Between 1970 and 2009, India has overcome many infrastructural, market, and institutional challenges to transition from a dairy importing nation to the top producer in the world of both buffalo and goat milk, as well as the sixth largest producer of cow milk. In India, at least 100 million households are involved in farming and 70 million have dairy cattle. In India, dairy production is important for employment, income levels, and the nutritional quality of diets. Milk production in India is dominated by smallholder farmers including landless agricultural workers. For example, 80 percent of milk comes from farms with only two to five cows. A well-known smallholder dairy production initiative, Operation Flood, laid the foundation for a dairy cooperative movement that presently ensures returns on dairy investments to 13 million members. Operation Flood also advanced infrastructural improvements to enable the procurement, processing, marketing, and production of milk and to link India's major metropolitan cities with dairy cooperatives nationwide. This intervention transformed the policy environment, brought significant technological advancements into the rural milk sector, established many village cooperatives, and oriented the dairy industry toward markets.

Assessing impacts of public investments has long captured the interest and attention of the development community. This paper presents the evolution of different methods and approaches used for ex ante appraisal, monitoring, project evaluation, and impact assessment over the last five decades. Among these tools, impact assessment (IA) conducted retrospectively comes closest to providing the proof of development effectiveness. It is defined as the systematic analysis of the significant or lasting changes in people's lives brought about by a given action or series of actions in relation to a counterfactual. There are three basic types of retrospective IAs: macro-level IAs that focus on the contribution of developmental efforts to an impact goal aggregated at a sector or a system level; micro-level impact evaluations (IEs) concerned with estimating the average effect of an intervention on outcomes at the beneficiary level; and micro-level ex post impact analysis concerned with total effects of a development effort after the outputs are scaled-up. Ex post IAs have evolved and expanded over the decades in both breadth and depth of analysis in response to evolving development themes and methodological advancements. The increased emphasis on learning from evaluations has also seen responses from both quantitative and qualitative camps of the evaluation community. The paper argues that generation of robust knowledge that feeds into making developmental policies and investment decisions requires a hierarchical and cumulative approach to "improving the proof" through rigorous and a variety of impact assessment methods applied incrementally at the project, program and system level. Subjecting as many development interventions as resources allow to rigorous impact assessment based on a common framework can help build a critical body of evidence on impacts of development interventions, which can then be subjected to meta-analyses to help assimilate results across different studies and build a knowledge base on what works and what does not.

Humanity has made enormous progress in the past 50 years toward eliminating hunger and malnutrition. Some five billion people--more than 80 percent of the world's population--have enough food to live healthy, productive lives. Agricultural development has contributed significantly to these gains, while also fostering economic growth and poverty reduction in some of the world's poorest countries.

The world has made enormous progress in the past 50 years toward eliminating hunger and malnutrition. While, in 1960, roughly 30 percent of the world's population suffered from hunger and malnutrition, today less than 20 percent doessome five billion people now have enough food to live healthy, productive lives. Agricultural development has contributed significantly to these gains by increasing food supplies, reducing food prices, and creating new income and employment opportunities for some of the world's poorest people.This book examines where, why, and how past interventions in agricultural development have succeeded. It carefully reviews the policies, programs, and investments in agricultural development that have reduced hunger and poverty across Africa, Asia, and Latin America over the past half century. The 19 successes included here are described in in-depth case studies that synthesize the evidence on the intervention's impact on agricultural productivity and food security, evaluate the rigor with which the evidence was collected, and assess the tradeoffs inherent in each success. Together, these chapters provide evidence of "what works" in agricultural development.

This book is a compilation of information on all basic aspects of mealybugs, as well as management strategies for mealybug species affecting different crop plants in different countries. It highlights the latest information on morphology, cytogenetics, taxonomy, molecular characterization, biology, damage, ecology, natural enemies, ant association, control measures, insecticide resistance and pheromones – essential aspects which will equip researchers to pursue further research on mealybugs. The book examines current trends in the management of mealybugs for a variety of agricultural and horticultural crops, forest plants and mulberry in different countries, while also addressing the negative effects of chemical control methods and presenting success stories of mealybug control that utilize their natural enemies. It offers a valuable guide for crop growers, government officials and other stakeholders in the industry, as well as researchers and students engaged in related research and development activities.

Agrobiodiversity provides most of our food through our interaction with crops and domestic animals. Future global food security is firmly anchored in sound, science-based management of agrobiodiversity. This book presents key concepts of agrobiodiversity management, critically reviewing important current and emerging issues including agricultural development, crop introduction, practical diversity in farming systems, impact of modern crop varieties and GM crops, conservation, climate change, food sovereignty and policies. It will also address claims and misinformation in the subject based on sound scientific principles.