This review assesses the performance of Colombian agriculture over the last two decades, evaluates Colombian agricultural policy reforms and provides recommendations to address key challenges in the future.

"With 80% of its population living in cities, Latin America and the Caribbean is the most urbanized region on the planet. Located here are some of the largest and bes-known cities, like Mexico City, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Bogota, Lima and Santiago. The region also boasts hundreds of smaller cities that stand out because of their dynamism and creativity. This edition of State of Latin American and Caribbean cities presents teh current situation of the region's urban world, including the demographic, economic, social, environmental, urban and institutional conditions in which cities are developing." -- p.4 of cover.

This publication deals with key issues in land tenure, especially as they relate to food insecurity and rural development situations. Land tenure issues are frequently ignored in rural development interventions, with often long-lasting, negative results. This guide is designed to assist technical officers in governments and civil society in understanding why and how land tenure issues should be considered in rural development projects. It analyses important contexts such as environmental degradation, gender discrimination, and conflicts, where land tenure is currently of critical concern.

Weed management Decision Support Systems (DSS) are increasingly important computer-based tools for modern agriculture. Nowadays, extensive agriculture has become highly dependent on external inputs and both economic costs, as well the negative environmental impact of agricultural activities, demands knowledge-based technology for the optimization and protection of non-renewable resources. In this context, weed management strategies should aim to maximize economic profit by preserving and enhancing agricultural systems. Although previous contributions focusing on weed biology and weed management provide valuable insight on many aspects of weed species ecology and practical guides for weed control, no attempts have been made to highlight the forthcoming importance of DSS in weed management. This book is a first attempt to integrate `concepts and practice’ providing a novel guide to the state-of-art of DSS and the future prospects which hopefully would be of interest to higher-level students, academics and professionals in related areas.

The World Bank has recently defined two strategic goals: ending extreme poverty and boosting shared prosperity. Shared prosperity is measured as income growth among the bottom 40 percent of the income distribution in the population. The two goals should be achieved in a way that is sustainable from economic, social, and environmental perspectives. Shared Prosperity: Paving the Way in Europe and Central Asia focuses on the second goal and proposes a framework that integrates both macroeconomic and microeconomic elements. The macro variables, particularly changes in relative prices, affect income growth differentially along the income distribution; at the same time, the microeconomic distribution of assets at the bottom of the distribution determines the capacity of the bottom 40 to take advantage of the macroeconomic environment and contribute to overall growth. Growth and the incidence of growth are thus understood as jointly determined processes. Besides this integration, the main input of the framework is the finding that the trade-off between growth and equity may be an issue only in the short run. Over the long run, redistribution policies that increase the productive capacity of the bottom 40 percent enhance the overall growth potential of the economy. This report considers shared prosperity in Europe and Central Asia and concludes that the performance in sharing prosperity during the period 2000–10 was good, on average, but heterogeneous across countries and that sustainability is unclear. It also describes examples of the application of the framework to selected countries in the region. Finally, the report provides a tool to structure the policy discussion around the goal of shared prosperity and explains that specific policy links associated with the goal can be established only after a thorough analysis of the country-specific context.

Does gender condition politicians’ discourse strategies in parliament? This is the question we try to answer in A Gender-based Approach to Parliamentary Discourse: The Andalusian Parliament. This book, written by experts in the field of discourse analysis, covers key aspects of political discourse such as gender, identity and verbal and nonverbal strategies: intensification, enumerative series, non-literal quotations, pseudo-desemantisation, lexical colloquialisation, emotion, eye contact and time management. It provides a large number of examples from a balanced gender parliament, the Andalusian Parliament, and it focuses mainly on argumentation, since parliamentary discourse is above all argumentative. This book will prove invaluable to students and teachers in the field of discourse analysis, and more specifically of political discourse, and will also be very useful to politicians and anyone interested in communication strategies. As of January 2019, this e-book is freely available, thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched.