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.