By all accounts, Bank, Pakistan faces increased difficulties in expanding its agricultural sector. For its part, the government is gradually withdrawing from its historical policy of direct intervention and adopting a more market oriented strategy. In this strategy, the private sector will be expected to play the major role in providing capital to the agricultural sector, with government’s rema...

Central Bank of Swaziland [1] Used a more extensive range of 16 to 39 years old while [2] reduced the range to all people between 12 and 24 years. For the purpose of this study, the youth will be defined in terms of age, (15-35yrs). Youth act as catalysts in agricultural development for most developing nations. There is recognition that for Africa to achieve food security, the youth must be reg...

Rainfed agriculture is practised on 80% of the world’s agricultural area and generates 60–70% of the world’s staple food1 (FAOSTAT, 2005). In semi-arid and dry subhumid zones, rainfed agriculture dominates food production systems, and water is a key limiting factor to crop growth (SEI, 2005). Since approximately 70% of the world’s poor are women, the importance of rainfed sources of food weighs...

Ensuring the salvage of future sources is a challenge for plant geneticists and breeders, as well as historians and archivists. Here, this suggestion is illustrated with an account of the emergence, in the mid-20th century, of seed banks. These repositories are intended to enable the conservation of the world's crop genetic diversity against the 'genetic erosion' of crops, an unintended consequ...

Our ability to manage gene flow within traditional agroecosystems and their repercussions requires understanding the biology of crops, including farming practices' role in crop ecology. That these practices' effects on crop population genetics have not been quantified bespeaks lack of an appropriate analytical framework. We use a model that construes seed-management practices as part of a crop'...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Gene flow from crops to their wild relatives has the potential to alter population growth rates and demography of hybrid populations, especially when a new crop has been genetically modified (GM). This study introduces a comprehensive approach to assess this potential for altered population fitness, and uses a combination of demographic data in two habitat types and mathemat...

The World Bank, in collaboration with the e-Agriculture community and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), is holding a series of two week online forums. These e-forums stem from the launch of the World Bank’s ICT in Agriculture e-Sourcebook (2011) and the growing demand for knowledge on how to use ICT to improve agricultural productivity and raise smallholder inco...

Access to groundwater has been a key driver of agricultural productivity growth and rural poverty reduction in south Asia. Yet, markets for groundwater have not developed everywhere. We develop a contract-theoretical model of groundwater transactions under payoff uncertainty, which arises from unpredictable fluctuations in groundwater availability during the agricultural dry season. Our focus i...

Pedro Olinto and seminar participants at the World Bank, the University of Wisconsin and the 1998 American Agricultural Economics Association Annual Meetings for their comments. Any remaining errors and all views expressed in this paper remain the responsibility of the authors and should not be attributed to employing or funding institutions.