España se ha sumado a los países que han situado de nuevo la agricultura en el centro de sus agendas de desarrollo. En 2008 incrementó su cooperación en agricultura, desarrollo rural y seguridad alimentaria, aunque la ayuda alimentaria de emergencia fue la que más creció. Aún así, la magnitud del reto del hambre exige un esfuerzo mucho mayor, en cantidad y calidad. Un esfuerzo que no desvíe recursos de otros sectores también clave, como la salud y la educación, para alcanzar el primer Objetivo de Desarrollo del Milenio: reducir a la mitad el hambre y la pobreza extrema.

An introduction into the work we do to assist disadvantaged communities in Laos and Cambodia. 

We have 3 core Programs of development work: Healthy Villages & Local Leadership/ Land & Livelihoods/ Child Protection and Empowerment. 

Please visit our website for more information: https://villagefocus.org/index

Women’s land ownership and control have important connections with their empowerment in Pakistan’s agricultural context. However, the link between these has largely remained unexplored; and there has been only a few research to determine how many women own or control land in Pakistan. The Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) carried out a multiple pronged research in 2007-09 to fill this knowledge gap and to examine the reason behind women’s land ownership and empowerment.

Environmental change and adaptation
in degraded agro-ecosystems: the case
of highland Madagascar
Jon Unruh*, Bill McConnell** and Joe Rodman†
Area (2010) 42.3, 359–368

The number of people which the world must feed is expected to increase by 50% during the first half of this century, but will the world’s agricultural resource base be up to the task of meeting the diverse demands being placed on it?

Agriculture is an inherently risky economic activity. A large array of uncontrollable elements can affect output production and prices, resulting in highly variable economic returns to farm households. In developing countries, farmers also lack access to both modern instruments of risk management—such as agricultural insurance, futures contracts, or guarantee funds—and ex post emergency government assistance. Such farmers rely on different “traditional” coping strategies and risk-mitigation techniques, but most of these are inefficient.

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.

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.

In Nigeria, conventional financial institutions serve only about 35 percent of the active population, and the poor, especially women, have limited access to financial services. Private sector-led microfinance institutions (MFIs) are increasingly playing a role to fill this need. This brief provides an overview of the institutional environment of microfinance in Nigeria, as well as insights and recommendations for better reaching this audience, based on focus group discussions and case studies of self-employed women in rural areas of Edo State, Nigeria.

Determining the causality between health measures and both income and labor productivity remains an ongoing challenge for economists. This review paper aims to answer the question: Does improved population health lead to higher rates of agricultural growth? In attempting to answer this question, we survey the empirical literature at micro and macro levels concerning the link between health investments and agricultural productivity. The evidence from some micro-level studies suggests that inexpensive health interventions can have a very large impact on labor productivity.

Large land acquisitions can have a deep, lasting e? ect on livelihoods, food security and the future of agriculture, so there is a need for strategic thinking, vigorous public debate and government responsiveness to public concerns, especially in recipient countries

The recent upsurge in Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in land raises the hope to bridge the gap of decades of underinvestment in developing countries’ agricultural sector, but it may also threaten host countries’ food security and increase the vulnerability of the rural population. Based on four country case studies conducted by Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), this article illustrates distinct impacts of large-scale investments in agricultural land.