OBJECTIVES This study was designed to explore the interactions between food securing activities, health and gender equity from the perspective of rural east African women. The specific objectives were to document the critical interaction among these three issues-food security, gender inequity, women's health within the context of sub-Saharan Africa; to describe the nature of this triad from the...

Prevailing poverty and culminating social crises in Egypt are the final products of development failure in the last 50 years, first in the context of state control and then the restructuring of uncontrolled capitalism. This bad mixture has ended up with less accumulation of all forms of capital assets and an uneven access to those assets, which resulted in deprivation of the absolute majority a...

Access to agricultural markets and marketing information are essential factors in promoting competitive markets and improving agricultural sector development. The agricultural sector employs majorities in developing countries and it contributes greatly to the development of these countries. Unluckily, majorities of the farmers are smallholders living in isolated rural areas and thus lack approp...

This paper investigates the impacts of cotton marketing reforms on farm productivity, a key element for poverty alleviation, in rural Zambia. The reforms comprised the elimination of the Zambian cotton marketing board that was in place since 1977. Following liberalization, the sector adopted an outgrower scheme, whereby firms provided extension services to farmers and sold inputs on loans that ...

This paper covers nonmarket services provided by farmers for recreational purposes in several Central European regions. A regionally specified general equilibrium model is used to derive the efficiency conditions for a competitive equilibrium to guarantee a Pareto optimal outcome. Moreover, we present green agricultural compensation programmes in Europe and their assessment from an economic per...

Farmers living in rural villages of Sri Lanka do not have proper access to information to make informed decisions about their livelihoods and as a result they face constant hardships in their lives. They use mobile phones to communicate but these are not currently connected to the Internet. We are investigating how to provide personalized information to farmers with the aim of empowering them t...

The Indo-UK Advanced Technology Centre of Excellence in Next Generation Networks, Systems and Services (IUATC) is trying to address the future challenges identified by the UK Government under the Digital Economy Theme and the Department of Science and Technology in India. One such area in rural India where Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) networks can have a major impact is Agri...

Sustainable development is of great significance in rural areas of China, which are under coupled pressures of poverty reduction, environmental protection and economic development. In these areas, agriculture is the primary sector in supporting their economies, where a number of the relevant production and processing practices cause many adverse impacts on environment and ecosystem. This poses ...

There has been very commonly an absence of correspondence between modern systems of soil taxonomic classification and the agronomical qualities of the soils. For this reason, this study has resorted to tapping the knowledge of the farmers that know best these agronomical properties in a practical sense, in order to obtain an agronomical classification of the soils. This rural classification has...

To determine migration-related differences in serum lipid levels and to estimate the contribution of environmental factors to these differences, the authors conducted a cross-sectional study among 1,222 residents of southwestern China in 1988 and 1989: 521 Yi farmers living in a remote rural area, 340 Yi migrants to an urban setting, and 361 Han people living in the same urban setting. Serum to...