The family farm in a globalizing world: the role of crop science in alleviating poverty

"The topic of family farms has been gaining prominence in the academic, policy, and donor communities in recent years. Small farms dominate the agricultural landscape in the developing world, providing the largest source of employment and income to the rural poor, yet smallholders remain highly susceptible to poverty and hunger. With the advance of globalization and greater integration of agricultural markets, the need for increases in agricultural productivity for family farms is particularly pressing. Raising productivity and output of small farmers would not only increase their incomes and food security, but also stimulate the rest of the economy and contribute to broad-based food security and poverty alleviation. In this paper, Michael Lipton builds an argument for greater focus on pro-smallholder crop science as a key solution to generate increases in productivity and income. Increasing the levels of investment into agricultural technology, improving water and land use and distribution, and creating positive incentives for developing-country farmers come to the forefront of the paper as critical steps that must be taken to ensure massive reduction in global poverty. Favorable demographic trends over the next few decades provide a window of opportunity for reforms and action that must not be squandered." From Foreword by Joachim von BraunGlobalization, Poverty alleviation Developing countries, Rural poor, Agricultural productivity, Agricultural technology, Small farmers, Crop science,

Can Small Farmers Survive, Prosper, or be the Key Channel to Cut Mass Poverty?

The paper reviews the role of small farms in development and poverty reduction in countries (or regions within a country) with persistent mass poverty. It discusses the arguments supporting the importance of agricultural development for poverty and argues that initial success in reduction of mass poverty requires prior agricultural developments. It explores in particular the role of smallscale farming and policy requirements to ensure the competitive advantage of small farms.Poverty, agriculture, agricultural development, small-scale farming, Farm Management, Food Security and Poverty,

How Third World rural households adapt to dietary energy stress

People can adjust to environmental changes by calling on a wide range of physical attributes, capabilities, and behaviors. For survival, probably the most important are those that make it possible to prevent serious imbalances between food energy needs and the amount of food that can be acquired at acceptable cost. Those who formulate food and agricultural policies need to know the scope, costs, and benefits of the more common adaptive strategies used by poor people, who are normally at greatest risk of energy stress. In particular, policymakers and analysts need to assess the scope and limits of adjustments by individuals or groups. When might adjustments fail to be biologically adaptive, that is, to reduce the risk that adverse effects of undernourishment will prevent individuals from contributing to the genetic inheritance of future generations? Even if adjustments are biologically adaptive, when are they likely to involve unacceptable suffering, damage to health, or social incapacity? In How Third World Households Adapt to Dietary Energy Stress: The Evidence and the Issues, IFPRI Food Policy Review 2, Philip Payne and Michael Lipton draw upon relevant literature from a range of subjects spanning the biological, behavioral, and social sciences and set out a conceptual framework to identify the current state of knowledge and the gaps in it.Malnutrition Developing countries. ,Adaptation (Physiology) Developing countries. ,

Reducing Inequality And Poverty During Liberalisation In China: Rural And Agricultural Experiences And Policy Options

While liberalisation is designed to help growth and alleviate poverty by removing impediments that stop people and regions from specialising and trading, the process known as Core liberalisation (CL) has three components: it frees markets in goods and services, land, capital, and labour; phases out non-market influences on prices; and clarifies property rights. In the case of China, CL accompanied rapid, robust economic growth and reduction in poverty. However, from the mid-1980s, inequality – among regions, between city and village, and within rural communities – soared, leaving stubborn poverty increasingly concentrated in ‘rural poverty islands’ (RPIs). By 2001, almost 40 per cent of China’s poor – but only about a fifth of the population – lived in these RPIs. This paper analyses evidence of liberalisation in China, factors limiting the gains from CL for poor people and regions, and provides policy recommendations.Inequality, Poverty, Trade Liberalisation, Rural, Agriculture, China.

Poverty and policy

In this analysis of public policy to reduce poverty, the authors point out, among other things, that typically the highest incidence and severity of poverty are still found in rural areas, especially if ill-watered. For many of the rural poor, the only immediate route out of poverty is by migration to towns, to face a higher expected income, although often a more uncertain one. This may or may not reduce aggregate poverty. We can be more confident that growth in agricultural output -- fueled by investment in human and physical infrastructure -- is pro-poor, though not because the poor own much land. The policies pursued by most developing countries up to the mid-1980s -- and by many still -- have been biased against the rural sector in various ways. The same is true -- although different policies are involved -- of the other major sectoral concentration of poor, namely, the urban informal sector. There are clear prospects for reducing poverty by removing these biases. Looking ahead (far ahead, in some cases), it is less clear how much further gain to the poor can be expected from introducing a bias in the opposite direction. Neutrality should be the aim. We need good data and measurement to identify which public actions are effective in fighting poverty. There have been a number of advances in household data and analytic capabilities for poverty analysis over the last ten years. We are in a better position than ever to devise well-informed policies. The authors identify two important roles for public action. One is to foster the conditions for pro-poor growth, particularly by providing wide access to the necessary physical and human assets, including public infrastructure. The other is to help those who cannot participate fully in the benefits of such growth, or who do so with continued exposure to unacceptable risks. Here there is an important role for aiming interventions by various means to improve the distribution of the benefits of public spending on social services and safety nets in developing countries. Those means range from the selection of key categories of public spending (such as primary education and basic health care) to more finely targeted transfers (including nutrition and health interventions) based on poverty indicators, or some self-targeting mechanism. Though disappointing outcomes abound, many countries have demonstrated what is possible with timely and well-conceived interventions.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Economics&Finance,Poverty Assessment,Achieving Shared Growth

Uncertain Loading and Quantifying Maximum Energy Concentration within Composite Structures

We introduce a systematic method for identifying the worst case load among all boundary loads of fixed energy. Here the worst case load is defined to be the one that delivers the largest fraction of input energy to a prescribed subdomain of interest. The worst case load is identified with the first eigenfunction of a suitably defined eigenvalue problem. The first eigenvalue for this problem is the maximum fraction of boundary energy that can be delivered to the subdomain. We compute worst case boundary loads and associated energy contained inside a prescribed subdomain through the numerical solution of the eigenvalue problem. We apply this computational method to bound the worst case load associated with an ensemble of random boundary loads given by a second order random process. Several examples are carried out on heterogeneous structures to illustrate the method

Reviving Global Poverty Reduction: What Role for Genetically Modified Plants?

Sir John Crawford Memorial Lecture delivered by Michael Lipton of the Poverty Research Unit at the University of Sussex during CGIAR International Centers Week 1999. Lipton described the slow-down in progress against poverty in the developing world since the mid 1980s, and the changing agricultural research climate in which the private sector was preeminent and the most promising new technologies for raising yield potentials were the intellectual property of private firms. Reviewing the factors leading to the dramatic progress in poverty reduction from 1965 to 1985, Lipton discussed the central role of higher yields of food staples, which increased in ways that both increased the poor's access to those staples and created more workplaces for the poor. At the same time, a fertility transition was underway in East and Southeast Asia, and had created a 'demographic window of opportunity' during which a very high proportion of the population was of working age. Capitalizing on the fertility transition now becoming evident in parts of South Asia and Sub Saharan Africa would require increased yield potentials. Improving the presently sterile public policy dialogue about how to use privately owned genetic science technologies for this purpose was by Lipton's account an imperative of international agricultural research