By the year 2020 land degradation may pose a serious threat to food production and rural livelihoods, particularly in poor and densely populated areas of the developing world. Appropriate policies are required to encourage land-improving investments and better land management if developing countries are to sustainably meet the food needs of their populations.
By the year 2020 land degradation may pose a serious threat to food production and rural livelihoods, particularly in poor and densely populated areas of the developing world. Appropriate policies are required to encourage land-improving investments and better land management if developing countries are to sustainably meet the food needs of their populations.
o presente trabalho e uma compilação de vàrios artigos que sintetizam os resultados de pesquisas de campo sobre acesso e segurança de posse de terra efectuados nos liltimos cinco anos em Moçambique. Trata-se de pesquisas realizadas pelo projecto sobre Política Fundiária -Land Tenure Center da Universidade de Wisconsin, Estados Unidos da América, em colaboração com o Ministério da Agricultura e o NET-Núcleo de Estudos da Terra, da Universidade Eduardo Mondlane.
The objective of this technical paper is to shed insights on ways of reversing the spiraling decline of the land and the economy in rural Rwanda, with focus on the forces behind productivity decline in the Rwandan agricultural sector. The results are based on collaborative research between the Rwandan Ministry of Agriculture and Michigan State University.Among the key findings are that Rwandan farmers need to sustain and intensify their farming by pro-tecting the soil against erosion.
Report draws attention to the structure of landholding as a set of mechanisms through which demographic changes in agrarian societies can alter the natural environment: demographically-induced change in the structure of landholding: farm holdings generally become smaller as an ever-increasing number of households enter the agricultural work force and seek to derive their livelihood from this fixed resource base holdings tend to become more fragmented, not simply in the number of parcels operated but in the distances between parcels, as farmers look harder and farther for whatever bits and p
The workshop participants were clear that now is the time for choices, and that without the will to make those choices, the likelihood of success in boosting agricultural growth on a sustained basis would be small. Without such growth, it will not be possible to improve food security or halt natural resource degradation. It seems unlikely that all countries of Africa will choose to put in place the necessary conditions for growth, which makes it all the more important to decide at the outset which conditions are most likely to beget further success.
The goal of the workshop was to identify strategic investments and policy actions that African Governments, firms, and organizations can undertake, with the support of their development partners, to foster agricultural and economic transformation in Africa. The workshop focused on forces that will influence the evolution of African economies well into the 21st Century. The emphasis was not simply on the impact of structural adjustment programmes but rather on the broader process of economic adjustment that would lead to more productive economic systems.
The Government of Zambia is embarking on an ambitious program of legal and administrative reforms in land policy. Although the need to liberalize the land market is universally shared, the ideas on how to accomplish this transformation are not. Two decades of underinvestment in field research have resulted in the present situation of micro-level data on land tenure and farm-level production, consumption, and resource management inadequate to guide policy decisions.
Attempts to achieve "more for the poor" through the use of indicator targeting may in fact mean less for the poor. The efficient use of a fixed budget for poverty reduction may require targeting. However, the use of indicator targeting, using fixed characteristics that are correlated with poverty to determine the distribution of expenditures, will tend to reduce the budget. Ignoring the budget reducing effects can reduce the welfare of the poor as they receive a greater share of a shrinking budget.
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.
