Books and Book Chapters

Données de population sur la République démocratique du Congo: Peut-on réduire les marges d'imprécision?

The role of foreign aid in the fast-growing Rwandan economy: Assessing growth alternatives

Factors influencing the effectiveness of productivity-enhancing interventions: an assessment of selected programs

The preceding chapter has shown that agricultural intensification paths differ markedly in different farming systems and are influenced significantly by population density; yield-enhancing technologies, such as fertilizer, may have been used more as instruments for expanding cultivated area, rather than for increasing yield; and further in-country analysis is needed to sharpen the policy implications of these findings. This chapter assesses selected productivity-enhancing interventions across Africa, with the aim of distilling lessons on key factors contributing to the effectiveness of such interventions. Intervention as used here stands for programs, projects, strategies, or other agricultural development initiatives, and effectiveness refers to the extent to which the objectives of the intervention were achieved, taking into account their relative importance (OECD 2010).

East African agriculture and climate change: A comprehensive analysis

The second of three books in IFPRI's climate change in Africa series, East African Agriculture and Climate Change: A Comprehensive Analysis examines the food security threats facing 10 of the countries that make up east and central Africa - Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Eritrea, Kenya, Madagascar, Rwanda, Sudan, Tanzania, and Uganda - and explores how climate change will increase the efforts needed to achieve sustainable food security throughout the region. East Africa's populations is expected to grow at least through mid-century. The region will also see income growth. Both will put increased pressure on the natural resources needed to produce food, and climate change makes the challenges greater. East Africa is already experiencing rising temperatures, shifting precipitation patterns, and increasing extreme events. Without attention to adaptation, the poor will suffer.Through the use of hundreds of scenario maps, models, figures, and detailed analysis, the editors and contributors of East African Agriculture and Climate Change present plausible future scenarios that combine economic and biophysical characteristics to explore the possible consequences for agriculture, food security, and resources management to 2050. They also offer recommendations to national governments and regional economic agencies already dealing with the vulnerabilities of climate change and deviations in environment. Decisionmakers and researchers will find East African Agriculture and Climate Change a vital tool for shaping policy and studying the various and likely consequences of climate change.

Rwanda [In East African agriculture and climate change: A comprehensive analysis]

Strategies and priorities for African agriculture: Economywide perspectives from country studies

This book examines the potential of agriculture to contribute to national growth and poverty reduction. It also evaluates the financial costs of accelerating agricultural growth. The analysis is based on ten country case studies that apply similar economywide approaches to linking growth, poverty, and investment. The findings indicate that, in most African countries, improving agriculture’s performance is essential to achieving pro-poor growth. They also point to export agriculture having high growth potential and becoming a prominent part of agricultural strategies. The research shows that broad-based growth will be difficult to achieve without expanding staple-foodcrop production and livestock production, since only they have the scale and linkages to poor households needed to reduce national poverty within a reasonable period of time. Finally, the case studies confirm the need for greater investment in agriculture. However, the efficiency of agricultural investments will have to improve if development targets are to remain attainable.

Rwanda

Despite a remarkable transition to peace and development over the past 10 years, Rwanda is still marked by the consequences of the 1994 genocide. Gross domestic product (GDP) growth averaged 7.3 percent per year between 1995 and 2006, and public investment has picked up and reached 9.4 percent of GDP in 2007. With security and political stability restored and the business environment improved, private investment has risen from 6 percent in 2001 to an estimated 9 percent of GDP in recent years (Rwanda, MINECOFIN 2008). Progress has also been made in improving education and health indicators. For examples, the number of primary school students rebounded to pre-genocide long-term levels only five years after the conflict. Today Rwanda’s gross primary school enrollment ratio is higher than in most other Sub-Saharan countries with similar income levels, and the number of students in secondary school has almost tripled since 1996 (Lopez and Wodon 2005). Moreover, in terms of health indicators, World Bank (2008a) estimates that, while infant mortality increased from 85 to 137 per thousand between 1988–92 and 1992–94, it has since receded to 97.5 per thousand in 2006.

Agricultural growth and investment options for poverty reduction in Rwanda

HIV/AIDS, Nutrition, and Food Security: Looking to Future Challenges

Rollout of antiretroviral (ARV) therapy under the aegis of the WHO’s “3 by 5” initiative, with funding from numerous donors via the Global Fund for TB, HIV/ AIDS, and malaria, the U.S. PEPFAR and U.K. DFID, gives cause for hope for all those millions of people in Africa who are living with HIV/AIDS. Midway through 2005 nobody seriously believed that the target of 3 million people on treatment by year end would be achieved. However, it was a necessary goal at that stage. But for those concerned with meeting the challenge of HIV/AIDS impacts, increased antiretroviral therapy (ART) availability has to be seen for what it is: an opportunity to take a breath in the struggle against the impact of AIDS and think, and think hard, about what we do next.

AIDS and Watersheds: Understanding and Assessing Biostructural Interventions

Over the past 15 years, evidence has accumulated of how HIV/AIDS impacts rural people who depend for their food and livelihood on agriculture and the management of natural resources. Evidence is also available, though less extensive, of how changes in the rural environment influence the dynamics of HIV/AIDS. It is striking, however, how little this understanding has yet to contribute to the methods used in the struggle with HIV/AIDS. The “expanded response” that UNAIDS is spearheading to meet the targets set by the UN General Assembly Session on HIV/AIDS in 2001 includes no reference to agricultural or natural resource–based measures for prevention, treatment, and care (Stover et al. 2002). This is hardly surprising because there is as yet little documented evidence of their effectiveness in HIV/AIDS control terms or feasibility on a wide scale. Much less is it clear how such efforts might be financed. Across the sectoral divide, agricultural and natural resource management policies and programs are aimed at enhancing food security, improving nutrition, and expanding livelihood opportunities. However, the decisionmakers responsible for the most part have a very limited understanding of how these may be affecting HIV/AIDS risks, positively or negatively, and how these inadvertent effects can be optimized. Few have a clear understanding of how HIV/ AIDS is affecting or will in the future affect attainment of the objectives they now pursue and what adjustments will be necessary to keep these in sight.

Measuring the Impact of Targeted Food Assistance on HIV/AIDS-Related Beneficiary Groups: Monitoring and Evaluation Indicators

In October 2005, the Consortium for the Southern Africa Food Security Emergency (C-SAFE) transitioned to its final year of a regional “developmental relief ” program. Yet, members continued to collaborate on this specific learning activity given their common objectives of improving monitoring and evaluation (M&E) for HIV/AIDS-related beneficiary groups. C-SAFE’s strategic objectives included (1) improving and maintaining nutritional status, (2) protecting productive assets, and (3) improving community resilience to food security shocks.

Stigma When There Is No Other Option: Understanding How Poverty Fuels Discrimination toward People Living with HIV in Zambia

Based on qualitative fieldwork in urban and rural Zambia (see Bond et al. 2003), this chapter aims to demonstrate that HIV-related stigma and discrimination are fueled by the practicalities of limited resources and narrow options and, in this wider context of poverty and household fatigue, that the poor, women, orphans, and rural dwellers are particularly vulnerable to HIV-related stigma and discrimination. It is apparent that a significant proportion of discriminatory actions are caused by the fact that HIV and AIDS can be so very hard to manage in the context of poverty. Significant differences between the urban and rural sites that emerged in our material, with overall less stigma manifested in the urban site and more pronounced stigma in the rural site, suggest that it is possible to alleviate household stress and reduce this type of stigma and discrimination by providing services and support.

Multisectoral HIV/AIDS Approaches in Africa: How Are They Evolving?

The response to HIV/AIDS in Africa has evolved considerably since the first cases were reported on the continent in the early 1980s. After the initial medical and public health responses through the mid-1990s, there was an enormous expansion in the scope of the strategic approaches and level of political and financial commitment to fight the disease. In the absence of a vaccine or cure, the global response expanded far beyond the traditional confines of the health sector. Perceiving strong links between AIDS and the greater development processes, national and international organs reached out to a wide array of stakeholders to implement a broad multisectoral agenda. This expansion in vision was accompanied by a corresponding development of institutional structures and coordination mechanisms. Efforts to extend, harmonize, and improve the management of the multisectoral response are very much continuing today.

Understanding Rwandan Agricultural Households' Strategies to Deal with Prime-Age Illness and Death: A Propensity Score Matching Approach

The increasing prevalence of HIV in Rwanda, along with the likelihood of continued effects of the genocide of 1994, suggests that many rural households may be facing extreme stress, and their agricultural production may be changing. Policymakers and development practitioners seek to understand how Rwandan households are affected and how they are reacting to the stress so that development policies can best support improvements in rural livelihoods under this changing environment. If production systems are shifting to less nutritious crop mixtures or ones that increase the potential for soil erosion on the hillsides, measures may be needed to counterbalance the negative effects.

HIV/AIDS and the Agricultural Sector in Eastern and Southern Africa: Anticipating the Consequences

This chapter is intended to respond to the need to better understand the implications of the AIDS pandemic for the agricultural sectors in the hardest-hit countries of eastern and southern Africa. The six countries of the world with estimated HIV prevalence rates exceeding 20 percent1 are all in southern Africa: Botswana, Lesotho, Namibia, South Africa, Swaziland, and Zimbabwe (UN Census Bureau 2003). Five other countries, all in southern and eastern Africa (Cameroon, Central African Republic, Malawi, Zambia, and Mozambique), have HIV prevalence rates between 10 and 20 percent. For shorthand, we hereafter refer to these countries as the “hardest hit” countries.

