Poverty is great obstacle towards achieving sustainable development and economic growth, and threatens political and social stability and security. Poverty doesn’t mean only lack of necessities to fulfill individuals’ welfare, but deprivation from opportunities and choices. Though, previous governments-prior to 25th of January revolution embarked a program aiming poor people through an integrated bunch of developmental projects to improve poor people’s quality of life. This program consists of two main parts: first the main development program targeting 1000 poorest villages (according to the economic development ministry, 2008) and second part the integrated development program which targets 151 villages. In order to enhance the governmental initiative and improve the agriculture sector in Egypt, the current study aims at identifying the conditions of these poor communities via targeting two main and important categories which are agricultural laborers and farmers either tenants or renters of the agricultural lands from gender perspectives, besides identify- ing their problems and suggestions to overcome these problems and their relationship with the relevant agricultural institutions and private sector, and finally their suggested policies to enhance and attract investments to the agriculture sector in Egypt, which will eventually lead to application of more convenient measurements and policies to improve poor people’s livelihoods. The study’s results revealed the rooted poverty especially among agricultural laborers either male or female, but mostly among females, as most of them lack skills, and not gathered in one entity, besides low wages and seasonality of the agriculture work. Therefore most of them are willing to shift to other work opportunities. As for farmers, they suffer from many problems such as high agricultural input prices, soil deterioration, irrigation problems, and deteriorated drainage networks and finally lack of agriculture extension services. In light of the previous results, if no serious measurements and actions taken by the government and relevant stakeholders to improve the agriculture system as a whole, and improve laborers capabilities, solving irrigation and drainage problems, and accessing markets, then we will lose our capabilities to face the accelerating challenges and imbalance in our food security and moreover trapped in the vicious poverty cycle.

.The results revealed that The highest proportion of farmers was between 28 and 60 years. Mean values for family size in the different study areas were 5.49, the main occupation of respondents was agriculture (60%) A large share of farmers (70%) received formal education, while (30%) of farmers did not receive any formal education. Farmers in the study area were small-scale farmers, it showed that the average size of land owned was one feddan, the average level of living was 12.19, the average annual gross farm income in the study area was 11362 L_.E per household. All farmers in the study areas were members of the agricultural cooperative, which exist in all villages. Membership of these cooperatives was mandatory for those farmers who had reasonable access to it; 51.5% of farmers have a medium level of cosmopoliteness, 37% have a high level. More than 75% of farmers were falling in the medium level of communication with agricultural information, more than 65% of farmers had a medium level of aspiration, only 1.5% of farmers had a high level of aspiration, The highest proportion of farmers was a medium degree of filiations to community. The results showed that non of the respondents from the sample size had a high level of agricultural modernity, 76.5% had a medium level and 23.5 % only had low level. The coefficients of the logistic model used to investigate factors affecting the modernity of farmers. The chi-square test showed the level of significance of the parameters included in the model (at P 0.01). Modernity of farmers was correctly predicted for 77.5% of the farmers. The factors that contribute to modernity of farmers according to the Wald chi-square statistic were in order of importance: degree of affiliation, cosmopoliteness, family size, farm size, and aspiration level.

The recent study aims to: identify the degree of farmers implementations for the recommendations of the technical rationalization of water use in New valley Governorate. In addition, identifying the independent variables affecting the degree of farmers implementations for the recommendations of the technical rationalization of water use as a dependent variable. In order to accomplish the study objectives, new valley Governorate was selected as a filed study. A systematic random sample of 212 farmers was selected. This sample represents about 5% of  the total farmers in three villages in New valley Governorate. A questionnaire was designed and collected using the personal interview (after it was pre- tested) during may 2011. Then, the data were tabulated and analyzed by using simple correlation coefficient, stepwise regression. The study finding showed that about 14% of the total sample have low level of implementations for the recommendations of the technical rationalization of water use. Medium category represents about 50%, and high category of implementations for the recommendations of the technical rationalization of water use represents about 36% of the total sample. Results revealed by using stepwise regression showed that three variables affected the degree of implementations for the recommendations of the technical rationalizations of water use, and these variables explained about 51% of the total variance of the implementations for the recommendations of the technical rationalization of water use. Those variables were: farmland holding size, respondent attitude towards the extension activities, finally respondent degree of formal social participation.