China-Africa development cooperation in the rural sector has received an increased attention by researchers and policy-makers given the advantages and disadvantages of China’s contribution to the local economy. However, there is a lack of more reliable and nuanced findings to provide greater insights into the major issues concerning rural development and resource use. This paper aims to position land tenure and foreign investments linkages as a new research angle for understanding the role of land in sustainable resource use and investments.

Agricultural land values and cash rental rates in South Dakota, by region and by state, are primary topics of this report. The target audience are farmers and ranchers, landowners, ag professionals (lenders, rural appraisers, professional farm managers), and policy makers interested in ag land market trends. This report contains results of the 2011 Farm Real Estate Market Survey, the 21st annual SDSU survey developed to estimate ag land values and cash rental rates by land use in different regions of South Dakota.

Among the remaining tropical forests of lowland Latin America, many are inhabited by indigenous peoples, and the sustainability of their land uses is a point of heated debate in the conservation community. Numerous small-scale studies have documented changes in indigenous land use in individual communities in the context of expanding frontier settlements and markets, but few studies have included larger populations or multiple ethnic groups.

The transition to commercial agriculture is investigated in two communes from three ecological zones (mountain, plains, coastal) in Quang Binh Province, Vietnam. Field investigations were undertaken in late 2006 - early 2007 and again in 2008. One commune in each zone had good road infrastructure and associated market access, while the other had poor road access and was more distant from the market. Two rural households were selected from poor, medium and high wealth categories in each commune, providing 36 case households.

Scholars of pastoralism often refer to changes of pastoral land tenure as ‘encroachment.’ The New Zealand case of pastoral land tenure reform suggests that this is incorrect for several reasons. First it takes the point of view of the pastoralist, which introduces unnecessary bias. Second, it assumes that all changes in land tenure are situations in which the state, or another powerful agent, takes land away from the less powerful pastoralists.

Policies designed to reduce land-based carbon emissions require a good understanding of the complex connections between state-sanctioned concessions, forest conversion, informal land markets and migrants. Our case study in the peat forests of the Tanjung Jabung Barat (TanJaBar) regency of Jambi, Indonesia aimed to explore relations between four key stakeholder groups: the state, local communities, migrants, and state-sanctioned concessions.

Food production in Swaziland follows a dualistic pattern of the land tenure system, namely; the Traditional Tenure System (TCT) and the Title Deed Tenure system (TDT). Land tenure plays a major role in the development and performance of the agricultural sector by influencing land ownership and its use. The Ministry of Agriculture has observed the differential in maize production among the TCT and TDT farmers. The purpose of this study was to empirically establish whether land tenure as an institution contributes to the observed maize productivity differentials among Swazi farmers.

This article solves and characterizes optimal decision rules to invest in irreversible land improvements conditional on land tenure insecurity. Economic model is a normative dynamic programming model with known parameters for the one period returns and transition equations. The optimal decision rules for liming are solved numerically, conditional on alternative scenarios on the likelihood that the lease contract and, thus, farmer access to land is either renewed or expired. The model parameters represent Finnish soil quality and production conditions.

While the need for land-related investment for sustainable land management and increased productivity is well recognized, quantitative evidence on agricultural productivity effects of secure property rights in Africa is scant. Within-household analysis of investments by owner-cum-occupants in Uganda points toward significant and quantitatively large investment effects of full ownership. Registration is estimated to have no investment effects, whereas measures to strengthen occupancy rights attenuate investment disincentives.