This is the first issue of the Journal of Law and Rural Development, published by IFAD. IFAD’s mandate to address rural poverty and promote rural development is unique among international organizations. For many years IFAD limited its activities to financing projects and programmes implemented by its Member States, but over the last decade it has begun to transform itself into a knowledge centre and a key participant in the international policy dialogue around rural development issues. The launch of this journal is another step forward in this transformation.

The Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT), was developed under the Committee on World Food Security as a result of collaboration among different groups of stakeholders – governments, civil society, private sector, academia. The VGGT is intended to provide a framework for responsible tenure governance that supports food security, poverty alleviation, sustainable resource use and environmental protection.

The Annual Country Reviews reflect upon current land issues in the Mekong Region, and has been produced for researchers, practitioners and policy advocates operating in the field. Specialists have been selected from Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand and Vietnam to briefly answer the following two questions:

1. What are the most pressing issues involving land governance in your country?

2. What are the most important issues for the researcher on land?

Tenure risk – or the risk of dispute between investors and local people over land or natural resource claims – is endemic in emerging markets. There are hundreds of recorded incidents of tenure disputes creating delays, violence, project cancellation and even bankruptcy at a corporate level. These tenure disputes create lose-lose outcomes for investors, local people and national governments while robbing emerging markets of the developmental benefits of responsible land investments.

New research by the Quantifying Tenure Risk (QTR) initiative has revealed that land disputes can cause losses of up to $101 million across a range of agricultural projects in Africa, while at the same time causing significant harm and stress to local communities who have a claim to the land.

In response, the initiative has developed a new publicly available economic modelling tool to accurately determine the potential cost of a dispute in a bid to help companies avoid harmful investments. 

Growing numbers of policies and programmes aim to integrate small-scale rural producers into agricultural value chains. But significant questions remain over how best to: recognise the possibly divergent visions, interests and constraints of various actors; address often substantial power imbalances; and ultimately promote agency among rural producers and their communities – that is, their ability to choose, act and influence realities around them.

Date: 2018

Source: Foncier & Développement

Par: Société française d'économie rurale

Ce nouveau numéro de la Revue d’Economie Rurale aborde les cas des investissements agrobusiness au Sénégal et de la régulation des marchés fonciers à Madagascar. Présentation de ces deux articles en quelques lignes :

These appendices refer to the summary report Assessing the costs of tenure risks to agribusinesses. The report is a product of the Quantifying Tenure Risk (QTR) initiative, a joint research programme conducted by the ODI and TMP Systems and funded by the UK Government.

Since ceasefire agreements were signed between the Burmese military government and ethnic political groups in the Burma–China borderlands in the early 1990s, violent waves of counterinsurgency development have replaced warfare to target politically-suspect, resource-rich, ethnic populated borderlands. The Burmese regime allocates land concessions in ceasefire zones as an explicit postwar military strategy to govern land and populations to produce regulated, legible, militarized territory.