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.

The purpose of this guide is to provide support to those who are assessing and designing appropriate responses to food insecurity and rural development situations. This guide aims to show where and why land tenure is an important issue in food security and sustainable rural livelihoods. The main objective of these guidelines is to provide detailed suggestions for consideration of land tenure issues in rural development policy.

This paper examines the current wave of land tenure reform in eastern and southern Africa. It discusses how far tenure reform reflects a shift in powers over property from centre to periphery. A central question is whether tenure reform is designed to deliver to rural smallholders greater security of tenure and greater control over the regulation and transfer of these rights.Policy conclusions include:whilst diverse in initial objective, and uneven in delivery, tenure reforms address a remarkably common set of concerns.

The poor adapt and learn to live with poverty in a variety of ways. They also try to cope with shocks from events such as droughts, floods and loss of employment. Environmental resources play a vital role in their survival strategies. As the poor depend on environmental resources, one can expect them to have a stake in their preservation. Much of the damage done to natural resources is by others. Thus deforestation is much more an outcome of commercial logging for timber than fuelwood gathering by the poor.

In urban areas of Cote d'Ivoire, human capital is the endowment that best explains welfare changes over time. In rural areas, physical capital especially the amount of land and farm equipment owned matters most.Empirical investigations of poverty in developing countries tend to focus on the incidence of poverty at a particular point in time. If the incidence of poverty increases, however, there is no information about how many new poor have joined the existing poor and how many people have escaped poverty.Yet this distinction is of crucial policy importance.

At 3 to 4 percent a year, the displacement rate for the Slovenian labor force in 1990 93 was higher than that for the North American labor force during a major recession in the 1980s. But patterns of displacement were similar.Unusually rich administrative data sets covering both firms and workers enabled Orazem, Vodopivec, and Wu to study displacement in Slovenia during 1987 93.They describe displacement trends and the characteristics of displaced workers, comparing them to those in North America during a major recession.

Wage levels are an issue of concern across the globe as individuals, companies and governments wrestle with how wages paid to workers relate to costs of living, corporate and national competitiveness, profitability and broader macroeconomic trends and challenges.

This report examines wages in the tea industry with a focus in three case study areas: Malawi, West Java (Indonesia) and Assam (India). It looks at hired labour on plantations and, in particular, tea pluckers. 

Explores how the institutions of property rights and collective action play a particularly important role in the application of technologies for agricultural and natural resource management.Technologies with long time frames tend to require tenure security to provide sufficient incentives for adoption, while those that operate on a large spatial scale will require collective action to coordinate.

The application of the incremental cost assessment to biodiversity has always been uncertain. This paper seeks to demonstrate that the concept is a workable one in biodiversity. This paper has a twofold aim:1. to make explicit the strategic and logical approach to incremental cost assessment- to demonstrate that it is replicable and applicable to all GEF projects2. to apply this strategic and logical approach to specific case examples (or paradigm cases)
- these paradigms will provide operational guidance at the more practical level

The study was conducted to determine whether the gender difference in wealth and land allocation between male and female farmers in male-headed households is manifested in soil fertility indicators. It determined chemical fertility levels (fertility indicators) in the composite topsoil samples from 5 woman-owned plots and 5 man-owned plots in Ntanzi village, Uganda, on a Rhodic Ferralsol. A similar study was conducted on 8 woman-owned and 8 man-owned plots in Buggala Island, Uganda, on a Ferralic Arenosol.