Documento exploratorio que analiza las acciones y demandas de las principales organizaciones sociales que representan a asalariados rurales y productores familiares en los últimos 10 años, describe los principales conflictos locales suscitados en torno al acceso a la tierra y plantea estimaciones aproximativas sobre la cantidad de solicitantes de tierra, tanto a nivel nacional como regional.

Desarrollo rural en Uruguay
Gerardo Evia*  
 Uruguay ha sido, hasta no hace mucho tiempo, un país esencialmente ganadero. Desde el siglo XVII, cuando se introdujeron las primeras cabezas de vacunos,  hasta la fecha, el cuero, luego el tasajo, y más tarde la carne y la lana han sido el soporte de la economía del país, modelando el desarrollo de una sociedad que depende sustancialmente de las exportaciones de origen agropecuario.

Refugiados del Modelo Agroexportador es la publicación de los resultados de una investigación llevada a cabo en el 2006 en comunidades campesinas paraguayas que viven rodeadas por los monocultivos de soja. Este estudio interdisciplinario detalla la dinámica de empobrecimiento y degeneración de las condiciones de vida de las familias que lleva a la expulsión rural y la migración hacia las ciudades. Esta investigación de Base Investigaciones Sociales fue llevada a cabo por un equipo multidisciplinario e internacional de investigadores, bajo la dirección del sociólogo Tomas Palau.

The Cocoa Research Institute of Ghana (CRIG), with support from the World Cocoa Foundation (WCF) the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), performed the Ghana Land Tenure Baseline Survey, the first of its kind survey of tenure rights among cocoa farmers in Ghana. CRIG surveyed almost 1,800 cocoa farmers operating 3,900 cocoa plots regarding various land tenure issues within customary sharecropping arrangements and on owner-managed land. This report describes the findings from the Survey.

This article explores the gendered experience of monocrop oil-palm expansion in a Hibun Dayak community in Sanggau District, West Kalimantan (Indonesia). It shows how the expanding corporate plantation and contract farming system has undermined the position and livelihood of indigenous women in this already patriarchal community. The shifting of land tenure from the community to the state and the practice of the ‘family head’ system of smallholder plot registration has eroded women's rights to land, and women are becoming a class of plantation labour.

The Rwandan government's ongoing reconfiguration of the agricultural sector seeks to facilitate increased penetration of smallholder farming systems by domestic and international capital, which may include some land acquisition (‘land grabbing’) as well as contract farming arrangements. Such contracts are arranged by the state, which sometimes uses coercive mechanisms and interventionist strategies to encourage agricultural investment.

This article shows that credit market imperfections have important implications for the distribution of policy rents. In a model with land as fixed factor and credit market imperfections, when an area payment is given, land rents go up by more than the subsidy. On aggregate farms may lose from the subsidy. The results depend on the extent to which subsidies have direct and indirect effects on the credit constraints, on whether farms rent or own land, and on farm heterogeneity.

This illustrated report examines four types of agricultural settlement in the Wetsern Cape

• Those  initiated by farm owners on large estates with minimal state involvement 
• Projects initiated by farm owners to provide workers with tenure security involving sub division of their property 
• Projects initiated by farm owners to move workers to new or existing settlements off- farm 
• Projects initiated by government to develop new settlements respond to the needs of displaced rural people 

Land, and in particular agricultural land, is central to livelhoods in rural Zambia. Zambia is characterised by a dual legal system of customary and statutory law and by dual land tenure, with state land and customary land. A first wave of socialist-oriented reforms took place after independence in 1964, which abolished previously existing freehold land in favour of leasehold. Subsequent changes in government policies under the influence of structural adjustment programmes and a new government in 1991 paved the way for a market-driven land reform.