Replaced with revised version of paper 08/04/09.

More than one third of the population in Africa is still facing undernourishment and malnutrition. While poor and food-insecure people are most often living in unfavourable agricultural zones, such as semi-arid areas, only few studies have assessed the potential of well adapted dryland cereals...

The potential contributions of new biotechnologies to sustainable food and income security have been the subject of widespread discussions around the turn of the twenty-first century. But distributional issues of which segments of GMO adopters benefit the most have not been given ample...

This paper deals with the social implications of ethanol expansion in Brazil. The evolution of the labor market in sugar cane production in the country is analyzed together with its regional patterns of expansion, to illustrate how the changes in the recent expansion are modifying the...

The level of food security in South Africa is largely being influenced by income inequalities and food prices with a large part of the population that has access to food but do not have the financial means to obtain it. Despite ever increasing food inflation, South Africa is still adopting...

Rising agricultural productivity in developing countries is crucial to ease the tension of increased population and haunting concern on food security. Nevertheless the soaring price of fertilizer and sluggish dissemination of improved seed varieties prohibit the poor to tap benefits from...

As one of the measures to smooth income, this paper focuses on the diversification of labor allocation across activities. A key feature of this paper is that it pays particular attention to differences in the covariance between weather risk and agricultural wages and between weather risk and...

Vulnerability to poverty is a major problem in the rural areas of Sub Saharan Africa. Rural Households are confronted with various covariate and idiosyncratic shocks and are often severely constrained in coping with such events. They frequently resort to food from natural resources such as...