Agriculture and natural resource management are crucial for pro-poor growth; empowerment is key to the success and sustainability of development initiatives in these areas. Donors can support empowerment processes in rural areas where poor people face pressing challenges to their livelihoods by supporting their rights and access to natural resources; through participatory and accountable knowle...

The great majority of the population in the countries most affected by HIV/AIDS live in rural areas. In many African countries, farming and other rural occupations provide a livelihood for more than 70 per cent of the population. Hence, it is to be expected that the HIV/AIDS epidemic will cause serious damage to the agriculture sector in those countries, especially in countries that rely heavil...

This paper challenges the idea that farmers revert to subsistence farming when confronted with violence from civil war. Macro-economic evidence on economic legacies of civil war suggests that civil wars, while obviously disastrous in the short run, do not need to have persistent effects on long term economic outcomes. New micro-level studies are ambiguous about the impact of civil war for welfa...

a Institute of Soil and Fertilizer and Ministry of Agriculture Key Laboratory of Plant Nutrition and Nutrient Cycling, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing 100081, China; b Institute of Plant Nutrition (330), University of Hohenheim, D-70593, Stuttgart, Germany; and c Department of Plant Nutrition, College of Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences, Nanjing Agricultural Univer...