Agricultural Development: New Perspectives in a Changing World is the first comprehensive exploration of key emerging issues facing developing-country agriculture today, from rapid urbanization to rural transformation to climate change. In this four-part volume, top experts offer the latest research in the field of agricultural development. Using new lenses to examine today’s biggest challenges, contributors address topics such as nutrition and health, gender and household decision-making, agrifood value chains, natural resource management, and political economy. The book also covers most developing regions, providing a critical global perspective at a time when many pressing challenges extend beyond national borders. Tying all this together, Agricultural Development explores policy options and strategies for developing sustainable agriculture and reducing food insecurity and malnutrition. The changing global landscape combined with new and better data, technologies, and understanding means that agriculture can and must contribute to a wider range of development outcomes than ever before, including reducing poverty, ensuring adequate nutrition, creating strong food value chains, improving environmental sustainability, and promoting gender equity and equality. Agricultural Development: New Perspectives in a Changing World, with its unprecedented breadth and scope, will be an indispensable resource for the next generation of policymakers, researchers, and students dedicated to improving agriculture for global wellbeing.

"This book reflects the latest developments and new perspectives on agricultural development, drawing on the expertise of numerous top scholars in different fields. The contributors cover most developing countries and regions, providing a global perspective, and review technological change and productivity growth in major regions. The book analyzes new agricultural development issues such as increasing production of high-value products, development of modern food value chains, nutrition and health, gender, insurance and credit, property rights and natural resource management, and climate change. The contributors also try to identify effective public policy strategies for developing sustainable agriculture and reducing food insecurity and malnutrition"--

This book examines the role of agriculture in the economic transformation of developing low- and middle-income countries and explores means for accelerating agricultural growth and poverty reduction. In this volume, Mellor measures by household class the employment impact of alternative agricultural growth rates and land tenure systems, and impact on cereal consumption and food security. The book provides detailed analysis of each element of agricultural modernization, emphasizing the central role of government in accelerated growth in private sector dominated agriculture. The book differs from the bulk of current conventional wisdom in its placement of the non-poor small commercial farmer at the center of growth, and explains how growth translates into poverty reduction. This new book is a follow up to Mellor’s classic, prize-winning text, The Economics of Agricultural Development. Listed as a Best Books of 2017: Economics by Financial Times.

This Open Access book explores the multifaceted nature of agricultural and rural development in Asia and examines the extent to which the Asian experience is being replicated in contemporary Africa. This volume compiles the works of top scholars who provided analyses and evidences from household-level surveys collected for many years in several parts of Asia and Africa. The most important finding presented in this book is that African agricultural development has evolved following the pathways of Asian agricultural development. The common pathways are borrowed technology from abroad and adaptive research in rice farming; secured property rights on natural resources; adoption of ICTs; investments in human capital, including training; and launching of the high-value agriculture. In both continents, agricultural development started in the crop sector, which had a strong tendency to induce the dynamic development of other sectors in rural areas. [Resumen de la editorial]

Despite the importance of Southeast Asia (SEA) region in the world for economy and agriculture, and despite reported evidence of the modernization of various aspects of the agricultural sector, the information has not been compiled in ways that provides more representative insights of the regions, as well as chronological, dynamic perspectives across different aspects of the overall agricultural developments. This report partly fills this knowledge gap by summarizing the key characteristics in SEA region of the agricultural development, as well as changes in related outcomes, such as nutrition, natural resource endowments, and the labor movement into non-farm economies. In doing so, the report gathers secondary cross-country data on key aspects of the agricultural modernization and diversification. Overall, the SEA region has seen a relatively fast movement of labor out of the agricultural sector into non-farm sectors including trade, restaurants and hotel industries in the last few decades, leading to higher labor productivity growth than land productivity growth. Despite the important roles of trade, the agricultural production within the region and in each country continues to account for important sources of food and nutrition. The modern production technologies and inputs have spread constantly within the region, but with considerable time lags across countries. The growth of vegetable oils and aquaculture production have been considerable, and contrast with South Asia (SA)where similar patterns have been observed for vegetables and milk production. The public sector has played important roles in agricultural research and development (R&D)on genetic improvements, and infrastructure development, while keeping the nominal assistance to the sector through market interventions to a relatively modest level, which has been accompanied by the significant growth of the private-sector participation in the provisions of inputs, services and agricultural finance. The agricultural modernization in SEA region has, however, been also associated with some negative outcomes, including continued degradation of natural resources like water and forest areas in which SEA has been relatively rich historically, and gradual increases in certain types of malnutrition including overweight and diabetes.

Economic theory, agricultural development, role of technological change - economic model, comparison of agricultural production in developed countries and developing countries, role of science and agricultural technology in Japan and the USA, technology transfer, implications for agricultural policy. Graphs, references, statistical tables.