The Government of Zambia is embarking on an ambitious program of legal and administrative reforms in land policy. Although the need to liberalize the land market is universally shared, the ideas on how to accomplish this transformation are not. Two decades of underinvestment in field research have resulted in the present situation of micro-level data on land tenure and farm-level production, consumption, and resource management inadequate to guide policy decisions.

Attempts to achieve "more for the poor" through the use of indicator targeting may in fact mean less for the poor. The efficient use of a fixed budget for poverty reduction may require targeting. However, the use of indicator targeting, using fixed characteristics that are correlated with poverty to determine the distribution of expenditures, will tend to reduce the budget. Ignoring the budget reducing effects can reduce the welfare of the poor as they receive a greater share of a shrinking budget.

In urban areas of Cote d'Ivoire, human capital is the endowment that best explains welfare changes over time. In rural areas, physical capital especially the amount of land and farm equipment owned matters most.Empirical investigations of poverty in developing countries tend to focus on the incidence of poverty at a particular point in time. If the incidence of poverty increases, however, there is no information about how many new poor have joined the existing poor and how many people have escaped poverty.Yet this distinction is of crucial policy importance.

Proposed here is a new scheme for allocating international river water that accounts for the stochastic nature of water supply and the dynamic nature of its demand. The suggested scheme is expected to improve the efficiency of river basins' water allocation and the riparians' welfare.International river and lake basins constitute about 47 percent of the world's continental land area, a proportion that increases to about 60 percent in Africa, Asia, and South America.

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.

The paper suggests a way forward to increase considerably the food-production in the Sub-Saharan African countries which have perpetually been suffering from acute shortage of food grains. Contrary to observed trends in most parts of the world, food production in Sub-Saharan Africa has failed miserably to keep pace with the growing population. Consequently, the region has been one of the most famine-prone regions on the planet. There is a lot to be learnt from the experience of many of the Asian countries who have made it on the food front inspite of equally difficult population pressures.

The deterioration of land resources in the world's arid and semi-arid regions is one of the gravest problems facing our planet and its people. Desertification, broadly defined, is one of the principal barriers to sustainable food security and sustainable livelihoods in our world today. It is not a future global threat; it is a devastating day-to-day local reality.

Review for sub-Saharan Africa, examines the English-language literature and focuses on four important dimensions of exclusion: (i) exclusion from agricultural land; (ii) exclusion from agricultural livelihood; (iii) exclusion from formal and informal employment; (iv) exclusion from organization and representation.Paper is organized in six sections. The first section discusses concepts of exclusion. The main body of the review examines the four dimensions of exclusion listed above.

The objectives of the study are: (i) to assess the performance of the food marketing system in Africa; (ii) to identify the different barrier to credit and assess their impact on the performance of the informal food marketing system; (iii) to suggest sound recommendations on improving informal food marketing operators' access to credit.

In the developed countries less than 20 per cent of the population is engaged in agriculture. The rest is employed in the industrial sector. In the underdeveloped countries less than 10 per cent of the population is employed in the industrial sector and the rest is engaged in agriculture. At once this dictates that, for some time to come, the route to development in the latter countries will depend on agriculture, which also mainly depends on land policy and tenure. The land question is a contradiction in land rights and consequential social, economic and political abuses replicated on it.

The report presents the benefits of nuclear technology, the central role played by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) of the United Nations in the transfer of nuclear technology applied to food and agriculture, as well as the experiences of Africa and some other developing regions in the acquisition of the technology. Some briefs are given on the discussions with scientists and technologists during missions to three African countries before concluding the report with recommendations.