Environmental degradation can inflict
serious damage on poor people because their livelihoods
often depend on natural resource use and their living
conditions may offer little protection from air, water, and
soil pollution. At the same time, poverty-constrained
options may induce the poor to deplete resources and degrade
the environment at rates that are incompatible with
long-term sustainability. In such cases, degraded resources

This Policy and Strategy Paper
contributes to an ongoing policy debate-within the Bank but
also with its client governments-about the role of tree
crops in various production systems, and as key commodities
in the trade portfolio of various African nations. It
attempts to answer the following questions: a) What is the
role of tree crops in a rural development strategy focused
on smallholders? B) Under what conditions can small-holder

In Uganda, efforts to decentralize the
management of the extension service and to launch the
village participation in land development exercise have led
to a number of issues, outcomes and expectations. This
overview looks at what can be realistically expected from
the extension service (in terms of contact with farmers),
from decentralization (in terms of management improvement),
and from the village participation exercise (in terms of

The main objective of the study is to
provide the Government of Senegal the analyses and
information to implement policies towards reducing the rural
poor's vulnerability. While during the latest years,
economic growth reduced poverty in the country, this has
been less noticeable among the rural population, who
actually account for 6 million people over a total
population of 10 million. The rural economy remains

The study outlines the socioeconomic
development strategy for Vietnam, during the first decade of
the twenty first century, envisaging sustainable economic
development, to rapidly adjust to social stability, while
maintaining cultural, and traditional ties. The aim is to
become a socialist market economy, fully integrated into the
global economy, internationally competitive, with
characteristics of an industrialized, and knowledge-based

The Northeast region of Brazil has long
been the single largest pocket of rural poverty in Latin
America. With a combined area of 1.6 million square
kilometers-16 percent of Brazil's total-the Northeast
is home to 45 million people, 28 percent of Brazil's
total population , of whom 5.4 million people live on about
$1 a day and a total of 10.7 million on $1.60 or less per
day. Nearly half of all rural communities are in the

This sector report on Challenges and
Priorities for Rural Development analyzes why Upper Egypt
has lagged behind the rest of the country and to help the
Government of Egypt and stakeholders to define a framework
for interventions to promote broad-based economic growth and
human development that will reach the poor and improve
welfare in rural Upper Egypt. To achieve this objective, the
strategic framework for intervention proposed here has two

the authors examine how economic activity and market participation are distributed across space. Applying a nonparametric von Thunen model to Nepalese data, the authors uncover a strong spatial division of labor. Nonfarm employment is concentrated in and around cities, while agricultural wage employment dominates villages located further away. Vegetables are produced near urban centers. Paddy and commercial crops are more important at intermediate distances. Isolated villages revert to self-subsistence.

This discussion paper: a) proposes a new
approach of targeted collaboration among different sectors;
b) devises new tools or enhances existing ones to facilitate
the contributions of different sectors to help relieve
health problems; and c) puts theory into practice through a
pilot in Ghana. The report is divided into three parts. Part
1 explains the foundations of environmental health and
proposes a new approach that taps health benefits

If the marginal gains from investment in physical capital depend positively on knowledge, but a household cannot hire skilled labor to compensate for low skills, then even if it has access to credit, the household will achieve lower returns than an educated household. If, as is common, the income-poor are less educated because of failures in the credit market, and because they live in areas where there is less access to schooling, then the poor will also have lower returns on investments. The author tests this argument for the case of irrigation infrastructure in Vietnam.

An estimated 80,000-100,000 Dominican
farmers produce coffee and cocoa, nearly 40 percent of all
agricultural producers. The sectors also provide employment
for tens of thousands of field laborers and persons employed
in linked economic activities. The majority of coffee and
cocoa producers are small-scale and most are located in
environmentally sensitive watersheds. Recent trends in
international commodity markets have challenged the survival

The focus of this report is crop
biotechnology, as developing countries are faced with
evaluating genetically engineered plants for human,
livestock, and environmental safety. These genetically
engineered plants can potentially contribute to agricultural
productivity in developing regions when appropriately
deployed, but there is uncertainty about the potential for
adverse consequences to environmental and human health. The