From the front cover: "The rural smallholder of the South is the epicenter of extreme poverty and hunger. Small farmers face a vicious cycle of vulnerability, intervention, disease and environmental degradation. At the same time they are major food providers. One question of global concern is: What are the challenges to rural livelihoods that are intimately dependent on land and natural resources? Researchers from the South and North address this issue through interdisciplinary analyses of rural realities in Africa, Latin America, India and Sweden. This study is a powerful wake-up call. It is an appeal to policy makers at international and national levels, researchers, aid bureaucracies and civil society to redirect strategies for development in order to better capture the socioeconomic, institutional and cultural complexities of rural lives and people's aspirations." - from Amzon