The Office de la Haute Vallée du Fleuve Niger (OHVN) zone in southern Mali is a small but important agricultural production region. Against a background of environmental degradation including decades of declining rainfall, soil erosion, and human pressure on forest resources, numerous farming communities stand out through the use of improved soil and water management practices that have improved agricultural and environmental conditions. Field surveys conducted in 1998-2001 indicated that environmental and agricultural conditions have improved in the past decade.

The unequal distribution of agricultural land is often cited as a source of inefficiency in agriculture. Previous cross-country studies of agricultural productivity differences, though, have not considered land inequality. This article addresses this issue by using cross-country data on inequality in operational holdings of agricultural land from Deininger and Squire (1998) . In an estimation of an agricultural production function, the Gini coefficient for land holdings is found to have a significant negative relationship with productivity.

In many European mountain regions, natural forest regrowth on abandoned agricultural land and the related consequences for the environment are issues of increasing concern. We developed a spatial statistical model based on multiple geophysical and socio-economic variables to investigate the pattern of natural forest regrowth in the Swiss mountain area between the 1980s and 1990s. Results show that forest regrowth occurred primarily in areas with low temperature sum, intermediate steepness and soil stoniness as well as close to forest edges and relatively close to roads.

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.