This paper analyses how the relationship between decent rural employment and agricultural productivity vary across production systems. The focus is on sub-Saharan Africa, taking Ethiopia and Tanzania as case studies. A latent class stochastic frontier approach is applied to identify different production systems and technologies for a sample of farms in the two countries. Subsequently, we estimate the efficiency of production for these systems and investigate in how far decent rural employment indicators explain different levels of efficiencies across different latent classes.
A joint FAO and World Bank study which shows how the farming systems approach can be used to identify priorities for the reduction of hunger and poverty in the main farming systems of the six major developing regions of the world.
The OECD-FAO Agricultural Outlook 2016-2025 provides an assessment of prospects for the coming decade of the agricultural commodity markets across 41 countries and 12 regions, including OECD countries and key agricultural producers, such as India, China, Brazil, the Russian Federation and Argentina.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Sub-Saharan Africa's rural population is growing rapidly, and more young people are entering the labour market every year. This raises serious policy questions. Can rural economies absorb enough job seekers? Could better-educated youth transform Africa's rural economies by adopting new technologies and starting businesses? Are policymakers responding to the youth employment challenge? Or will there be widespread unemployment, social instability, and an exodus to cities and abroad? Youth and Jobs in Rural Africa: Beyond Stylized Facts uses survey data to build a nuanced understanding of the constraints and opportunities facing rural youth in Africa. Addressing the questions of Africa's rural youth is currently hampered by major gaps in our knowledge and stylized facts from cross-country trends or studies that do not focus on the core issues. Youth and Jobs in Rural Africa takes a different approach, drawing on household and firm surveys from selected African countries with an explicit focus on rural youth. It argues that a balance between alarm and optimism is warranted, and that Africa's "youth bulge" is not an unprecedented challenge. Jobs in rural areas are limited, but agriculture is transforming and youth are participating, adopting new technologies and running businesses. Governments have adopted youth employment as a priority, but policies often do not address the specific needs of rural populations. Youth and Jobs in Rural Africa emphasizes that by going beyond stylized facts and drawing on more granular analysis, we can design effective policies to turn Africa's youth problem into an opportunity for rural transformation.
"This Case for Action urges that improving policy coherence between employment and agricultural initiatives and investigating more in the promotion of decent rural employment contribute highly to the interlinked challenges of fighting rural poverty and feeding a growing world population in a sustainable way. Even more importantly, decent work is a fully fledged human right, enshrined in international human rights law, to which each person is entitled as a means of personal development and socio-economic inclusion. While the ILO leads the Global Employment and Decent Work Agenda, FAO has a crucial comparative advantage in promoting decent work in rural areas, specifically with respect to employment in agriculture, including livestock, forestry, fisheries and management of natural resources, as well as agroprocessing and retailing. Given its mandate to raise levels of nutrition, improve agricultural productivity, better the lives of rural populations and contribute to the growth of the world economy, FAO has a significant responsibility within this context. This Case for Action further clarifies the reasoning behind this statement and suggests entry points for increased synergies and inter-disciplinary collaboration."--Introduction.
This framework presents ten interrelated principles/elements to guide Sustainable Agricultural Mechanization in Africa (SAMA). Further, it presents the technical issues to be considered under SAMA and the options to be analysed at the country and sub regional levels. The ten key elements required in a framework for SAMA are as follows: The analysis in the framework calls for a specific approach, involving learning from other parts of the world where significant transformation of the agricultural mechanization sector has already occurred within a three-to-four decade time frame, and developing policies and programmes to realize Africa’s aspirations of Zero Hunger by 2025. This approach entails the identification and prioritization of relevant and interrelated elements to help countries develop strategies and practical development plans that create synergies in line with their agricultural transformation plans. Given the unique characteristics of each country and the diverse needs of Africa due to the ecological heterogeneity and the wide range of farm sizes, the framework avoids being prescriptive.
The book highlights proceedings from the Berlin 2008: Agriculture and Development conference held in preparation for the World Development Report 2008.
This book provides a detailed history of farming systems research (FSR). While it includes the application of FSR to developed country agriculture, its main focus is on FSR in its original role, with small scale, resource-poor farmers in less developed countries. There are some 40 contributions from nearly 50 contributors from 20 countries, illustrating both the diversity and yet the coherence of FSR. The five parts of the book cover: (1) FSR - understanding farmers and their farming (FSR origins and perspectives; understanding farming systems); (2) the applications of farming systems research (FSR in technology choice and development; FSR in extension and policy formulation); (3) institutional commitment to FSR (FSR: some institutional experiences in national agricultural research; dimensions of the organization of FSR; training for FSR); (4) FSR: the professional dimension (regional and international associations; FSR and the professional disciplines); and (5) cutting edge methods, abiding issues and the future for FSR.
Promoting decent rural employment, by creating new jobs in rural areas and upgrading the existing ones, could be one of the most efficient pathways to reduce rural poverty. This paper systematically investigates the impact of decent rural employment on agricultural production efficiency in sub-Saharan African countries, taking Ethiopia and Tanzania as case countries. The analysis applies an output-oriented distance function approach with an estimation procedure that accounts for different technological, demographic, socio-economic, institutional and decent rural employment indicators. Data of the most recent round of Living Standards Measurement Study-Integrated Surveys on Agriculture (LSMS-ISA) for the two countries are used, and a set of indicators are derived to proxy core dimensions of decent rural employment. The findings of our analysis show that decent rural employment contributes to agricultural production efficiency.
The manual work carried out by farmers and their families is often both arduous and time consuming and in many countries this is a major constraint to increasing agricultural production. Such day-to-day drudgery is a major contributoring factor in the migration of people, particularly the young, from the rural countryside to seek the prospect of a better life in the towns and cities. Farm production can be substantially increased through the use of mechanical technologies which both are labor-saving and directly increase yields and production. This document provides guidelines on the development and formulation of an agricultural mechanization strategy and forms part of FAO's approach on sustainable production intensification.
