Land & Food Security

The workshop participants were clear that now is the time for choices, and that without the will to make those choices, the likelihood of success in boosting agricultural growth on a sustained basis would be small. Without such growth, it will not be possible to improve food security or halt natural resource degradation.

The goal of the workshop was to identify strategic investments and policy actions that African Governments, firms, and organizations can undertake, with the support of their development partners, to foster agricultural and economic transformation in Africa. The workshop focused on forces that will influence the evolution of African economies well into the 21st Century.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.