Isulat sa patlang kung ang pahayag ay ng epekto ng rebolusyon o panahon ng siyentipiko,enlightenment o industrial.

The term 'livelihoods' has become increasingly important in development theory and practice, as it is seen to encompass a wide range of concerns, and to allow inclusion of the broad range of people's activities and assets in considering how they support themselves, rather than focusing more narrowly on economic, income-generating or formal activities. One way in which this concept has been developed has been through the formulation of sustainable livelihood frameworks. Many different frameworks have been developed by many different actors and organisations, each with their own particular emphases, strengths, and weaknesses.

2.1.1 UK Department for International Development (DFID) sustainable livelihoods framework

Source: redrawn from DFID (1999) p. 1.

Frameworks such as this aim to represent the main factors affecting people's livelihoods and the relationships between these factors. They are not definitive and should be seen as tools highlighting the complexities involved in thinking about and interacting with livelihoods.

One of the key features of DFID's framework is its emphasis on livelihoods assets and on the different types of capital that make up the 'assets pentagon'. The framework stresses first that even poor people have assets (and development interventions should work from people's strengths, their assets, rather than promote dependency by emphasising their weaknesses and problems), and second that people have many different kinds of asset (or capital) and of livelihood strategy and income.

We now explore these important strands of livelihoods by considering two sets of literature that illuminate our understanding of the role and importance of assets in livelihoods: literature on famine and on non-farm activities in rural livelihoods.

Famine

There is a rich and substantial literature concerned with exploring and explaining the causes of famine and the vulnerability of poor people to these causes. In general terms, famine is where people do not have enough food, leading to a major deficit in consumption of basic food and nutrition requirements. This lack of food may be due to environmental causes reducing crop yields, eg pest or disease attack or too little or too much water. It may also be due to economic constraints such as having too little money to purchase inputs or a shortage of land or labour to cultivate sufficient crops. These may be termed production failures, where, for whatever reason, not enough food has been grown.

Following seminal work by Amartya Sen (Sen 1981), however, much of the literature has been concerned with other, perhaps less obvious but more ubiquitous, causes of famine: this is where there is sufficient food in a locality or market system to meet people's needs, but other factors present a barrier or constraint on people's abilities to access that food. Such inability to access otherwise available food is termed exchange failure. Such constraints or barriers include civil unrest or poor infrastructure preventing or limiting transportation of food to certain areas or at particular times. A particularly important form of exchange failure is where food prices are too high in relation to the income and financial resources of poor people for them to be able to buy food. Sen uses the term entitlements failure to describe the inability of people to obtain food because they lack resources with which to buy or otherwise obtain it from others.

Vulnerability to famine is therefore a function of people's ability physically to access food and of their ability to exchange the assets at their disposal for food. Swift (1993) identified the following range of assets which may be important in determining people's ability to obtain food.