The Ecology of Poverty: Nutrition, Parasites, and Vulnerability to HIV/AIDS

HIV/AIDS continues to spread throughout the developing world, in transition countries, and among poor and marginalized populations in industrialized countries. In its third decade, and even with increased resources, global AIDS policy is still failing to stem the epidemic. HIV prevention fails because it ignores the fundamental causes of the epidemic, it is unscientific, and it attempts to intervene at the last minute with programs limited to behavior change.

AIDS, Poverty, and Hunger: An Overview

The AIDS epidemic is a global crisis with impacts that will be felt for decades to come. More than 28 million people have died since the first case was reported in 1981. In 2005, AIDS killed 2.8 million people, and an estimated 4.1 million became infected, bringing to 38.6 million the number of people living with the virus around the world; 24.5 million of these people live in Sub-Saharan Africa (where in some countries one in three adults are infected) and 8.3 million live in Asia (UNAIDS 2006).

Scaling up Multisectoral Approaches to Combating HIV and AIDS

The AIDS pandemic is a global crisis with impacts that will be felt for decades to come, demanding massive responses at many levels. Such responses need to continue to be grounded in the three core pillars of prevention, care and treatment, and mitigation. But these responses need to be much larger in scale, far more broadly based, and better connected so as to better match the scale, breadth, and interconnectedness of the pandemic’s causes and impacts.

AIDS, poverty, and hunger: Challenges and responses

More than a quarter-century after HIV was identified, the long-wave, intergenerational nature of AIDS epidemics is becoming starkly evident. We may have passed the peak of the infection wave in many countries, but the multiple impact waves continue to gather momentum. Advances are indeed being made in prevention, treatment, care, and support. Yet, in 2006 in many of the hardest-hit countries, fewer than one in eight people living with HIV have sustained access to lifesaving drugs. At the same time, we are learning more about the intertwining of HIV and AIDS with poverty, nutrition, and agriculture. It is now clear that, if the Millennium Development Goals on hunger and AIDS are to be met, especially in eastern and southern Africa, we need to continue to research these dynamics and proactively address them through better, AIDS-responsive food policy and programming. Against this backdrop, the International Food Policy Research Institute convened the International Conference on HIV/AIDS and Food and Nutrition Security: From Evidence to Action in Durban, South Africa, April 14-16, 2005. ... As highlights from the conference, the chapters in this book amply illustrate the diversity of activity and the imperative for interdisciplinary work in this new field. Economists, nutritionists, anthropologists, health specialists, and other development professionals have approached the issue from different angles, often using innovative methods, to generate important new findings.

Conclusions for agricultural commercialization policy

Agricultural commercialization, economic development, and nutrition are linked with one another. Policies influence the strength and direction of these linkages and welfare outcomes. Ignoring the linkages may be to the disadvantage of the nutritional welfare of the poor; opportunities to improve the well-being of the poor may be lost. In this concluding chapter, we attempt to draw some generalized lessons from the receding chapters.

Agricultural processing enterprises: Development potentials and links to the smallholder

In countries where farming and fishing are major productive activities, processing enterprises can have a strategic developmental role. Infrastructural, institutional, and contractural issues arise around them. Whereas consumption and nutrition effects of agricultural commercialiazation linked to specific processing enterprises are traced in some of the detailed studies in Part V (for example, export vegetables, chapter 12; spices plantation, chapter 14; dairy, chapter 15; sugarcane factories, chapter 13 and 16), this chapter gives an overview of the broader experiences, potentials and problems of agricultural processing enterprises.

Contract farming and commercialization of agriculture in developing countries

The distributional benefits of commercialization of agriculture, access to commercialization opportunities, and sharing of commercialization risks are functions of institutional arrangements. Obviously, the indirect food security and nutritional effects are, thereby, partly a function of such institutional arrangements. This chapter explores the relevance to food security of one form of contractual relationship in agriculture: formal contracts between producers and buyers (generally processors or exporters), a production and marketing system known as contract farming. The chapter does not refer to the extensive literature on informal contractual relations, such as sharecropping, or on traditional systems of contract farming, such as the extensive "strange farmer" system in West Africa's groundnut sector. The chapter draws generalizations and conclusion from studies done by the author and by other researchers. The latter include two research networks initiated by the author. One network surveyed the experience with contract farming in several East and Southern African countries (Eastern Africa Economic Review 1989); the second examined the experience in Thailand, Malaysia, and the Philippines (Glover and Lim, forthcoming).

