Today, agrifood systems are undergoing remarkable changes, reflected in the modernization of food value chains and rural transformation responding to urbanization, income growth, and expansion of international trade.

Our understanding of decision-making within rural households has changed substantially since interest in intrahousehold decision-making emerged in the 1980s.

The chapter examines whether contract farming confers benefits primarily to large farmers in practice and how we may be able to make smallholders significantly better off by introducing new profitable crops and livestock products.

In this chapter, for brevity, we focus on the output value chains, but the conceptual framework and most trends are also relevant to the input value chains, the lateral service value chains, and R&D&E suppliers.

The five chapters on regional issues in agricultural development provide an overview of the various regional experiences and the transformation of agrifood systems.

The agriculture sector in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) is certainly not homogeneous, covering a variety of very different agroecological and climate zones, along a south-north axis.1 There are three large agricultural producers: Brazil (c

Climate change will be a major driver of change in the agricultural sector in the coming decades, along with changes in population, income, urbanization, dietary preferences, and technology.1 Agriculture is unique among economic sectors in its dep

Access to financial services is critical for agricultural development. By “access to financial services” we mean access to credit, savings, payments, and insurance.

Rapid urbanization is a defining feature of low-income countries, even as rural populations continue to grow. Greater attention should therefore be paid to the spatial dimensions and urban drivers of agricultural transformation.

This chapter addresses some of the basic questions regarding agricultural research systems, especially in the context of developing countries, raised in the preceding chapters.

This chapter on Africa documents the region’s unfolding agricultural and broader economic transformations, explores the underlying drivers and implications of these transformations, and considers the new policy priorities dictated by these develop

Traditionally societies and their governments have pursued agricultural development to ensure adequate food is available and affordable and incomes of farm households keep pace with those of nonfarm households.

Chapter 1 reviewed dynamically changing global trends in agricultural development and identified emerging and diverse issues associated with the process of global agricultural development.

First, we typically use the term agriculture to mean the farm production of crop and livestock commodities; agribusiness to mean commercial suppliers of farm inputs and wholesale purchasers of farm commodities; food markets to mean storage, shipme

Agricultural production is a risky activity subject to several contingencies that make farming incomes unstable and unpredictable from year to year.

The world has been changing rapidly, and major issues surrounding agriculture have evolved as well. In fact, over the last several decades major shifts have occurred in the thinking on and practice of agricultural development.

In this section, we follow Chapter 5 of Hayami and Ruttan (1985) to overview long-term changes experienced by East Asian countries.

Food and agriculture have been subject to heavy-handed government interventions throughout much of history and across the globe, both in developing and developed countries.1 Political considerations are crucial to understand these policies since a

Although the ECA countries are agriculturally heterogeneous in many ways, they share a common institutional history and, in certain respects, a common reform experience.

Agriculture, natural resources, and the nutrition landscape in South Asia (SA) are unique.