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Striking a balance between human survival heightened by mass unemployment and the environment is crucial to the sustainability of the natural resources. The role of petty trader is important in ensuring that the excess supply during harvest is processed into the forms (roasted maize, yam, plantain, meat and chicken) appreciated by consumers instead of being a loss to farmer. While average daily income of 2670.79 Nigerian naira (₦) was assured, substantial quantity of charcoal (46786.3 kg) was utilized per week by petty traders. This is equivalent of 20.6 hectares of wood. The per capita charcoal utilization per week for suya, roasted yam and plantain sellers were 178.7 kg, 85.2 kg and 145.8 kg, respectively. These were obtained from clearing 0.8 ha (suya), 0.4 ha (roasted yam) and 0.6 ha (plantain) of wood. Age of respondents, experience in petty trading and hours of trading per day have a positive influence on the quantity of charcoal utilized per day, while frequency of purchase (charcoal) and rainy season have a negative relationship with quantity of charcoal used per day. Considering the appreciable quantity of charcoal utilization among petty traders and its negative effect on the environment, government should go beyond collecting taxes from charcoal producers. Also, the need for control over exploitation of trees and mobilization of staff of the Ministry of Forestry for prompt tree planting are required.

In the wake of climate change, there is now a resurgence of interest in the promotion of crop diversification as a climate smart agricultural practice in Sub-Saharan Africa. The development economics literature suggests that increasing crop diversity is an effective risk management and consumption smoothing strategy in a context characterized by repeated exposure to shocks but weak institutional innovations. Using panel survey data from rural Uganda merged with historical weather data, this paper sheds light on the household welfare and consumption smoothing effects of crop diversity. We employ instrumental variables methods to control for unobserved heterogeneity and potential reverse causality. Our study finds that crop diversification is a welfare enhancing strategy that increases consumption and aggregate household diets. Instrumental variables quantile regression results show that crop diversification generates higher consumption benefits for poorest households in the lower quantile of the consumption distribution than for relatively richer households. Crop diversification also improves consumption smoothing through reducing households’ reliance on less effective strategies such as informal insurance and involuntary diet changes as risk coping mechanisms. Overall, the findings suggest that transforming agriculture towards a more diversified cropping system is a viable pathway for improving diets, welfare, risk management and the resilience of rural households.

This paper analyzes the economic effects of agricultural price and merchandise trade policies around the world as of 2004 on global markets, net farm incomes, and national and regional economic welfare and poverty, using the global economy wide Linkage model, new estimates of agricultural price distortions for developing countries, and poverty elasticity's approach. It addresses two questions: to what extent are policies as of 2004 still reducing rewards from farming in developing countries and thereby adding to inequality across countries in farm household incomes? Are they depressing value added more in primary agriculture than in the rest of the economy of developing countries, and earnings of unskilled workers more than of owners of other factors of production, thereby potentially contributing to inequality and poverty within developing countries (given that farm incomes are well below non-farm incomes in most developing countries and that agriculture there is intensive in the use of unskilled labor)? Results are presented for the key countries and regions of the world and for the world as a whole. They reveal that, by moving to free markets, income inequality between countries will be reduced at least slightly, all but one-sixth of the gains to developing countries will come from agricultural policy reform, unskilled workers in developing countries the majority of whom work on farms will benefit most from reform, net farm incomes in developing countries will rise by 6 percent compared with 2 percent for non-agricultural value added, and the number of people surviving on less than US$1 a day will drop 3 percent globally.

This chapter begins with a brief summary of the long history of national distortions to agricultural markets. It then outlines the methodology used to generate annual indicators of the extent of government interventions in markets, details of which are provided in Anderson and appendix A. A description of the economies under study and their economic growth and structural changes over recent decades is then briefly presented as a preface to the main section of the chapter, in which the nominal rates of assistance and consumer tax equivalents (NRA and CTE) estimates are summarized across regions and over the decades since the 1950s. These estimates are discussed in far more detail in the regional chapters that follow. A summary is also provided of an additional set of indicators of agricultural price distortions presented in chapter eleven that are based on the trade restrictiveness index first developed by Anderson and Neary (2005). In chapter twelve the focus shifts from countries to commodities, and all the various distortion indicators are used to provide a sense of how distorted are each of the key farm commodity markets globally. Then chapter thirteen uses the study's NRA and CTE estimates to provide a new set of results from a global economy-wide model that attempts to quantify the impacts on global markets, net farm incomes and welfare of the reforms since the early 1980s and of the policies still in place as of 2004. The chapter concludes by drawing on the lessons learned to speculate on the prospects for further reducing the disarray in world agricultural markets.

This chapter begins with a brief summary of economic growth and structural changes in the region since the 1950s and of agricultural and other economic policy developments as they affected the farm sector at the time of and in various stages after independence from colonial powers. The chapter then summarizes estimates of the nominal rate of assistance (NRA) and the relative rate of assistance (RRA) to farmers delivered by national farm and nonfarm policies over the past several decades, as well as the impact of these policies on the consumer prices of farm products, using the project's methodology (Anderson et al. 2008). The final sections point to what the author have learned and draw out implications of the findings, including for poverty and inequality and for possible future directions of policies affecting agricultural incentives in Africa.

This article assesses the impact of the East Asian financial crisis on farm households in two of the region’s most affected countries, Indonesia and Thailand, using detailed householdlevel survey data collected before and after the crisis began. Although the nature of the shocks in the two countries were similar, the impact on farmers’ income (particularly on distribution) was quite different. In Thailand, poor farmers bore the brunt of the crisis, in part because of their greater reliance on the urban economy, than did poor farmers in Indonesia. Urban-rural links are much weaker in Indonesia. Farmers in both countries, particularly those specializing in export crops, benefited from the currency devaluation. Although there is some evidence that the productivity of the smallest landholders declined over the period in question, it is difficult to attribute this directly to the financial crisis. At least in Thailand, a rural credit crunch does not seem to have materialized. Now that the East Asian financial crisis has waned, its impact on two of the region’s most affected countries, Indonesia and Thailand, can be more readily assessed. Agriculture is the major employer in these economies, yet little is known about how farm households weathered the crisis. Hyperbolic news reports notwithstanding, many farmers surely benefited from the exchange rate depreciation. Other effects of the crisis, however, may not have been so sanguine. Overall, one would expect considerable variation in the impact of the crisis within the rural sector. Of particular interest to policymakers, given the implications for the design of safety net programs and balanced rural development, is how the rural poor fared relative to better-off households. This article uses detailed household survey data from Indonesia and Thailand collected before and after the onset of the 1997 financial crisis to explore its effect on farm production and income, especially its differential impact on the poor.