This chapter is intended to respond to the need to better understand the implications of the AIDS pandemic for the agricultural sectors in the hardest-hit countries of eastern and southern Africa.

Over the past 15 years, evidence has accumulated of how HIV/AIDS impacts rural people who depend for their food and livelihood on agriculture and the management of natural resources.

The response to HIV/AIDS in Africa has evolved considerably since the first cases were reported on the continent in the early 1980s.

The AIDS epidemic is a global crisis with impacts that will be felt for decades to come. More than 28 million people have died since the first case was reported in 1981.

HIV/AIDS continues to spread throughout the developing world, in transition countries, and among poor and marginalized populations in industrialized countries.

Rollout of antiretroviral (ARV) therapy under the aegis of the WHO’s “3 by 5” initiative, with funding from numerous donors via the Global Fund for TB, HIV/ AIDS, and malaria, the U.S. PEPFAR and U.K.

The AIDS pandemic is a global crisis with impacts that will be felt for decades to come, demanding massive responses at many levels.

In October 2005, the Consortium for the Southern Africa Food Security Emergency (C-SAFE) transitioned to its final year of a regional “developmental relief ” program.

The increasing prevalence of HIV in Rwanda, along with the likelihood of continued effects of the genocide of 1994, suggests that many rural households may be facing extreme stress, and their agricultural production may be changing.

Based on qualitative fieldwork in urban and rural Zambia (see Bond et al.

Why should there be a book about the commercialization of subsistence agriculture, economic development, and nutrition? There are two compelling resasons.

In countries where farming and fishing are major productive activities, processing enterprises can have a strategic developmental role. Infrastructural, institutional, and contractural issues arise around them.

Agricultural commercialization, economic development, and nutrition are linked with one another. Policies influence the strength and direction of these linkages and welfare outcomes.

The choice between subsistence food crops, on the one hand, and cash crops, especially nonfood cash crops predominantly meant for exports, on the other hand, is a subject of considerable debate among policy makers as well as development specialist

Potatoes, of all food crops, had the fastest average annual growth rate of production in Rwanda between 1970 and 1985: 6.8 percent.