Agricultural Investment and Productivity provides a deep and systematic look at the opportunities for and constraints to investments in sustainable agriculture in East Africa, offering important insights into what works and how to analyze agricultural investments in one of the poorest regions of the world. The book critically examines the reasons behind East Africa's stagnant agricultural productivity over the past forty-five years, using the primary lens of investments in fertilizers, seeds, and sustainable land management technologies, These investments have a tremendous impact on production volume, ultimately affecting the income of millions of families throughout the region.

Encyclopedia of Agriculture and Food Systems, Second Edition, Five Volume Set addresses important issues by examining topics of global agriculture and food systems that are key to understanding the challenges we face. Questions it addresses include: Will we be able to produce enough food to meet the increasing dietary needs and wants of the additional two billion people expected to inhabit our planet by 2050? Will we be able to meet the need for so much more food while simultaneously reducing adverse environmental effects of today’s agriculture practices? Will we be able to produce the additional food using less land and water than we use now? These are among the most important challenges that face our planet in the coming decades. The broad themes of food systems and people, agriculture and the environment, the science of agriculture, agricultural products, and agricultural production systems are covered in more than 200 separate chapters of this work. The book provides information that serves as the foundation for discussion of the food and environment challenges of the world. An international group of highly respected authors addresses these issues from a global perspective and provides the background, references, and linkages for further exploration of each of topics of this comprehensive work. Addresses important challenges of sustainability and efficiency from a global perspective. Takes a detailed look at the important issues affecting the agricultural and food industries today. Full colour throughout.

This book showcases the power of economic principles to explain and predict issues and current events in the food, agricultural, agribusiness, international trade, natural resources and other sectors. The result is an agricultural economics textbook that provides students and instructors with a clear, up-to-date, and straightforward approach to learning how a market-based economy functions, and how to use simple economic principles for improved decision making. While the primary focus of the book is on microeconomic aspects, agricultural economics has expanded over recent decades to include issues of macroeconomics, international trade, agribusiness, environmental economics, natural resources, and international development. Hence, these topics are also provided with significant coverage.

This book argues that the viability of many observed market and non-market interventions in agricultural products worldwide depends considerably on the underlying behaviour of the relevant commodity markets. Many of these policies have had distortive impacts, resulting in much discussion and controversy in the context of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Doha Round of trade negotiations.