Botswana is a semi-arid, middle-income African country that imports 90 percent of its food. Despite its relative prosperity, Botswana also suffers from one of the highest measures of income inequality in the world, persistent poverty, and relatively high levels of food insecurity. The objective of this paper is to explore how political economy, climate change and livelihood dynamics are synergistically impacting household food security.

Gendered relations in resource access and farming are two important intersecting themes of gender studies in a northern rural context. However, conventional analysis and perceptions of the economy conceal the contribution of women within families, in businesses and in the labor market. This article demonstrate the significance of capital to farming women’s engagement with agriculture using a Swedish case study, based on descriptive analyses of data from the Federation of Swedish Farmers.

Land-titling programs, land and forest allocation programs, and projects on state-allocated land for development and investment in Laos have been key drivers of change in land tenure. These have triggered major shifts in land use rights, from customary, to temporary, and then to permanent land use rights. This article explores how government programs to grant land use rights to individual households have affected the way people have been able to acquire and secure land tenure.

Climate change and agriculture influence each other. The effects of climate change on agriculture seem to be predominantly negative, although studies show a large variation in impacts between crops and regions. To compensate for these effects, agriculture can either intensify or expand in area; both of these options increase greenhouse gas emissions. It is therefore likely that such negative effects will increase agriculture’s contribution to climate change, making this feedback a positive, self-reinforcing one.

Agroecology and landscape ecology are two land-use sciences based on ecological principles, but have historically focused on fine and broad spatial scales, respectively. As global demand for food strains current resources and threatens biodiversity conservation, concepts such as multifunctional landscapes and ecologically-analogous agroecosystems integrate ecological concepts across multiple spatial scales.

Multipurpose mosaic (“ecoagriculture”) landscapes can serve the purpose of land sharing to combine objectives of agricultural production and biodiversity conservation. Rewarding the people who shape and maintain those landscapes could act as a mechanism to generate added-value representing an indirect payment for ecosystem services. We investigated the feasibility of such an approach in two areas in Southern Africa differing in spatial configurations, history and socio-economic context.

The objective of this article was to develop a deeper understanding of the interdependences between smallholder farming and the state of environmental management in rural Malawi. We examined the agricultural local governance framework in Malingunde Extension Planning Area (EPA), its contribution to food security and how it conflicts with overall land and forest resources management. The charcoal production process was discussed in line with its implications for agricultural production and environmental sustainability.

A Estratégia de Segurança Alimentar e Nutricional (ESAN II) resulta da evolução da

ESAN I aprovada pelo Governo de Moçambique em 1998, através da Resolução Interna

16/98. A ESAN I foi elaborada na sequência da Cimeira Mundial de Alimentação

(CMA), realizada em Roma em 1996, quando os diversos países se comprometeram a

reduzir a fome para metade até 2015. Este objectivo coincide com o Objectivo número

um do Desenvolvimento do Milénio (ODM), aprovado na Cimeira do Milénio, em 2000.

A new report by IDMC and Gaza-based Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR) offers the most comprehensive analysis to date on Israel's lethal enforcement of Access-Restricted Areas - (ARA) - live-fire zones imposed by the Israeli military forces on large swathes of the Gaza Strip.

Download the report

Este artigo junta-se aos esforços de muitos outros africanos, entendendo-se por pobreza não só os níveis de rendimento por dia por pessoa, mas também a pobreza como ausência de poder nas relações intra-familiares, entre estas e os demais actores e entre a sociedade no seu todo e os recursos naturais de que se dispõe no Continente Africano.

According to the government agency Acción Social, around six per cent of national territory has been abandoned, while between 3.3 and 4.9 million people have been displaced by conflict and violence in Colombia. Roughly half of the internally displaced families owned or occupied land before their displacement. Almost all of them have lost it as a result.

Forced displacement in Colombia is primarily a way to seize agricultural land from peasants and small farmers, and only to a lesser degree the unintended consequence of fighting between warring parties. (...)

Download the report