Recent literature shows that income diversification is an important strategy for rural households to manage drought risk in arid and semiarid regions. This article examines whether income diversification can help rural households to overcome the adverse impact of drought in Northern China. Based on field interview data from 291 rural households in 13 townships of Northern China, we found that r...

Although still of central importance, farming on its own is increasingly unable to provide a sufficient means of survival in rural areas. Further, the asset base of farmers is not diversified, so loss of farming productivity during severe drought results in the total loss of assets and hence results in food insecurity and dependency on food aid. Therefore, it was crucial to identify the causes ...

Increasing population growth and decreasing land ratio made it difficult for rural people of Bangladesh to maintain their livelihood. Especially the small-scale farmers find it trickier using their scarce resources. One House One Farm approach(OHOF) is designed to utilize the house and farm resources of the small- scale farmers to improve their livelihood. The focus of the study was to determin...

Rural development should be central to poverty reduction. Three quarters of the 1.2 billion people surviving on less than one dollar a day live and work in rural areas. Rural people are twice as likely to be poor as urban counterparts. However, rural development faces a loss of confidence: funding has been falling, and governments and donors are scrambling to rethink policy. What new directions...

China’s grain production has transformed from absolute shortage to a current structural oversupply. High-intensity production introduced further challenges for the eco-environment, smallholder livelihood, and the man-land interrelationship. Driven by urban-rural transformation, research on food security patterns and grain production has expanded into a new field. To analyze the challenges and r...

This paper reviews and interprets changes in rural livelihoods in southern Malawi following market liberalisation. It argues that, by reducing household maize production, market liberalisation has increased the need for resourcepoor smallholders to develop market strategies that provide them with income security. Whereas previous scenarios for poverty elimination in Malawi were based either on ...

Feedback mechanisms are important in the analysis of vulnerability and resilience of social-ecological systems, as well as in the analysis of livelihoods, but how to evaluate systems with direct feedbacks has been a great challenge. We applied fuzzy cognitive mapping, a tool that allows analysis of both direct and indirect feedbacks and can be used to explore the vulnerabilities of livelihoods ...

Rural development means as overall development of rural areas social, economic, political and cultural so that the people are to lead a pleasant life. Agriculture plays the most important and decisive role in rural development. Infect, nobody can deny this fact that most of the population in India is still living in villages and their livelihood is depending on agriculture. Therefore, we rightl...