established in 1975, provides research-based policy solutions to sustainably reduce poverty and end hunger and malnutrition. The Institute conducts research, communicates results, optimizes partnerships, and builds capacity to ensure sustainable food production, promote healthy food systems, improve markets and trade, transform agriculture, build resilience, and strengthen institutions and governance. Gender is considered in all of the Institute's work. IFPRI collaborates with partners around the world, including development implementers, public institutions, the private sector, and farmers' organizations. IFPRI is a member of the CGIAR Consortium.

Compared to other continents, the economic growth performance of Sub-Saharan Africa has been poor over the last four decades. Likewise, progress in agricultural development has been limited and the Green Revolution left Africa almost untouched. The question raised in the literature is whether the poor performance is a question of poor policies or of an unfavorable biophysical environment (policy versus destiny). This paper, with a broad perspective, analyzes adaptation of current land use to environmental conditions in Africa and compares the physical resource base of Africa with Asia. In doing so, we search for unifying principles that can have operational consequences for agricultural development. We argue that some specificities of the natural resource base, namely local homogeneity and spatial diversity of the predominant Basement Complex soils, imply that simple fertilizer strategies may not produce the yield increases obtained elsewhere.

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Most of the chapters of the Book 1 report on empirical findings of cross sectional or panel estimates for farm or household models, occasionally of sector models. These models generally conform to profit or utility maximization, often using duality theory. The authors emphasize that heterogeneity of commodities and households should duly be accounted for. They point to the recurrent problems of endogeneity of explanatory variables, call for adequate testing of rational expectations hypothesis, the identification of credit constraints, and imperfections in the price transmission from consumer to producer. The Handbook offers thorough and extensive surveys of literature, more than it gives guidelines or techniques for research. The upcoming Book 2 will expectedly describe the role of agriculture in a wider economic setting, but within this Book 1, because the editors do not include linking sections that cross reference between chapters, it is left to the reader to identify the role and place of the various chapters in the field of agricultural economics and agriculture in general. As agricultural production and technical change are now discussed without reference to biological potentials, feed balances and land balances, it seems that the field has lost much of its interdisciplinary inspiration. This is regrettable.

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