Nutrient-balance assessments are valuable tools for delineating the consequences of farming on soil fertility. Various approaches and methods for different situations have been used. This bulletin presents a state-of-the-art overview of nutrient-balance studies. It brings out the evolution of the approaches and methods, provides for comparisons among them, features the improvements made, and highlights remaining issues. The analysis would be useful in further development of the assessment methodologies as reliable tools for devising time-scale soil fertility management interventions.

As the Government of Kenya treads the path to economic recovery, every Kenyan should be at home with the fact that many forms of economic development activities damage the natural resources upon which the economies are based. Nationally and internationally, a major environmental and development challenge is how to maintain the equilibrium between population, ecosystems and development.

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The remit of this paper is to identify and examine “success” stories in combating desertification.

This report identifies FAO’s activities concerning access to natural resources (ANR), and identifies other organizations that use explicitly or implicitly a sustainable livelihoods approach in relation to ANR. The report constitutes Output 2.1 of the work plan of the FAO LSP Sub-programme 3.1 ("Building Stakeholder capacity to improve access to natural resources for the rural poor").

Este artigo junta-se aos esforços de muitos outros africanos, entendendo-se por pobreza não só os níveis de rendimento por dia por pessoa, mas também a pobreza como ausência de poder nas relações intra-familiares, entre estas e os demais actores e entre a sociedade no seu todo e os recursos naturais de que se dispõe no Continente Africano.

This toolkit provides a framework for main-streaming gender in rural development activities.It addresses the lack of conceptual and practical tools in the area of sustainable land management. Its modular design allows for individual approaches and targets development staff at the project and programme levels, with the aim of helping them to find practical ways of dealing with gender issues in rural development activities.

Over the last decade, following the doi moi reforms, the Vietnamese government has formally recognised the household as the basic unit of production and allocated land use rights to households. Under the 1993 Land Law these rights can be transferred, exchanged, leased, inherited, and mortgaged. A land market is emerging in Vietnam but is still constrained for various reasons. Additionally, lack of flexibility of land use is an issue.

In November 2000, the World Bank (WB) and the Brazilian Federation for Direct Planting into Crop Residue (FEBRAPDP) organized the third Study Tour on “Producer-Led Rural Organizations for Sustainable Land Management” (PRO-SLM), with particular emphasis on notillage systems (NT).1 The Study Tour followed a 10-day itinerary of over 1,000 km through Southern Brazil, covering Paraná and Santa Catarina States, two states which received WB support through land and micro-watershed management projects.