Agriculture and Rural Poverty

Contents: 1. Rural poverty and agricultural performance in India. 2. Can non agricultural employment reduce rural poverty. 3. Rural development and poverty reduction: is agriculture still the key. 4. Agricultural production agricultural land and rural poverty. 5. The structure of public expenditures agricultural income and rural poverty. 6. Rural poverty: old challenges in new contexts. 7. Linkage between rural poverty and agricultural productivit. 8. Agricultural and rural development for reducing poverty and hunger in Asia. 9. Rural diversity agricultural innovation policies and poverty reduction. 10. Impact of agricultural policy reform on regional rural poverty. 11. Land interlinking markets and rural poverty in transition countries. 12. Agriculture and the new challenges of development. 13. Organic agriculture poverty reduction and the millennium development goals. Bibliography. Index.

Recent years have seen the development of an extensive and disquieting literature on trends in rural poverty in in and their relationship to agricultural growth. A recurring theme in much of this literature is that agricultural growth has been accompanied by a steady deterioration in distributional terms, involving not only an increase in relative inequality but also an increase in absolute impoverishment Indeed, it is argued that these trends are the natural consequence of the type of agricultural growth which can be expected within the existing institutional structure in Indian agriculture. This latter proposition has important implications for policy. It raises doubts about the scope for achieving even the fairly minimal welfare objective of alleviating absolute poverty in the future, at least through the kind of agricultural development that is currently deemed feasible, i.e growth without radical institutional change. (jacket)