Rural roads promote economic development, but they also facilitate deforestation. To explore this tradeoff, this article develops a spatially explicit model of land use and estimates probabilities of alternative land uses as a function of land characteristics and distance to market using a multinomial logit specification of this model. Controls are incorporated for the endogeneity of road place...

To eradicate poverty, governments across developing countries have adopted programs to promote business ownership, with varying levels of success. The mixed success such underscores the importance local and economic conditions. Yet, empirical evidence on how context shapes outcomes entrepreneurship-focused poverty initiatives is sparse. In this paper, we use data from 2015 Smallholder Survey ex...

Past studies discussing the origins of agriculture have mainly emphasized changes in environmental and human-behavior factors as possible explanations for the shift from foraging to farming. This paper focuses on how increase in the biological fitness of both farmers and crops enabled the rapid evolution and success of farmers and agriculture. It is shown that the first plants under domesticati...

Uganda is dominated by agriculture with over 80 percent of the 24.6 million people involved in subsistence farming. The most important cereals are maize, finger millet and sorghum in that order. Finger millet is the second most important cereal in Uganda after maize and exceeding sorghum both in area and production. It is the staple food for over 50% of the country’s 24.6 million people and inc...

The epidemiology of rabies in dogs in Zimbabwe is described using data from 1950, when rabies was re-introduced after a 37-year absence, to 1996. Dogs constituted 45.7% of all laboratory-confirmed rabies cases and were the species most frequently diagnosed with the disease. Slightly more cases were diagnosed from June to November than in other months. From 1950 to the early 1980s, most dog case...

One of the most important developments in the existence of human society was the successful shift from a subsistence economy based on foraging to one primarily based on food production derived from cultivated plants and domesticated animals. The shift to plant food production occurred in only a few independent centers around the world and involved a commitment to increased sedentism and social ...

This paper analyses the status of food security in selected South Pacific Island countries, namely Cook Islands, Fiji Islands, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, and Vanuatu at the national and household levels during the period 1991-2002. Due to narrow resource base and production conditions, Pacific Islands concentrate on a few primary commodities for production and exports. Dur...

This paper combines theory from ecology and anthropology to investigate variation in the territory sizes of subsistence oriented agricultural societies. The results indicate that population and the dependence of individuals within a society on "wild" foods partly determine the territory sizes of agricultural societies. In contrast, the productivity of an agroecosystem is not an important determ...