Using the framework of the Land Use and Cover Change (LUCC) Science/Research Plan this study takes 152 studies of deforestation in different regions of varying size from around the tropics and analyses them to assess how important different causes of deforestation really are.

Improved agriculture in the Drought Prone Uplands (DPUs) depends critically on better water conservation and management. However, there is a high degree of uncertainty surrounding issues of water availability, allocation and local rights. Despite broad similarities in the goals of many programmes, there has been a lack of consistency and coherence among them. The focus of this paper is on the difficulties of developing a coherent analytical framework that would enable questions of technical and institutional choice to be addressed systematically.

Future Agricultures Working Paper 73Emmanuel Sulle and Fred NelsonDecember 2013

Following initial enthusiasm in the post-war period, land reform fell out of favour with donors from the early 1970s. Nonetheless, sporadic efforts to redistribute land continued: Ethiopia in 1975, Zimbabwe in 1980 and a renewed commitment to land reform in the Philippines in 1988. These reforms stemmed from shifts in the domestic balance of power between landowners and landless workers and peasants, which were quite independent of donor policies.

This case study deals with the South African government policies for restitution and redistribution of land to people in rural areas who were deprived of it due to racially discriminatory laws and practice. Its main focus is on how the interactions between civil society and the state in the several phases of land reform through the 1990s reflect some key issues of governance, eg.

Manual offers guidelines for using rapid appraisal methods to gather information on tenure and natural resource management. It translates the concepts elaborated in Community Forestry Note 5, rapid appraisal of tree and land tenure. The author defines rapid appraisal as "a family of methodologies designed to encourage the participation of local communities in the collection and use of information to improve their livelihood.

Environmental policy should be inspired by the recognition that the environment is everyone’s business; all social actors must be involved in environmental management. Policies that implicitly subsidize a wasteful and environmentally destructive use of resources are pervasive: reforms should command a high priority on economic as well as environmental grounds. Compared to regulation, market-based instruments are little used but they can be more efficient; they can also produce revenues to finance environmental improvements.

There is clearly a link between agricultural incentives and the environment, but quantitative data on such topics as soil quality and land use are inadequate for sound analysis.Mamingi studies the literature on how agricultural prices and macroeconomic policies affect agricultural supply and how that supply affects the environment. He addresses the question of how effective agricultural incentives are in boosting the agricultural supply, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.Certain generalizations are common in the literature: Farmers are rational.

The present century has seen a significant real increase in resource conflict in semi-arid Africa. The most important causes of this are human population increase and the globalisation of the economy. Such conflicts reflect both point resources (mines, farms, reserves) and ecozonal conflicts (water, grazing and hunting rights). Although attempts to involve the community have been partially successful in relation to reserved land, conflict over extensive and patchy common property resources such as wetlands and grazing has made them more difficult to conserve and manage.

This case study of Zimbabwe has examined developments in biotechnology against the background of a well-developed national agricultural research, plant breeding and seeds system. It has then assessed the constraints to biotechnology research, technology development and diffusion in the light of the resources available and the technology transfer mechanisms in place for different groups of farmers.

This paper estimates the poverty reducing impact of land access in rural Uganda. The paper firstly states that land acquired through markets or otherwise may play an important role for rural household welfare. Conversely, there are concerns that poverty reduction effect of access to land through the market may be inadequate, due to land markets that can increase land concentration among the rich and inefficient producers.