"The contribution of sustainable agriculture and land management to sustainable development" - This brief discusses the potential for sustainable agriculture to contribute towards sustainable development with a particular focus on developing countries. It briefly describes different sustainable agricultural practices and the extent of their adoption, identifies constraints to their further adoption, and presents some actions and policy options that could accelerate the widespread adoption of sustainable agricultural practices.

In most low-income countries, rural households depend on mixed rain-fed agriculture/livestock production, which is very risky. Due to numerous market failures, there are few ways to shift risks to third parties.

EfD in Ethiopia, the Environmental Economics Policy Forum for Ethiopia (EEPFE) will be co-hosting a one day workshop with Forum for Environment on Tuesday 8 September 2009.

The main theme of the workshop will be on accounting and taking stock of land, soil and forestry resources in Ethiopia.

The workshop will be chaired by Dr Alemu Mekonenn, Coordinator of EEPFE.

Dr Menale Kassie, EEPFE Research Associate will present papers related to the theme of the workshop. The papers being presented are:

Using a choice experiment approach, the authors investigated what governs Ethiopian farmers’ in-situ conservation decisions and crop-variety preferences.

Ethiopia is one of the sub-Saharan countries of Africa which liberalized their economies and developed poverty reduction strategies that underpin market-led strategies for broad-based agricultural development and economic growth. The country has successively adopted economic reform programs that aimed to open up the agricultural marketing system for active participation of the private sector.