Ce document vise à contribuer au programme d’action en cours pour le développement de l’Afrique au sud du Sahara.

Book chapter

Most of Nigeria's poor reside in rural areas and gain their livelihood from agricultural work. If the government's poverty reduction goals are to be achieved, Nigeria will need an adequate level of strategically targeted investments in agriculture to upgrade rural infrastructure, boost productivity, and increase competitiveness. Before effective investment programs can be designed and implemented, however, it is important to have a clear understanding of the current pattern of public spending on agriculture.

The devolution of natural resource management responsibility from the state to communities or local user groups has become a widespread trend that cuts across countries and resource sectors. Unlike claims to the contrary in policy narratives, devolution of control over resources from the state to local organizations does not necessarily lead to greater participation and empowerment of all stakeholders (Cleaver 1999).

Mexico’s Programa Nacional de Educación, Salud y Alimentación (PROGRESA) is a major government program aimed at developing the human capital of poor households. Targeting its benefits directly to the population in extreme poverty in rural areas, it seeks to alleviate current poverty through monetary and in-kind benefits, as well as to reduce future levels of poverty by encouraging investments in education, health, and nutrition.

Eighty-three percent of the population of Ethiopia depends directly on agriculture for their livelihoods, while many others depend on agriculture-related cottage industries such as textiles, leather, and food oil processing. Agriculture contributes about 46.3 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) (World Bank 2008) and up to 90 percent of total export earnings. As part of the current five-year (2006–2011) Plan for Accelerated and Sustained Development to End Poverty (PASDEP), the government is continuing to invest heavily in agriculture.

Book chapter

Poor people in developing countries are vulnerable to a broad range of shocks that affect their livelihoods, including illness, accidents, and death as well as loss of assets such as animals, crops, and machinery. The poor are still predominantly rural, and their vulnerability is even higher than that of their urban peers. Health facilities are less available and less well equipped in rural areas; water, sanitation, roads, and telecommunication are less developed; and people are less educated and not as aware of risk-mitigation mechanisms.

Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries in the world, and its population of more than 70 million people lives mostly in the highlands. The food security of these people is threatened by land degradation and droughts that cause declining and highly variable land productivity. Changes in the global climate may also have caused an increase in the incidence of drought that has occurred recently in areas that were not affected by the earlier droughts.

Human activities such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation have significantly increased the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases (GHG) leading to global climate change. Global climate change and its associated weather extremes pose considerable challenges worldwide, and mitigating the adverse impacts of climate change is a high priority for the international community. To reduce global emissions and curb the threat of climate change, many countries are participating in carbon trading.

"The International Food Policy and Research Institute (IFPRI), headquartered in Washington, D.C.and represented by an office in Central America based in RUTA, in San Jose, Costa Rica, and the Sub-regional Economic Commission for Central America (ECLAC) office based in Mexico, have been executing the Project on the Impact of the Central America Free Trade Agreement on Agriculture and the Rural Sector in Five Central American Countries (“the Project”).