Agricultural commercialization, economic development, and nutrition

Why should there be a book about the commercialization of subsistence agriculture, economic development, and nutrition? There are two compelling reasons. First, concerns and suspicions about adverse effects on the poor of commercialization of subsistence agriculture persist and influence policy of developing countries and of donor agencies. Second, in rural areas of low-income countries, nutritional welfare is determined by many complex factors whose relationships to agricultural commercialization and economic development need to be traced in order to design optimal rural growth policies that benefit the poor. In view of the challenges of rapid urbanization and the chances of commercialization, the question is not if subsistence agriculture should be overcome, but how. Thus, the purpose of this book is to clarify concepts, add comprehensive factual information, and assist policy and program analysts in identifying potentials and risks of promoting commercialization of agriculture for poverty alleviation.

Consumption effects of commercialization of agriculture

The commercialization of agricultur has, in many diverse circumstances, led both to an increase in household income and to changes in the way household resources are organized to earn that income, Have these changes meant that food intakes are more nutritions and that health and sanitation conditions are improved? This chapter addresses three central questions: (1) to what extent are increments in income spent on nonfood items, in particular, health-related items; (2) to what extent are increments in income spent on food, and (controlling income) dows the switch to commercial production alter the marginal propensities to spend on food; and (3) to what extent do increments in food expenditures lead to greater calorie intakes, both at the household level and at the individual preschooler level?

The triple role of potatoes as a source of cash, food, and employment: Effects on nutritional improvement in Rwanda

Potatoes, of all food crops, had the fastest average annual growth rate of production in Rwanda between 1970 and 1985: 6.8 percent. This increase in potato production was mainly brought about by a rapid expansion of the cultivated and harvested acreage, which grew by 6.7 percent per year during the same period, whereas average yields only slightly increased by 0.1 percent per year. In 1983, potato production covered an estimated 3.3 percent of the total harvest food crop acreage, and contributed to 3.1 percent of total calorie production (Delepierre 1985).

Health and nutrition effects of commercialization of agriculture

One of the most contentious issues in the cash crop/food crop debate revolves around the impact of commercialization of agriculture on the health and nutritional status of women and children/ This chaper examines the effects of commercialization of agriculture on preschoolers' health nad nutritional status. The chapter also assesses the effects on women along the lines of the conceptual ramework described in chapter 2.

Conceptual framework

In this chapter, the basic theoretical relationships and definitional issues related to the commercialization of agriculture and described. Simply speaking, cash crops can be defined as crops for sale. The listing of typical agricultural processing enterprises in chapter 9 gives a rough overview of cash crops (also, see von Braun and Kennedy 1986). Yet, commercialization of agriculture as a process and a characteristic of agricultural change is more than whether or not a cash crop is present to a certain extent in a production system. Commercialization of subsistence agriculture and take many different forms.

Commercialization of agriculture and food security: Development strategy and trade policy issues

The choice between subsistence food crops, on the one hand, and cash crops, especially nonfood cash crops predominantly meant for exports, on the other hand, is a subject of considerable debate among policy makers as well as development specialists. The debate raises issues not only at the level of farming households but also at the level of national and international policies, including macroeconomic policies such as trade and exchange rate policies. This chapter reviews and focuses on those aspects of principal relevance in the context of an overall agrcultural development strategy and food security.

Production, employment, and income effects of commercialization of agriculture

The three chapters in Part III report synthesis is findings from the microlevel IFPRI research in The Gambia, Guatemala, Kenya, the Philippines, and Rwanda, as well as from the other case studies presented in Part V. Any attempt to synthesize and generalize on the basis of the detailed case studies runs the risk of excessively extrapolating from special circumstances and of losing insights gained from these case studies, whose strengths are the detailed assessments of the commercialization-production-income-consumption-nutrition chain and the important feedbacks from these elements. This chapter, on the first elements of the commercialization chain, is therefore to be seen in the context of the following two chapters, and all the three synthesis chapters together are to be seen in the context of the rich insights from the individual studies discussed later.

Introduction and overview [in Agricultural commercialization, economic development, and nutrition]

Why should there be a book about the commercialization of subsistence agriculture, economic development, and nutrition? There are two compelling resasons. First, concerns and suspicions about adverse effects on the poor of commercialization of subsistence agriculture persist and influence policy of developing countries and of donor agencies. Second, in rural areas of low-income countries, nutritional welfare is determined by many complex factors whose relationships to agricultural commercialization and economic development need to be traced in order to design optimal rural growth policies that benefit the poor.

Commercialization of agriculture under conditions of population pressure: A study in Rwanda on production, consumption, and nutritional effects, and their policy implications