This book contains the proceedings of an international conference on Sustainable Rural Development in Mountainous Regions with a Focus on Agriculture in the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR) held in July 2004 in Lhasa, hosted by the Tibetan Academy of Agriculture and Animal Sciences (TAAAS) and organised by InWEnt Capacity Building International, Germany, the European Union supported Panam Integrated Rural Development Project (PIRDP), and ICIMOD. The conference reviewed the socioeconomic progress made by TAR in its rural mountain areas and provided a platform for sharing experiences from other similar regions with the aim of identifying suitable policies and strategies for agriculturally related sustainable development. The papers include a review of significant disparities between counties and prefectures and what might be the reasons for them, as well as concerns about the impacts of globalisation and the free market, nutrition, supply of safe drinking water and energy, and improvements in education and health. Government measures would go a long way to solving problems of poverty, but improved coordination, cooperation, and targeting of investments was needed. The unique characteristics could be exploited to capture niche markets for products and services such as organic food products and eco-tourism.