"Using survey data from the Upper East region of Ghana collected in 2005, the paper evaluates the household- and community-level factors influencing women’s and men’s decisions to participate in off-farm activities, either in the off-farm labor market or in local community groups, and the relationship with on-farm crop returns. Results indicate that crop returns are not affected by increased labor availability over a certain labor-land ratio.

Despite the importance of tropical moist forests for conserving biodiversity and storing carbon, forests continue to fall, because the private benefits of clearing land for agriculture far outweigh tangible economic gains from retaining forests. This report measures the financial disparity between forested and cleared land for small-scale farmers in two settlements in the western Brazilian Amazon where pastures are expanding and forests receding.

This paper analyzes how women’s participation affects institutional outcomes related to the decentralized governance of community forests in Madhya Pradesh, India. The analysis is based on data from a representative sample of 641 cases of joint forest management, India’s flagship program to involve communities in forest governance. We focus on two outcomes relevant for local livelihoods: control of illicit grazing and control of illicit felling in the forest.

Increasing agricultural productivity is an important challenge in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Since the 1960s, agricultural production in SSA has failed to keep up with population growth.

The government of Uganda, with help from its development partners, is designing and implementing policies and strategies to address poverty, land degradation, and declining agricultural productivity. Land degradation, especially soil erosion and depletion of soil nutrients, is widespread in Uganda and contributes to declining productivity, which in turn increases poverty.

An international conference was held in Amman, Jordan in September 1997 to examine mounting problems of poverty and environmental degradation in the low rainfall areas (LRAs) of the eight Mashreq and Maghreb countries of West Asia and North Africa (Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria from the Mashreq region, and Algeria, Libya, Morocco and Tunisia from the Maghreb), and to seek solutions which reconcile economic growth with equity and environmental conservation -- the 3 E's of sustainable development.

In Uganda, agricultural extension has been hotly debated since the implementation of the National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS) program in 2001. Conceived as a demand-driven approach and largely publicly funded with services provided by the private sector, the NAADS program targets the development and use of farmer institutions. It is a key strategy in the government’s poverty-reduction and national development plan.

Since 2003, economic growth in Nigeria has been strong. Annual GDP grew by 9.1 percent per annum between 2003 and 2005 and by 6 .1 percent per annum between 2006 and 2008. Much of this growth can be attributed to the non-oil economy which has grown rapidly. This is due primarily to agriculture, which contributes approximately 35 percent to total GDP and supports 70 percent of the population. Agricultural research has been shown to be crucial in increasing agricultural productivity and reducing poverty. A study by Alene et al.

Agricultural advisory services play an important role in supporting the use of the agricultural sector as an engine of pro-poor growth and enabling small farmers to meet new challenges, such as accessing export markets, adopting environmentally sustainable production techniques, and coping with HIV/AIDS and other health challenges that affect agriculture...There is now renewed interest in agricultural advisory services in many countries.... The questions under debate include: What should be the roles of the public sector, private sector, and civil society?

"Land is still among the most important assets of the rural population in the developing world. Land resources are governed by a variety of tenure systems based on statutory, customary, or religious law. At the same time, many national, subnational, and local institutions administer the application and enforcement of these laws, relying on a wide variety of policies, rules, and regulations that promote different practices for using and managing land and land-based resources.