In line with the conventional view that customary land rights impede agricultural development, the traditional tenure system in Nigeria has been perceived to obstruct the achievement of efficient development and agricultural transformation. This led to the Land Use Act (LUA) of 1978.

Food First Backgrounder, Spring 2014, Vol. 20, No. 1

Introduction: Land, Race and the Agrarian Crisis

The disastrous effects of widespread land grabbing and land concentration sweeping the globe do not affect all farmers equally. The degree of vulnerability to these threats is highest for smallholders, women and people of color—the ones who grow, harvest, process and prepare most of the world’s food.

News, views and experiences of policy makers, practitioners, academics and communities on making rangelands more secure.

Friends of the Earth’s report, ‘What’s your pension funding? How UK institutional investors finance the global land grab’, highlights the investments of UK institutional investors, such as British Airways Pension Fund, Legal & General and Standard Life, in companies accused of grabbing land, destroying the environment, and undermining sustainable livelihoods.

This briefing paper makes the case for proactive business engagement in respecting land rights and ensuring legal, fair and inclusive practices on land use, access to natural resources and equitable development opportunities. It outlines key challenges, provides an overview of existing instruments that can help companies address issues related to land, and points to practical entry points for improved business practices.

This brief considers the benefits and costs of alternative tenure and institutional arrangements and the impact of existing legal and policy frameworks on the sustainability and equity of pastoral production systems under three categories of landownership: (1) state ownership; (2) individual ownership; and (3) common property... Achieving efficient, equitable, and sustainable rangeland management depends on the costs and benefits of alternative systems. These costs and benefits, in turn, depend on agroecological, sociocultural, and economic characteristics.

This report provides an overview of the achievements and learning from the Phase 1 of the Tenure Security Learning Initiative - East & Southern Africa (TSLI-ESA) Project. It also looks ahead to strategies for scaling up the initiatives, and to the second phase of the TSLI-ESA project. The main objective of the TSLI-ESA Phase 1 Project has been to identify common land and natural resources tenure issues and to enhance lesson sharing and knowledge management on land-related tools and approaches amongst the various projects, country stakeholders and partners.

Land rights and the systems that
administer them can vary significantly across the world and
within countries (World Bank 2003). For a number of reasons,
land rights may be unclear or insecure. Securing land rights
plays an important role in driving economic growth and
poverty reduction. In recent years there has been increasing
awareness of the relevance of land tenure issues to food
security, climate change, rapid urbanization, informality,

This report examines land access,
disputes, and dispute resolution in Timor-Leste, using
findings from the justice module included in an extension of
the 2007 Timor-Leste Survey of Living Standards (TLSLS2) and
a review of relevant social-science literature. The
extension survey (TLSLSx) revisited a nationally
representative subsample of the TLSLS2 between April and
October 2008. The respondent for the justice module was

As India continues to urbanize and move
towards a less agricultural- and more industry-based
economy, land demands will continue to grow. Its urban
population is expected to increase by more than 200 million
by 2030, requiring 4 to 8 million hectares of land for
residential use alone. Demands for infrastructure and
industry could add a similar amount, summing to total land
demand of 5 to10 percent of the land area currently used for

This is covers land administration and
reform in Sub-Saharan Africa, and is highly relevant to all
developing countries around the world. It provides simple
practical steps to turn the hugely controversial subject of
"land grabs" into a development opportunity by
improving land governance to reduce the risks of
dispossessing poor landholders while ensuring mutually
beneficial investors' deals. This book shows how Sub

Rwanda's completion, in 2012/13, of
a land tenure regularization program covering the entire
country allows the use of administrative data to describe
initial performance and combine the data with household
surveys to quantify to what extent and why subsequent
transfers remain informal, and how to address this. In
2014/15, annual volumes of registered sales ranged between
5.6 percent for residential land in Kigali and 0.1 percent