In recent years, development policy has responded to an increasing concern about natural resource degradation by setting up innovative payment for environmental services (PES) programs in developing countries. PES programs use market and institutional incentives in order to meet both environmental and poverty alleviation objectives. However, their optimal design, implications for the rural poor, and how these initiatives integrate into international treaties on global warming and biodiversity loss are still being discussed. This book addresses these issues by scrutinizing analytical tools, providing policy insights and stimulating debate on linkages between poverty alleviation and environmental protection. In particular, it turns attention towards the role of environmental services in agricultural landscapes as they provide a living for many poor in developing countries. It serves as a valuable reference for academics and students in various disciplines, as well as for policy makers and advisors. This book is a co-publication between Springer and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

This volume summarizes the current state of knowledge in the economic literature of management of agricultural biotechnology and biodiversity in agricultural and economic development. It identifies key issues confronting policy makers in managing biodiversity and biotechnology and provides a broad, multi-disciplinary analysis of the linkage between the two. It is especially innovative in its use of plant genetic resource management as the basis for is analysis.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO license. The book uses an economic lens to identify the main features of climate-smart agriculture (CSA), its likely impact, and the challenges associated with its implementation. Drawing upon theory and concepts from agricultural development, institutional, and resource economics, this book expands and formalizes the conceptual foundations of CSA. Focusing on the adaptation/resilience dimension of CSA, the text embraces a mixture of conceptual analyses, including theory, empirical and policy analysis, and case studies, to look at adaptation and resilience through three possible avenues: ex-ante reduction of vulnerability, increasing adaptive capacity, and ex-post risk coping. The book is divided into three sections. The first section provides conceptual framing, giving an overview of the CSA concept and grounding it in core economic principles. The second section is devoted to a set of case studies illustrating the economic basis of CSA in terms of reducing vulnerability, increasing adaptive capacity and ex-post risk coping. The final section addresses policy issues related to climate change. Providing information on this new and important field in an approachable way, this book helps make sense of CSA and fills intellectual and policy gaps by defining the concept and placing it within an economic decision-making framework. This book will be of interest to agricultural, environmental, and natural resource economists, development economists, and scholars of development studies, climate change, and agriculture. It will also appeal to policy-makers, development practitioners, and members of governmental and non-governmental organizations interested in agriculture, food security and climate change.

Markets have been found to be an increasingly important source of the seeds of crops and varieties low income farmers need to improve their livelihoods, encompassing both the formal and informal seed sector. Markets also have major impacts on agricultural biodiversity, by affecting farmers' choice of crops and varieties to grow. They are not, however, a homogenous institution, although all too frequently policies and regulations are developed as though they were. Markets vary considerably depending on the participants, on the institutions that govern how and what they exchange, and on local agricultural, economic and social conditions. Developing effective strategies to improve the way agricultural markets work, including how farmers use crop genetic resources, requires understanding of these variations. Seed Trade in Rural Markets presents a unique set of case studies from Bolivia, India, Kenya, Mali and Mexico on agricultural seed and product markets that describe three important market characteristics expected to affect farmers' access to seeds and varieties: the range of varieties on offer, the information provided about them, and relative prices. The case studies - all based around a common framework to aid comparability - also provide information on social, agricultural and economic factors which may be affecting the market availability, information, and cost of crop genetic resources, and ultimately the capacity to stimulate agricultural developmentPublished with the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations