Adapted from the author’s paper “How good enough biofuel governance can help rural livelihoods: making sure that biofuel development works for small farmers and communities”, an unpublished background paper for FAO’s State of Food and Agriculture 2008. Some suggestions on how to achieve biofuel development that favours sustainable rural livelihoods. The quest for sustainable biofuel systems has...

Contemporary debates on the rural sector in Latin America have led many to question the future viability of peasant livelihoods in the Andes. The paper first discusses certain limitations in these discussions of peasant viability. Firstly, they conflate agrarian with rural livelihoods, thus deflecting attention from the myriad transitions that have occurred in the ways through which people make...

Aquaculture is often viewed narrowly as intensive culture of salmon and shrimp to provide high value products for luxury markets and is often associated with environmental degradation. The promotion of aquaculture for rural development has had a poor record in many developing countries, especially in Africa. This paper shows that aquaculture does contribute to the livelihoods of the poor, parti...

Obtaining detailed and reliable data about local economic livelihoods in developing countries is expensive, and data are consequently scarce. Previous work has shown that it is possible to measure local-level economic livelihoods using high-resolution satellite imagery. However, such imagery is relatively expensive to acquire, often not updated frequently, and is mainly available for recent yea...

This study was undertaken to assess the socio-economic impact of producing export oriented agricultural crops on the livelihoods of the farmers, in eastern Ethiopia. A random sample of 305 farmers was studied. Comparisons were made between producers and non-producers using the Ztest and regression analysis. It was found that producers of export oriented crops are better off than the non-produce...