People in developing countries—particularly the agricultural poor—face a host of risks to their lives and livelihoods, including those stemming from globalization, climate change, and weather shocks. These experiences highlight the importance of social protection, which can have a potentially significant impact on reducing poverty and vulnerability when implemented with the optimal design, targets, and resources.

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.

Effective poverty reduction programs require careful measurement of poverty status. Several studies have shown conceptually that assets reflecting productive capacity form a more robust basis for identifying the poor than do flow variables such as expenditures or income. Nonetheless, little work has empirically compared poverty measurements based on assets and expenditures. This paper uses panel data from Ethiopia to generate an asset-based poverty classification scheme. Regression results are used to estimate an asset index and classify households into categories of structural poverty.

This study was conducted with the main objective of determining the linkages between poverty and land management practices in Uganda. The study used the 2002/03 Uganda National Household Survey (UNHS) and more focused data collected from a sub-sample of 851 households of the 2002/03 UNHS sample households. We found that farmers in Uganda deplete about 1.2 percent of the nutrient stock stored in the topsoil per year, which leads to a predicted 0.31 percent reduction in crop productivity.

ecent food-price and economic shocks have further jeopardized the food security of developing countries and poor people, pushing the estimated number of undernourished people over one billion. Known and unknown food-security risks appear to be on the rise. Increasing uncertainties raise critical questions about how to quickly, viably, and sustainably manage familiar risks and emerging new ones.

This report presents results of the 2012 Annual Trends and Outlook for Malawi (ATOR). This is the first ATOR for Malawi. The study was carried out as part of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Monitoring and Evaluation for the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP) Survey. The study mainly adopted a quantitative approach. A standard structured questionnaire 1 was used to collect data on several indicators around the six broad areas.

Poverty in rural India has declined substantially in recent decades. This steady decline in poverty was strongly associated with agricultural growth, particularly the green revolution, which in turn was a response to massive public investments in agriculture and rural infrastructure. Public investment in rural areas has also benefitted the poor through its impact on the growth of the rural non-farm economy, and government expenditure on rural poverty and employment programs,which has grown rapidly, has directly benefitted the rural poor.

Public investment, together with institutional and policy reforms, has contributed substantially to rapid economic growth in rural China since the late 1970s. This rapid growth has also led to dramatic reductions in rural poverty. In this study we use a simultaneous equations model and time-series (1978-97), cross-sectional (25 provinces) data to analyze the differential impact of different types of public investments on growth and poverty reduction in rural China.

"Like many developing countries, China and India followed development strategies biased in favor of the urban sector over the last several decades. These development schemes have led to overall efficiency losses due to misallocation of resources among rural and urban sectors. It also led to large income gaps between rural and urban areas. The urban bias was greater in China than in India. Indeed, official data show that both the income gap and the difference in poverty rates between rural and urban areas are much larger in China than in India.

Biofuel demand is increasing because of a combination of growing energy needs; rising oil costs; the pursuit of clean, renewable sources of energy; and the desire to boost farm incomes in developed countries. In turn, the need for crops-such as maize and sugarcane-to be used as feedstocks for biofuels has increased dramatically. That demand has had a significant and increasing impact on global food systems. The effects of growing biofuel demand are interwoven with tightening grain markets, which reflect demographic shifts and improved diets.