During the last two decades Indonesia has experienced immense forest and land fires. Often these fires are associated with extended drought and widespread use of fire to clear previously logged forest and other degraded land in preparation for oil palm, rubber, or pulpwood plantations. There are many reasons for the use of fire in land clearing activities, but probably the most important one is economics. There is still acceptance that fire is the cheapest, fastest, and most effective land clearing method with the added benefit of providing nutrients from ash residues.

The report seeks to analyze what has been learned about how agricultural interventions influence nutrition outcomes in low-and middle-income countries, focusing on the target populations of the millennium development goals-people living on less than a dollar a day. It also sets out to synthesize lessons from past efforts to improve the synergies between agriculture and nutrition outcomes. The report identifies a number of developments in agriculture and nutrition that have transformed the context in which nutrition is affected by agriculture.

Recognition of the importance of institutions that provide security of property rights and relatively equal access to economic resources to a broad cross-section of society has renewed interest in the potential of asset redistribution, including land reforms. Empirical analysis of the impact of such policies is, however, scant and often contradictory. This paper uses panel household data from India, together with state-level variation in the implementation of land reform, to address some of the deficiencies of earlier studies.

Although a large theoretical literature discusses the possible inefficiency of sharecropping contracts, the empirical evidence on this phenomenon has been ambiguous at best. Household-level fixed-effect estimates from about 8,500 plots operated by households that own and sharecrop land in the Ethiopian highlands provide support for the hypothesis of Marshallian inefficiency. At the same time, a factor adjustment model suggests that the extent to which rental markets allow households to attain their desired operational holding size is extremely limited.

At independence in 1960, Africa was a modest food exporter while Asia was engulfed in a food crisis. The Green Revolution boosted food production in Asia and the global food problem shifted to Africa. However, science and technology have been promoted on an ad hoc basis in Africa's 45 years of independence. This chapter analyses why the Asian Green Revolution failed to take root in Africa, and why the average African grain yield has been flat since 1960.

The major subsistence food systems of the world that feed resource?poor populations are identified and their capacity to supply essential nutrients in reasonable balance to the people dependent on them has been considered for some of these with a view to overcoming their nutrient limitations in sound agronomic and sustainable ways.

This participatory poverty assessment (PPA 2006) comprises one component of ADB’s Technical Assistance to the Lao People’s Democratic Republic for Institutional Strengthening for Poverty Monitoring and Evaluation. The goal of this PPA, as with the first PPA in 2000, is to complement the statistical analyses of poverty in a meaningful way and to record the experiences and concerns of the poor in order to initiate and identify more effective forms of public and private actions to alleviate poverty.

De EU-Bodemstrategie en het voorstel voor een Kaderrichtlijn Bodem (KRB) dat daaraan gekoppeld is, betekenen een nieuwe visie op het Europese beleid op het gebied van de bodem. Nagegaan wordt wat de mogelijke betekenis van een bodemstrategie en/of ¬richtlijn is voor het huidige landbouwbeleid. Uit de analyse blijkt dat de directe impact van het huidige voorstel voor een KRB beperkt is voor de Nederlandse landbouw.

The combination of rice and fish production into one system is considered to be an efficient means of agricultural land use for small-scale farmers. In some of these so-called rice-fish systems rice and fish are grown in the same field, at the same time; in other systems they are grown in the same field, but in rotation. Rice-fish farmers pay most attention to the maximization of the rice yield. This is a logical choice because the rice field is not the most ideal environment for fish production as the rice crop shades the field floodwater, thus hampering aquatic primary production.

The paper documents how the implementation of the land tenure policy of the Vietnamese government has affected the agricultural system, livelihood strategies and food self-sufficiency of Thai farmers in a remote upland village, Que, in Nghe An Province, North Central Vietnam. It is shown that the enforcement of restrictions on the area under swidden agriculture has resulted in a strong reduction of swidden agriculture production and shortened fallow periods, not compensated for by the slow increase in paddy rice production.

De Nota Ruimte wijst de grondgebonden landbouw aan als drager van het cultuurlanschap in de Nationale Landschappen. Dit veronderstelt: 1. dat er voor landbouw toekomst is; 2. dat deze niet op gespannen voet staat met landschapskwaliteit. Of, en in welke mate deze veronderstelling opgaat, is het onderwerp van deze bijdrage vanuit WOT Natuur & Milieu. Conclusie van het betoog: per nationaal landschap is een gerichte aanpak nodig om de landbouw haar rol als drager van het cultuurlandschap te laten vervullenl

De presentatie van posters van WOT zijn ingedeeld naar de volgende onderdelen: 1. Bestuurlijke organisatie; 2. Implementatie van beleid; 3. Landschapskwaliteit; 4. Natuur, welzijn en draagvlak; 5. betekenis van de EHS; 6. Ontwikkeling in de landbouw; 7. Waterbeleid; 8. Internationale aspecten van natuurbeleid; 9. Kosten en baten van natuur; 10. Infrastructuur; 11. Milieu