Land quality and land degradation affect agricultural productivity and food security, but quantifying these relationships has been difficult. Data are extremely limited and outcomes are sensitive to the choices that farmers make. The contributors to this book - including soil scientists, geographers, and economists - analyse data on soils, climate, land cover, agricultural inputs and outputs, and a variety of socio-economic factors to provide new insights into three key issues: * the extent to which differences in land quality generate differences in agricultural productivity across countries * how farmers' responses to differences or changes in land quality are influenced by economic, environmental, and institutional factors, and * whether land degradation over time threatens productivity growth and food security at local, regional, and global levels. This book can be thoroughly recommended to policymakers, public and private sector researchers, university faculty and graduate students, and non-profit organizations for use in research, education, and decision-making.

Dramatic increases in food prices, as witnessed on a global scale in recent years, threaten the food security of hundreds of millions of the rural poor in Sub-Saharan Africa alone. This book focuses on recent food and financial crises as they have affected Africa, illustrating the problems using country case studies, that cover their origins, effects on agriculture and rural poverty, their underlying factors and making recommendations as to how such crises could best be addressed in the future.

This book describes trends in resources used in and affected by agricultural production (including natural, produced, and management resources), as well as the economic conditions and policies that influence agricultural resource use and its environmental impacts. Each chapter provides a concise overview of a specific topic with links to sources of additional information.

Global food production has more than doubled over the past 40 years, growing faster than population, and will likely keep pace in the 21st century. Yet today one-eighth of the world's people lack secure access to the food they need to live active and healthy lives. This volume describes how together innovative technologies and sound policies can help close the global food gap--the gap between demand for and supply of food.

Although markets will continue to supply sufficient food to those with money to spend, getting food to the poor will require that government policies and investments supplement the operation of markets in three critical areas: protecting the natural resources on which agriculture depends; focusing the benefits of agricultural research, including biotechnology, on the needs of small farmers in developing countries; and ensuring that access to food, resources, and income-generating opportunities is equitable and secure.

Contributors to this book show how soil degradation, biotechnology, and other resources and technologies might affect the future supply of food, as well as how poverty, conflict, and gender roles might affect demand. They also consider the roles that institutions must play in meeting the challenge of global hunger. Finally, they outline the policy priorities required to achieve a food-secure world in the 21st century.

Contributors: Bruce Alberts, Nicole Ballenger, Donald Duvick, Craig Gundersen, Eileen Kennedy, Rattan Lal, Alex F. McCalla, Susan R. McCouch, Ellen Messer, Rajul Pandya-Lorch, Per Pinstrup-Andersen, G. Edward Schuh, and Keith Wiebe.