founded in 1970 as the Canadian Environmental Law Research Foundation. It is an independent, not-for profit, environmental law and policy research and education organization. Over the last 15 years, CIELAP has been involved extensively in environmental law and policy development related to biotechnology. In 1984, CIELAP organized the first conference in Canada on environmental law and policy is...

Smallholder participation in agricultural markets in Mozambique has been historically very low. The majority of rural smallholders are subsistenceoriented, devote the majority of their labor and assets to agricultural activities and rely on crop production for over two thirds of their total household income. Household survey results indicate that the poorest 40% of smallholders sell very little...

How does agricultural insurance affect the modernization of farming in low income countries? We focus on institutional contexts without formal contract enforcement, where smallholders cannot access modern inputs via markets. Instead, farmers can engage relational contracting with traders to sell their crop and gain (as an advance in-kind payment). Although conventional theory assumes that “crow...

We empirically investigate the relationship between agricultural development and proximity to military forts in Kansas, Nebraska, and Colorado in 1880. Agricultural investments are substantially higher in counties where a military fort is present, suggesting that military forts stimulated agricultural development on the Great Plains. However, the reverse is not true; there is no statistical sup...

In this paper we address two topical questions: How do the quality of governance and agricultural intensification impact on spatial expansion of agriculture? Which aspects of governance are more likely to ensure that agricultural intensification allows sparing land for nature? Using data from the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Bank, the World Database on Protected Areas, and the Y...