Today’s agriculture offers new opportunities, suggests pathways out of poverty and remains the basis for sustainable development and poverty reduction even in the 21st century. Three out of every four poor people in the developing countries still live in rural areas. More than 40% of them live on less than $2 a day, 880 million live in chronic poverty (less than $1/day) and most of their livelihoods depend on agriculture. Promoting agriculture is therefore necessary for taking the pathway out of poverty. The SSA countries’ agriculture accounts for over 1/3 of their GDP and is the source of income and employment for nearly 2/3 of their population. Despite the natural resources in many of these countries to diversify their economies, agriculture is likely to remain the main source of livelihood in the coming years.Their efforts to increase agricultural production made in global agricultural production and trade are going through dramatic changes that raise anew the fear of Malthusian food scarcities. Most threatening for the developing countries is the failure to reach a trade agreement on agriculture in the Doha Round. That failure left intact the high subsidies of around 30 percent that the US and the EU give to their farmers, thus leaving the world prices of agricultural products highly distorted. It also gave incentive for a different organization of world trade in regional trade agreements that tend to leave out the least developed countries (LDCs). The economies of most of the latter countries are open to imports of heavily subsidized basic food products from the developed markets and their own exports of agricultural products often face high obstacles in the form of tariffs, quotas, food safety standards and other restrictions. A second dramatic change was the introduction and widespread use of GMOs that are changing the entire structure and potential of agricultural production and trade. The revolutionary advances in biotechnology can offer huge benefits to small farmers and poor consumers, but currently most investments in biotechnology concentrate in the private sector and driven by commercial interests. This leads to a limited impact on the productivity of small landholder in the LDCs. A third dramatic change is the large scale production of certain crops for bio-fuel. This development is still undergoing, because one study estimates that bio-fuel is inefficient, more costly and/or more damaging to the environment than fossil fuel. Other study comes to the opposite conclusions. So far, its huge dose of subsidies mostly from the US had the effect of raising food prices worldwide and making consumers in the LDCs more vulnerable to the high prices and less secure about the direction this development will take in the future. A fourth and potentially most ominous development is the damaging impact of the climate change. According to FAO projections, food security in Africa is likely to be "severely compromised" by the climate change within a generation. About 25 percent of Africa's population does not have easy access to water and that figure may more than double by the 2050s. According to FAO, over 95 percent of Africa’s agriculture depends on rainfall. Their models suggest that even with a minimal rise in global temperatures, crop production in the southern hemisphere will decline.