The trend is inescapable: more and more people in the developing world are living in the cities. By 2020, the number of people living in developing countries will grow from 4.9 billion to 6.8 billion. Ninety percent of this increase will be in rapidly expanding cities and towns. More than half the population of Africa and Asia will live in urban areas by 2020. More than three-quarters of Latin Americans already do.

There is hardly need these days to repeat that HIV/AIDS is devastating African societies and economies, threatening the hard-won human development gains of the past several decades. The changes to the development landscape wrought by AIDS demand a review of existing development actions at many levels, from households seeking to secure viable livelihoods, to policymakers attempting to better understand and internalize the implications of AIDS for their own sectoral goals and strategies.

This paper assesses the degree to which the L’Aquila Food Security Initiative (AFSI) has been implemented in Ghana within the framework of managing for development results (MfDR), and to evaluate progress in various outcomes, including economic governance, agricultural growth, poverty, and food and nutrition security. The MfDR approach, which has gained widespread support globally for obtaining results, is endorsed by the government of Ghana and reflected in the Ghana Aid Policy and Strategy.

To effectively address the interactions between HIV/AIDS and food insecurity, there's a need to fill knowledge gaps. strengthen capacity, and learn-by-doing in partnership with people who are directly affected." -- from Text

The second of three books in IFPRI's climate change in Africa series, East African Agriculture and Climate Change: A Comprehensive Analysis examines the food security threats facing 10 of the countries that make up east and central Africa - Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Kenya, Madagascar, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda - and explores how climate change will increase the efforts needed to achieve sustainable food security throughout the region. East Africa's populations is expected to grow at least through mid-century. The region will also see income growth.

A large body of literature makes the argument that commercialization of agriculture has mainly negative effects on the employment, incomes, food production and consumption, health, and nutrition of the poor. In Commercialization of Agriculture, Economic Development, and Nutrition, Joachim von Braun and Eileen Kennedy find that the conclusion that commercialization of agriculture is generally bad for nutrition is flawed.

This study employs IFPRI’s IMPACT model to generate projections of global fi sh supply and demand. IMPACT covers the world in 115 model regions for a range of agricultural commodities, to which fi sh and fi sh products are added for this study. As is the case with most global modeling work, an important value that IMPACT brings to this study is an internally consistent framework for analyzing and organizing the underlying data.

"Biodiversity provides essential components of healthy environments and sustainable livelihoods. One key component of biodiversity is agrobiodiversity—that is, the cultivated plants and animals that form the raw material of agriculture, the wild foods and other products gathered by rural populations within traditional subsistence systems, and organisms such as pollinators and soil biota... Agrobiodiversity used and conserved in a livelihood context can directly contribute to nutrition, health, and income generation...

How can family farmers best contribute to their country’s agriculture needs as well as broader development goals? First, we should determine which farmers can be profitable and assist them in doing so. Second, for those who aren’t profitable, we need to help them shift to other economic pursuits.

Benin covers a land area of 114,763 square kilometers and occupies a long stretch of land perpendicular to the coast of the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa. It is bordered on the north by Burkina Faso and the Republic of Niger, on the east by the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and on the west by the Republic of Togo. With a 124-kilometer coastline, it stretches north to south some 672 kilometers and east to west 324 kilometers at its widest point.

Policy Analysis for Sustainable Land Management and Food Security in Ethiopia presents a bioeconomic model of this less- favored area in the Ethiopian highlands. The main reason for selecting this case study area is the unique availability of both biophysical and socioeconomic data covering a period of 15 to 20 years.The data provides a valuable opportunity to analyze the relationships between population pressure, poverty, and land degradation and to test policies for reducing vulnerability and improving sustainable management of the resource base....