity if food items provided under FFW are not part of the beneficiaries’ staple diet. By raising effective incomes, cash payments also have the potential to “crowd in” purchases of nutritionally important foods.