Brief

Ce document vise à contribuer au programme d’action en cours pour le développement de l’Afrique au sud du Sahara.

"Rising world prices for fuel and food represent a negative terms-of-trade shock for Mozambique. The impacts of these price increases are analyzed using various approaches. Detailed price data show that the world price increases are being transmitted to domestic prices. Short-run net benefit ratio analysis indicates that urban households and households in the southern region of the country are more vulnerable to food price increases.

"Recent trends in agricultural growth and food security in Eastern and Central Africa (ECA) have been discouraging. With very low labor productivity, yields, and growth rates, agriculture is unable to keep up with population growth or achieve the type of pro-poor growth needed to reduce poverty dramatically.Yet agriculture accounts for about half of the region’s gross domestic product (GDP) and is the main source of livelihood for the majority of the population. Behind this gloomy picture, however, lies agriculture’s potential to be the engine for growth in ECA.

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The authors take a fresh look at the role of rural financial policy in improving household food security and alleviating poverty. They develop a conceptual framework for relating access to financial services to food security and review empirical findings on household demand for financial services. They explore the potentials for linking informal lenders (relatives, credit groups, and moneylenders) with the formal financial systems (banks and cooperatives).

As the population continues to grow and natural resources become scarcer, the need to shift toward an environmen­tally responsible, socially accountable, more equitable, and “greener” economy has become increasingly apparent. Despite differing perspectives and definitions among stakeholders, the “green economy” is often seen as an economy that pursues growth while also promoting sustainable development through more efficient use of resources.

The world’s farmers will likely need to produce enough food to feed 8 billion people by 2025, and to do so they must have enough water to raise their crops. Yet farmers are already competing with industry, domestic water users, and the environment for access to the world’s finite supply of water. Will available freshwater meet the rapidly growing demands for household, industrial, and environmental needs and still provide enough water to produce food for a burgeoning population?

A farmer-managed, agroenvironmental transformation has occurred over the past three decades in the West African Sahel, enabling both land rehabilitation and agricultural intensification to support a dense and growing population. This paper traces the technical and institutional innovations, their impacts, and lessons learned from two successful examples. The first is the story of the improvement and replication of indigenous soil and water conservation practices across the Central Plateau of Burkina Faso.

Assessing the world’s progress against poverty calls for frequent and careful measurements, using household surveys and price data. Fortunately, the task of measuring poverty is becoming easier, and the results are probably getting more accurate over time. The best data for assessing progress against poverty come from surveys of the living standards of nationally representative samples of households.