The current pressures on land are huge and expected to continue growing: there is rapidly escalating competition between the demand for land functions that provide food, water, and energy, and those services that support and regulate all life cycles on Earth.

The Congo Basin Forest Partnership aims to reconcile forest conservation with forest use. This article explains what a “policy network” of this sort can achieve and where its limits lie.

In rural areas of many developing countries fuelwood constitutes the only energy source – often with negative impacts on humans and the environment. Wise management and modern technology can guarantee a sustainable use of this valuable resource, as some examples from Latin America demonstrate.

The rural areas of the South have undergone vital socio-economic and technological changes marked by globalisation, economic liberalization and political decentralization and by the information and communication sector. Will these changes suffice to improve the living standards of the rural population and lessen the urban-rural gap or will the rural sector remain in isolation and be also in ten years time home of the poor?

Kenya is still largely agrarian with 80 percent of its population depending on agriculture for food, employment and income. The dilemma facing the country is that only 20 percent of the land is suited for agricultural production. A greater proportion of the country, however, consists of agroecologically less favoured areas (LFAs). Another dilemma in Kenya?s agricultural sector is that economic development impacts are not homogeneously spread even among the agriculturally favoured areas.

There is growing degradation in sylvo-pastoral lands that were originally under common property regimes, but over which the state now asserts ownership. User associations are being given the right to take charge of regulating how these areas are sustainably exploited by means of use agreements, and are proving an effective instrument in halting the degradation process.

Since 1996, the Centres for Agriculture in the Tropics and Subtropics of the Universities of Hohenheim and Göttingen and of Berlin's Humboldt University have organised a conference, the ''Tropentag'', once a year to present and discuss recent findings in research on agriculture and rural development. Other universities, like Kassel-Witzenhausen, have joined in, and the number of participants, papers and posters presented has more than doubled.

Two images have dominated the northern media in recent months.The first is of desolation in remote, rural areas in Africa affected by drought, conflict or famine, such as in Somalia, northern Kenya or Darfur, Sudan. The second is a different kind of desolation - that of urban squalor as portrayed in the film «The Constant Gardener». Nairobi's Kibera, which provides a backdrop for the film, is a bustling shantytown with a population of ca.

In October 2014, for the first time in recent history, the government of Myanmar decided to organize a public consultation to inform the development of a national policy. To support this consultation process, several organizations decided to organize civil society pre-consultation activities to listen and gather concerns from smallholder farmers to formulate relevant recommendations for the policy dialogue.

This country level analysis addresses land governance in Viet Nam in two ways. First, it summarises what the existing body of knowledge tells us about power and configurations that shape access to and exclusion from land, particularly among smallholders, the rural poor, ethnic minorities and women. Second, it draws upon existing literature and expert assessment to provide a preliminary analysis of the openings for and obstacles to land governance reform afforded by the political economic structures and dynamics in the country.

Alors qu'ils sont tributaires de l'élevage, de nombreux ménages vivant dans les régions arides et semi-arides du Kenya sont régulièrement confrontés à des pertes de bétail importantes en raison des sécheresses chroniques qui affectent la région.

Les populations vivant aux alentours d’aires protégées doivent développer de nouveaux moyens de subsistance pour assurer leur survie. Les populations riveraines des forêts dépendent souvent de l’utilisation des produits et services que leur offrent les ressources naturelles. L’exploitation de ces produits jadis «gratuits» est aujourd’hui réglementée et limitée, notamment pour des raisons environnementales.