Economic Benefits of Farmland Preservation: Evidence from the United States
For the last 50 years, local, state and the federal governments have expressed concerns about farmland retention. Four benefits have been used to warrant farmland preservation programs: food security and local food supply, viable local agricultural economy, environmental and rural amenities, and sound fiscal policy and orderly development. We explore the available evidence of how well farmland preservation programs have provided these benefits.
Conceptualizing the human use of wild edible herbs for conservation in South African communal areas
Security of Widows’ Access to Land in the Era of HIV/AIDS: Panel Survey Evidence from Zambia
1. The percentage of households that are headed by widows in rural Zambia increased from 9.4 % to 12.3% between 2001 and 2004.2. Within 1 to 3 years after the death of their husbands, widow-headed households, on average, controlled 35 percent less land than what they had prior to their husband’s death.3. To some extent, older widows are protected against loss of land compared to younger widows.4. Women in relatively wealthy households are particularly vulnerable to losing land after the death of their husbands.5.
Security of Widows’ Access to Land in the Era of HIV/AIDS: Panel Survey Evidence from Zambia (revised version)
The view that widows and their dependents face greater livelihood risks in the era of HIV/AIDS is indeed supported by nationally-representative survey results from Zambia. Efforts to safeguard widows’ rights to land through land tenure innovations involving community authorities may be an important component of social protection, poverty alleviation, and HIV/AIDS mitigation strategies. Several of the findings reported show the influence of local traditional authorities in affecting the extent to which widows are able to retain land.
Testing Household-Specific Explanations for the Inverse Productivity Relationship
The inverse relationship between land productivity and farm size is an old and puzzling empirical regularity. Most explanations for this relationship rely on market imperfections that jointly determine the farm size and the household's shadow price of some productive inputs. We use plot-level data from the ICRISAT/VLS to assess whether these household-specific theories can explain the puzzle. The data exhibit plots of different sizes being simultaneously cropped by the same household.
From Agriculture to Nutrition
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.
Participatory Poverty Assessment II (2006)
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.
The effects of land tenure policy on rural livelihoods and food sufficiency in the upland village of Que, North Central Vietnam
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.