For many millions in the developing world, land is central to livelihoods, food security, even identity – the result of a direct dependence on agriculture and natural resources. It is not surprising that a recent wave of large-scale land acquisitions in Africa, Central and Southeast Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America has sparked a major debate.
Includes rising land acquisition in developing countries; threats and opportunities from large-scale land acquisitions; making a virtue of necessity: toward win-win policies; 5 tables of media reports on overseas land investments to secure food supplies, 2006-09.
Prior studies exploring the quantitative relationship between landscape structure metrics and the ecological condition of receiving waters have used a variety of sampling units (e.g., a watershed, or a buffer around a sampling station) at a variety of spatial scales to generate landscape metrics resulting in little consensus on which scales best describe land-water relationships.
Despite programmes for rural land reform and redistribution around the world, inequitable land distribution and rural poverty remain profound in much of the rural South. Suggests a new approach to land reform and rural development.
1. Patch dynamics is a new, potentially unifying mechanism for the explanation of tree-grass coexistence in savannas. In this scale-explicit paradigm, savannas consist of patches in which a cyclical succession between woody and grassy dominance proceeds spatially asynchronously. The growing ecological and economic problem of shrub encroachment is a natural transient phase in this cycle. 2.
Since the 2005 Land Summit, new approaches to land reform have been on the agenda, yet there remains little clarity on the way forward. The main focus has been on means of accelerating the redistribution of land through new modes of acquiring land. Acquisition is an important matter but if treated in isolation risks mis-specifying the core problems evident in land reform in South Africa.
Women in most rural communities in Africa dominate farm activities in terms of labour
supply and management. Overall, Africa's performance in terms of agricultural
production and productivity remain inadequate and the region has failed to make progress
in food security (Republic of Kenya, 2002). Therefore, successful agricultural reform
Includes why is secure access to land important; secure property rights, economic growth and social justice; the scale of insecure access to land; political contestation; the role of donors; IIED v FIG, contrasting ways of looking at land issues; governance and corruption; recourse to legal remedies; struggling for urban survival; aid instruments; lessons and recommendations from the literature
Paper reviews the South African experience with land reform, and land redistribution in particular, up to the end of 2005.
