T he average smallholder farmer in Malawi is tasked to feed a family of five on a farm of less than one hectare in size (NSO, 2008). The intensification of land through, for example, fertilizer use plays a prominent role in Malawi’s policy to increase the productivity potential of smallholder farmers. With the population almost doubling in the last twenty years (NSO, 2008), additional measures ...

Most commentary on Zimbabwe‟s land reform insists that agricultural production has almost totally collapsed, that food insecurity is rife, that rural economies are in precipitous decline, that political „cronies‟ have taken over the land and that farm labour has all been displaced. This paper however argues that the story is not simply one of collapse and catastrophe; it is much more nuanced an...

Urban growth reduces open space in and around cities, impacting biodiversity and ecosystem services. Using land-cover and population data, we examined land consumption and open space loss between 1990 and 2000 for all 274 metropolitan areas in the contiguous United States. Nationally, 1.4 million ha of open space was lost, and the amount lost in a given city was correlated with population growt...

• Observe that land sales markets between large landlords and small peasants are thin/segmented because: 1. Land is overpriced for small buyers relative to value in use (borrowing capacity): the price of land internalizes tax advantages, expected speculative gains, wealth sheltering, social status effects, and collateral value. 2. Smallholders do not have access to long term credit. 3. Even if ...

This paper investigates the effect that an option to call a mediator has on using voluntary agreements to solve a land conflict using a framed field experiment in the highlands of Ethiopia. A game theoretical model to describe this situation is constructed including a discussion related to social preferences, which subsequently the experimental design is based on. Our results indicate that almo...

Many of the countries of the Pacific region (including Australia and New Zealand) have a British colonial legacy. This history has had wide implications for the development of the region: economically, politically and socially. The cadastral (property based) systems in theses countries have been influenced by British land conveyance and registration practices, and by colonial history. To date, ...

As the end of the 20 century grows nearer, South Africans find themselves entering the postMandela era. Five years after the first democratic government was elected in South Africa, the euphoria of transformation and reconciliation has receded. In its place has come the hard reality that the social and spatial impacts of colonialism and apartheid run very deep. Since the transfer of power in Ju...

Given the year on year decrease of rural farmland and various forms of land degradation through the intrusion of non-farm land uses, the government of Bangladesh has drafted the agrarian reform strategies, primarily to protect the agricultural land from encroachment, conversion, and indiscriminate use. The draft Agricultural Land Protection and Land Use Bill since its inception in 2011 is facin...

The South African land reform programme has been widely criticised for its slow pace as well as its apparent lack of contribution to poverty reduction. However, there is little systematic evidence of the impact of land transfers on their beneficiaries due to data scarcity. This paper combines econometric evidence based on official household surveys with qualitative data collected specifically t...