In MENA, household food insecurity, which is closely related to poverty and undernourishment, is most severe in rural areas and concentrated within Iraq, Sudan, and Yemen. 25% of the MENA population may be poor and 7% undernourished. The key to increased national and household-level food security is pro-poor growth, driven by export-oriented, labor-intensive sectors. Agricultural sector policie...

Luffa aegyptiaca (Luffa sponge gourd) is increasingly seen as both a source of vegetative nutrition and as a source of the “luffa” used as to exfoliate during bathing. As such, the commercial growing of Luffa aegyptiaca is increasingly being investigated using more intensive farming methods. Two factors traditionally used to promote / speed germination and emergence of vegetable seeds is invest...

Anthrax causes an infectious disease mostly in pigs, cattle, horses, sheep and goats. The disease is rare in humans and occurs primarily in regions with intensive farming. The lethal toxin (LeTx) composed of the lethal factor (LF) and the protective antigen (PA) is mostly responsible for the high mortality of anthrax. Although Bacillus anthracis can be treated by antibiotics, this chemotherapy ...

Two outbreaks of Q fever were reported in the Netherlands in 2007 and 2008. The ongoing 2008 outbreak in the south-eastern part of the Netherlands is the largest community outbreak ever described, with 808 cases reported until August 2008. The changing epidemiology of Q fever is most likely related to intensive goat farming, and has important implications for the clinical care of patients in en...

A postal survey conducted of 172 farms in the intensive farming areas of East and Northeast Scotland revealed that one in four farms considered that there was a serious rabbit {Oryctolagus cuniculus L.) problem. Although a wide range of crops was subject to damage, winter cereals and winter oilseed rape were particularly affected by grazing, especially in the winter and spring periods. Two-thir...

Driven by population pressures on natural resources, peri-urban pastoralists in the Far North Province of Cameroon have recently intensified livestock production in their traditional pastoral system by feeding their cattle cottonseed cakes and other agricultural byproducts to cope with the disappearance of rangelands typically available through the dry season. Although the crop–livestock intera...

Scientific understanding of agricultural change has grown considerably since Boserup’s seminal 1965 work, but her model’s simplicity has provided a foundation for building more complex understandings of farming societies. Much of the development of these more sophisticated understandings has been led by Harold Brookfield. The first section of this paper summarises our current understanding of t...

The increased use of pesticides and tillage intensification is known to negatively affect biodiversity. Changes in these agricultural practices such as herbicide and tillage reduction have variable effects among taxa, especially at the top of the trophic network including insectivorous bats. Very few studies compared the effects of agricultural practices on such taxa, and overall, only as a com...

Foot-and-mouth disease appeared as devastating storms that swept UK and Taiwan in recent epidemics. Many observations attributed these disasters to the extensive countrywide movements of animals, and the intensive nature of the livestock industry. However, there is no mathematical model incorporating these two factors in its framework. In this project, we combined formal analytical models, Arti...