Discusses the debate around structural adjustment and African agriculture, the history of the Tanzanian cotton sector and farming systems in the main cotton growing area of the country before reporting the results of a small survey of cultivators carried out at the end of the 1997/8 seed cotton marketing season. This survey, carried out in the fourth year of market liberalisation, covered crop sales, farming methods, marketing behaviour and perceptions of the marketing system.

Review for sub-Saharan Africa, examines the English-language literature and focuses on four important dimensions of exclusion: (i) exclusion from agricultural land; (ii) exclusion from agricultural livelihood; (iii) exclusion from formal and informal employment; (iv) exclusion from organization and representation.Paper is organized in six sections. The first section discusses concepts of exclusion. The main body of the review examines the four dimensions of exclusion listed above.

Considers the cultural dimension of applying the land information system (LIS) concept to lands held under customary land tenure. The article recognizes that the LIS concept has been developed primarily to serve the needs of countries with a western-style land market where individual land rights are the norm. However, many countries where customary landholdings exist, or predominate, are also interested in establishing LISs to manage their land resources better. The article has three main sections.

This paper explores the dualities in the coexistence within Zimbabwean politics of constitutionalism and legality versus a complex combination of paralegal, supralegal, oppressive and brutal political action, especially as this pertains to elections and land. The analysis is set in the period 1999-2002.

Land has historically been a source of dispute and conflict in Rwanda, compounded by the social unrest which resulted in the 1994 genocide. Up to one million people were killed and three million fled to neighbouring countries, leading to weakened political institutions, infrastructure and human capital. Traditional land allocation systems also suffered.

Overview of a conceptual definition or sustainable land management policies

Livelihoods in Darfur are intimately linked to the conflict. This document considers the livelihoods of the Northern Rizaygat, a group of Arabic-speaking, camel-herding nomads living in the Sudanese states of North, South, and West Darfur. The Northern Rizaygat have achieved notoriety for their role in the Janjaweed, the loose groupings of armed Arab tribesmen, who, since 2003, have been integral players in Darfur’s conflict and instrumental to the Sudanese government’s counterinsurgency campaign.

In the late 1960s the Malawi government established irrigated settlement schemes throughout the country with the goal of promoting the production of rice for export to raise farmers' incomes. A supplementary objective was to promote the development of a sense of nationhood among people of different ethnic backgrounds settled on the schemes. The permanent settlement of people and their investment of surplus incomes in the local economy was envisaged to spur the growth of rural towns.

Recent years have seen pastoralist communities in Tanzania becoming increasingly impoverished and vulnerable, due to  livestock diseases, drought, fluctuating market prices and unfavourable policies. This paper discusses strategies to address the last of these factors with reference to the Ereto-Ngorongoro Pastoralist Project, which was set up in response to growing concern about the unprecedented and rising levels of poverty among pastoralists in Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA).

Brief summary of FAO’s experience in agrarian reform and the most relevant activities of the current programme related to this field. It argues that the type of agrarian reform that considers the redistribution of land from the rich to the poor either through confiscation or through pre-emptive buyouts belongs to the past. However, this does not mean that Member Nations have stopped seeking ways to improve access to productive resources (land, water, etc.) as a cornerstone to their rural development policy.

This paper analyzes the impact of land titling on child health and education in Argentina. The authors exploit a natural experiment in the allocation of land titles across squatters in a poor suburban area of Buenos Aires, Argentina, to evaluate the impact of property rights on child health and education outcomes.

A new Land Act introduced in Angola in 2004 demonstrates a genuine interest in the protection of the customary land rights of rural communities and underlines rural communities’ rights to their land. However, the documentation of customary rights in Angolan agriculture is limited. This report describes and analyses customary land rights in two villages in Huambo province, both situated some 60 to 90 km from the provincial capital. The report demonstrates that despite of many similarities there exist huge differences in agricultural practices and in how customary land rights are conceived.