Institution: Michigan State University, USA
E-mail: reardon@pilot.msu.edu
Biosummary:
Thomas Reardon received his Ph.D. in agricultural economics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1984; during the doctoral studies he spent two years in Peru. From 1984 to 1986, he was a Rockefeller Post-Doctoral Fellow stationed in Burkina Faso, working with ICRISAT and University of Ouagadougou and affiliated with IFPRI. From 1986 to 1991 he was a Research Fellow at IFPRI, and from 1992 to present is an associate professor at Michigan State University. During 1999 he is on sabbatical at the FAO Regional Office for Latin America and the Caribbean in Santiago de Chile.
Title: Links between poverty and the environment: focus on asset categories and investment poverty, with illustrations from Latin America and Africa, and implications for policy and research. Co-authors: Stephen Vosti, Julio Berdegue.
Theme: 3D
This paper presents a framework for analyzing the links between poverty and the environment in rural areas of developing countries. It uses the concept of "investment poverty" and relates it to other measures of poverty in analysis of these links. The notion of poverty is examined in the context of categories of assets and categories of environmental change, with particular focus on farm household income generation and investment strategies as determinants of the links. The strength and direction of the poverty/environment links are shown to change depending on the composition of the assets held by the rural poor and the types of environmental problems they face. Policy strategies need to focus on conditioning variables that affect market development, community wealth, infrastructure, household asset distribution, and the affordability and appropriateness of natural resource conservation technologies. Illustrations from recent empirical studies in Latin America and Africa are presented.