In urban areas of Cote d'Ivoire, human capital is the endowment that best explains welfare changes over time. In rural areas, physical capital especially the amount of land and farm equipment owned matters most.Empirical investigations of poverty in developing countries tend to focus on the…

This case study of Zimbabwe has examined developments in biotechnology against the background of a well-developed national agricultural research, plant breeding and seeds system. It has then assessed the constraints to biotechnology research, technology development and diffusion in the light of…

Commercial farms in South Africa could become significantly more efficient if they became smaller. The government could encourage that trend by removing policies and distortions that favor large over small farms.Drawing on international evidence, van Zyl, Binswanger, and Thirtle discuss the…

Apparently factor prices do matter in agricultural production and in the selection of production technology. And in South Africa, more attention should be focused on the technological needs of small scale farmers. Current policies sustain the bias toward labour saving technical change, hardly…

Results from this study show that the over-used but under-researched association between grazing and land degradation in the Kalahari has been oversimplified. In typical Kalahari conditions, the ecological changes that have been brought about by grazing cannot be linked with more fundamental…

Building soil conservation practices on a base of indigenous knowledge greatly increases the rate at which they are adopted by farmers in Burkina Faso. Indigenous soil conservation practices are ecologically sound and need to be taken into account when efforts are made to introduce modern…

Full text of the Convention to Combat Desertification, which was elaborated by the Intergovernmental Negotiating Committee (INCD) and signed in June 1994.Also available from the CCD WWW site in French and English

Review for sub-Saharan Africa, examines the English-language literature and focuses on four important dimensions of exclusion: (i) exclusion from agricultural land; (ii) exclusion from agricultural livelihood; (iii) exclusion from formal and informal employment; (iv) exclusion from organization…