"African agriculture is at a crossroads. The current high food prices and the instability they have provoked in several countries have added impetus for African countries to review their agricultural policies and programs. New agricultural policies will have to be more focused on staple food crops and on their main producers-smallholders, most of whom are women. The new policies must remove constraints that impede access by smallholder farmers to the knowledge, technology, and financial services they need to increase farm productivity in a profitable and environmentally sustainable manner.

High food prices are not only causing a humanitarian crisis, but also putting at risk the development potential of millions of people. Global agriculture markets are undergoing structural changes, and the next three to four years will pose great challenges for achieving an affordable and accessible food supply for the world's most vulnerable. Soaring food and fuel prices are creating a "perfect storm" for the world's most vulnerable.

"Part of the difficulty in responding to the food crisis is the lack of credible and up-todate data on the impacts of food prices on poor people and on the effects of policy responses. Such information would allow international and national decision makers to use feedback to adjust their responses and achieve maximum effectiveness. Much more investment and sound coordination is needed in this area. So far, national and international responses to the food crisis are mixed in terms of their likely effectiveness.

Policymaking initiatives in agriculture and public health are often pursued in a parallel and unconnected fashion. Yet coherent, joint action in agriculture and health could have large potential benefits and substantially reduce risks for the poor. Among development professionals there is growing recognition that agriculture influences health, and health influences agriculture, and that both in turn have profound implications for poverty reduction.

"This paper describes the emergence of improved traditional planting pits (zaï) in Burkina Faso in the early 1980s as well as their advantages, disadvantages and impact. The zaï emerged in a context of recurrent droughts and frequent harvest failures, which triggered farmers to start improving this local practice. Despair triggered experimentation and innovation by farmers. These processes were supported and complemented by external intervention. Between 1985 and 2000 substantial public investment has taken place in soil and water conservation (SWC).

Las instituciones de acción colectiva y los sistemas de derechos de propiedad moldean la forma en que la gente usa los recursos naturales.A su vez, estos patrones de uso afectan los resultados de los sistemas de producción agrícola de la gente. Juntos, los mecanismos de acción colectiva y los sistemas de derechos de propiedad definen los incentivos a los que la gente accede por llevar a cabo estrategias de gestión sostenible y productiva, y afectan el nivel y distribución de los beneficios de los recursos naturales.

This brief defines property rights and collective action and discusses the links to sustainability of natural resource management and agricultural systems and to poverty reduction, as well as the implications for policy and practice.

This chapter challenges one of the main tenets of agricultural economics—that households behave as though they are single individuals, with production factors allocated efficiently between men and women. In many contexts this is a convenient and innocuous assumption. It can be quite restrictive, however, when investigating the causes and welfare consequences of gender differences in agriculture.

Much empirical work has approached the problem of how resource allocations are made within households from the perspective that if preferences differ, welfare outcomes depend on the power of individuals to exert their own preferences. Measures of power are therefore a central component of quantitative empirical approaches to understanding how different preferences translate into different welfare outcomes. Following most of the empirical studies in this genre, this chapter focuses on dynamics within couples.

Among financial institutions serving poor households around the world, microfinance programs have emerged as important players. These programs typically make small loans—sometimes as small as US$50 to US$100 and sometimes as large as several thousand dollars-to households lacking access to formal-sector banks (see, for example, Lapenu and Zeller 2001). One important achievement of the microfinance movement has been its relative success in deliberately reaching out to poor women living in diverse socioeconomic environments.

Since 1997 Mexico has provided poor families with cash benefits linked to children’s school attendance and regular clinic attendance, as well as in-kind health benefits and nutritional supplements, through the Programa Nacional de Educación, Salud y Alimentación (PROGRESA). Unlike previous social programs in Mexico, this nationwide antipoverty program targets transfers to the mother of the family.

Many decisions that affect the well-being of individuals are made within families or households. The processes by which resources are allocated among individuals and the outcomes of those processes are commonly referred to as “intrahousehold resource allocation.” Since the early 1990s a growing literature has paid increasing attention to the role that intrahousehold resource allocation plays in affecting the outcome of development policy (see Strauss and Thomas 1995; Behrman 1997; Haddad, Hoddinott, and Alderman 1997 for reviews).