The basic cause of needless poverty and hunger in the rural Africa to-day is the stagnation of its main economic base - agriculture. It has settled down to a low level of equilibrium of income, saving and investment over time. Hence, most of the rural people of the region is caught in a vicious circle of a poverty trap. They are below the "absolute poverty line". The country studies show all of them are food-deficit.

La planification du développement dans les pays africains était au départ(années 50 - début des années 70) perdue et conçue essentiellement comme une planification macro-économique. Cette perception mettait essentiellement l'accent sur la projection et la maximisation des agrégats économiques nationaux tels que le PIB, le PNB, le revenu par habitant, le niveau de l'emploi, la stabilité des

niveaux de prix comme seuls moyens de mesurer le développement économique.

Earlier (1950s - early 1970s) development planning in African countries was essentially perceived and conceived as macro-economic planning. This perception placed overriding emphasis on the projection and maximization of national economic aggregates such as the GDP, the GNP per capita income, level of employment, stability of price levels etc. as sole measures of economic development performance.

Analiza las principales características y consecuencias de los asentamientos humanos de la población urbana en condiciones de extrema pobreza e indica la importancia social, económica y política de este problema, que debe ser considerada en las políticas de vivienda, infraestructura y servicios sociales para tratar de solucionarlo.

During the past two decades there has been increasing concern that the development strategies of the 1950s and 1960s would neither eliminate nor even greatly reduce poverty even as the pervasive nature of that poverty became more widely recognized. This increase in concern conincided with the drama of the major biological breakthroughs in food production associated with the "green revolution." A debate began on whether there was a causal relation between the technology of the green revolution and the incidence of rural poverty.

In his insghtfull but unfinished work, Dharm Narain drew attention to the behavior of prices as one of the important factors determining the extent of poverty in rural India. His empirical investigations, summarized in Gunvant Desai's contribution to this volume (chap. 1), provide strong prima facie evidence of such influence. Dharm Narain found that rural poverty is not only inversely related to the level of output per head of the rural population, as established in Ahluwalia (1978a), but also positively related to the level of prices.

Programa Conjunto de Asentamientos Humanos

Abstract not available.

Land degradation in the tropics is strongly associated with human population growth. The latter phenomenon is quite marked in humid areas and in the temperate highlands (Jahnke 1982). Notably in the plateaux of Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia, several pastoral systems have gradually evolved into mixed farming, in order to cope with such pressure (Ruthenberg, 1980). Land is more intensively utilized as population density increases since mixed systems are more efficient than specialized crop or livestock systems (McIntire et al.,1992). In fact, livestock crop integration allows: