Terri Raney

• PhD
• Retired at Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Numerous sources provide evidence of trends and patterns in average farm size and farmland distribution worldwide, but they often lack documentation, are in some cases out of date, and do not provide comprehensive global and comparative regional estimates. This article uses agricultural census data (provided at the country level in Web Appendix) to...

Increasing the openness of information and data on agricultural land use in the developing world is important. We can do more to take advantage of complementarities among agricultural census data and other sources of information. And it is also important that we fully exploit data and information, such as that of agricultural censuses, in the forms...

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book, Gender in Agriculture: Closing the Knowledge Gap. The book grew out of collaborative work done for Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) flagship report, The State of Food and Agriculture 2010–11, Women in agriculture: Closing the gender gap for development, highlig...

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) produced a 2011 report on women in agriculture with a clear and urgent message: Agriculture underperforms because half of all farmers—women—lack equal access to the resources and opportunities they need to be more productive. This book builds on the report’s conclusions by providing,...

Farmers experiment and innovate continuously and have done so for millennia. Their efforts led to the domestication of the many crops and livestock species used in the modern food system. Formal scientific research in agriculture is a relatively recent phenomenon and has been largely responsible for the enormous growth in agricultural yields since...

Malnutrition in all its forms – undernutrition, micronutrient deficiencies, and overweight and obesity – imposes unacceptably high economic and social costs on countries at all income levels. Improving nutrition and reducing these costs requires a multisectoral approach that begins with food and agriculture and includes complementary interventions...

This JRC Scientific and Technical report provides proceedings of the “International workshop on socio-economic impacts of genetically modified (GM) crops” which was co-organised by JRC-IPTS and FAO in Seville on 23-24 November 2011. JRC-IPTS has been requested to review for policy makers the main findings of scientists active in this field world-wi...

World agriculture faces enormous challenges in the coming decades. To feed the world adequately in 2050, agricultural production in developing economies will need to nearly double. Incremental production will mainly come from increases in yields or cropping intensities. This chapter focuses on the potential of genetically modified (GM) crops to con...

Women make significant contributions to the rural economy in all developing country regions. Their roles differ across regions, yet they consistently have less access than men to the resources and opportunities they need to be more productive. Increasing women’s access to land, livestock, education, financial services, extension, technology and rur...

Livestock contribute 40 percent of the global value of agricultural output and support the livelihoods and food security of almost a billion people. Rapidly rising incomes and urbanization, combined with underlying population growth, are driving demand for meat and other animal products in many developing countries. These changes and the speed with...

The spread of agricultural biotechnologies, and the conditions conducive to their development, have economic, social and environmental implications. This paper explores these implications for the realization of the right to food emphasizing genetic engineering as the most controversial biotechnological application. First, this paper will examine th...

A new green revolution based on genetically modified crops can help reduce poverty and hunger—but only if formidable institutional challenges are met

This important collection prepared by Robert E. Evenson and Terri Raney - leading scholars in the field - focuses on one of the most controversial issues of our time - the genetic modification of agricultural produce. Whilst the US and Canada are supportive of GM crops, the European Union urges other countries to involve the 'precautionary principl...

Transgenic crops are being adopted rapidly at the global level, but only a few developing countries are growing them in significant quantities. Why are these crops so successful in some countries but not in others? Farm level profitability ultimately determines whether farmers adopt and retain a new technology, but this depends on much more than te...

As an introduction to food aid this paper reviews various definitions of food aid and terminology used by practitioners and academics. It also briefly examines the size of food aid relative to Official Development Assistance, trade and food production in recipient countries and recognizes that in many instances food aid may play an important role i...

The past four decades have seen two waves of agricultural technology development and diffusion to developing countries. The first wave was initiated by the Green Revolution in which an explicit strategy for technology development and diffusion targeting poor farmers in poor countries made improved germplasm freely available as a public good. The se...

The pattern of crop genetic diversity has changed over the past two centuries with the modernization of agriculture, accelerating with the advent of the green revolution. Since the green revolution, the locus of agricultural research has shifted from the public to the private sector. The growing importance of the private sector in agricultural R&D...

The Green Revolution came about as the result of an internationally-coordinated programme of public research and development (R&D) and that explicitly pro-moted the free international transfer of improved germplasm as public goods. Mil-lions of small farmers in developing countries benefited directly from this first wave of globalization in agricul...

In a global general equilibrium analysis, an FTAA excluding the United States erodes U.S. agricultural trade preferences and export gains achieved under NAFTA. Participation in an FTAA increases U.S. agriculture exports $740 million, with gains in Central American and Caribbean Markets more than offsetting declines in NAFTA, Asia, and Europe.

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in "The State of Food and Agriculture 2003-04", examines the potential of agricultural biotechnology to address the current and future needs of the world's poor and food insecure. Critics of biotechnology claim that technology is not the answer to the problems of poverty and hunger. They...