Humanity has made enormous progress in the past 50 years toward eliminating hunger and malnutrition. Some five billion people--more than 80 percent of the world's population--have enough food to live healthy, productive lives. Agricultural development has contributed significantly to these gains, while also fostering economic growth and poverty reduction in some of the world's poorest countries.

This Handbook provides insights to the ways in which globalisation is affecting the whole agri-food system from farms to the consumer. It covers themes including the physical basis of agriculture, the influence of trade policies, the nature of globalis

Between 1970 and 2009, India has overcome many infrastructural, market, and institutional challenges to transition from a dairy importing nation to the top producer in the world of both buffalo and goat milk, as well as the sixth largest producer of cow milk. In India, at least 100 million households are involved in farming and 70 million have dairy cattle. In India, dairy production is important for employment, income levels, and the nutritional quality of diets. Milk production in India is dominated by smallholder farmers including landless agricultural workers. For example, 80 percent of milk comes from farms with only two to five cows. A well-known smallholder dairy production initiative, Operation Flood, laid the foundation for a dairy cooperative movement that presently ensures returns on dairy investments to 13 million members. Operation Flood also advanced infrastructural improvements to enable the procurement, processing, marketing, and production of milk and to link India's major metropolitan cities with dairy cooperatives nationwide. This intervention transformed the policy environment, brought significant technological advancements into the rural milk sector, established many village cooperatives, and oriented the dairy industry toward markets.

Women represent half of the world's human resources. Though women perform different roles (production, household and productive), women continue to be mainly responsible for 'Care Economy'. It is said that unpaid work of these women comes to around US $ 11 trillion/ annum which is equivalent to half of the world's GDP. But this contribution goes unnoticed and seldom income statistics enters national income accounts.

As millions continue to face a future of food poverty, lessons can be learned by considering how farmer cooperatives succeeded in improving India's food security. 'Operation Flood', which revitalised the Indian dairy industry between 1970 and 1996, was the world's largest development programme, however critics accused it of luring India to neocolonial dependence on European surpluses. Eventually the perils of reliance on food aid were managed by proper pricing policies that both benefited rural farming families and wiped out urban 'milk famines'. In 2008 the World Bank hailed the programme's success and now promotes similar schemes in Africa. A detailed understanding of India's White Revolution is therefore imperative in the context of its future use in the developing world.

Food security is one of the twenty-first century’s key global challenges, and lessons learned from India have particular significance worldwide. Not only does India account for approximately one quarter of the world’s under-nourished persons, it also provides a worrying case of how rapid economic growth may not provide an assumed panacea to food security. This book takes on this challenge. It explains how India’s chronic food security problem is a function of a distinctive interaction of economic, political and environmental processes. It contends that under-nutrition and hunger are lagging components of human development in India precisely because the interfaces between these aspects of the food security problem have not been adequately understood in policy-making communities. Only through an integrative approach spanning the social and environmental sciences, are the fuller dimensions of this problem revealed. A well-rounded appreciation of the problem is required, informed by the FAO’s conception of food security as encompassing availability (production), access (distribution) and utilisation (nutritional content), as well as by Amartya Sen’s notions of entitlements and capabilities.

The world has made enormous progress in the past 50 years toward eliminating hunger and malnutrition. While, in 1960, roughly 30 percent of the world's population suffered from hunger and malnutrition, today less than 20 percent doessome five billion people now have enough food to live healthy, productive lives. Agricultural development has contributed significantly to these gains by increasing food supplies, reducing food prices, and creating new income and employment opportunities for some of the world's poorest people.This book examines where, why, and how past interventions in agricultural development have succeeded. It carefully reviews the policies, programs, and investments in agricultural development that have reduced hunger and poverty across Africa, Asia, and Latin America over the past half century. The 19 successes included here are described in in-depth case studies that synthesize the evidence on the intervention's impact on agricultural productivity and food security, evaluate the rigor with which the evidence was collected, and assess the tradeoffs inherent in each success. Together, these chapters provide evidence of "what works" in agricultural development.