The North China Plain is the country's granary: most of wheat and maize is supplied by this region in the northeast of China. Intensity of agricultural production has risen sharply in the last decades and the negative environmental effects like water scarcity, salinization and nitrate contamination have been widely acknowledged. In the wake of the country's rapid economic development it becomes at the same time more and more urgent to narrow the gap between the well-being of the urban and rural population.

Forest is an important natural resource to the Latvian economy. It is useful to examine the historical context to estimate objectively the events that created the structure of forest property rights today. While 50.3% of all Latvian forests are state-owned and the remaining 49.7% are under different ownership, historically this structure has changed with the political situation and the authorities.

This paper proposed a methodological framework for the assessment of carbon stocks and the development and identification of land use, land use change and land management scenarios, whereby enhancing carbon sequestration synergistically increases biodiversity, the prevention of land degradation and food security through the increases in crop yields. The framework integrates satellite image interpretation, computer modelling tools (i.e. software customization of off-the-shelf soil organic matter turnover simulation models) and Geographical Information Systems (GIS).

While theory strongly suggests that restricting development rights should reduce land prices, empirical evidence of this effect has been notoriously hard to obtain. Indeed, largely based on this difficulty a Congressional committee has recently recommended that tax benefits for such restrictions be severely curtailed. We collect data on 131 land transactions in South Central Wisconsin, including 19 cases of developmentrestricted parcels.

The growing body of literature devoted to study the impact of inequality on economic growth have centred its attention in the income distribution effect, even though the theoretical relationships are more related to assets distributions than to income distribution. While some recent studies have tried to overcome this limitation by introducing indicators of this type, they found a new constraint when dealing only with time-invariant measurements for this explanatory variable.

In this paper we argue that the loss of bio-diversity hould be of concern for farmers, though it seems to be of little or no concern to them at the moment. As diversity is a component of nature that controls the growth of pests, a loss of bio-diversity means increased exposure to pests, danger of crop failures and, in the long run, lower average yields and profits. So far farmers buy costly pesticides for compensating the reduction of bio-diversity.

The challenges of achieving both food security and sustainability have resulted in a confluence of demands on land within the European Union: we expect our land to provide food, purify water, sequester carbon, and provide a home to biodiversity and to external nutrients. All soils perform all these five functions, but some soils ‘are better at’ supplying selective functions. Functional Land Management is a framework for policy making aimed at meeting these demands by incentivising soil management and land use practices that selectively augment specific soil functions, where required.

The article presents the analysis of the terms of land administration contained in the texts published in Latvia and the United Kingdom. The aim is to compare the terms used in Latvian texts, their translations in the English language with the terms used in authentic English texts, to identify the most controversial cases and to provide the explanation of the problem arising in working with the English terminology of land administration.

Structural changes in the farm production sector, continued pressure to reform existing agricultural policies, and an increasing demand for nonagricultural real estate emphasize the need for rural land market research. Rural land, with a wide diversity of physical characteristics and use, continues to be a large portion of Louisiana's total land base. Of Louisiana's total 28,493,440 land acres, cropland and pastureland account for 7,811,413 acres or 27 percent (1992 Louisiana Census of Agriculture).

The terms of grazing lease contracts potentially influence the tenant’s incentive to preserve the vegetation resource. Annual stocking rate decisions dictate the degree of overgrazing, which can be cumulative over long periods of time. The objective of this study is to identify the impact the tenant’s planning horizon and cost structure specified in the lease contract has on his/her profit-maximizing stocking rate. A multi-period nonlinear programming model was developed to identify economically optimal stocking rates each year over a 24-year period.

Since 1982, the New Castle County Superior Court in Delaware has promoted mediation, which attempts to resolve filed conflicts prior to trial. This paper evaluates how spatial land-use conflicts channel through mediation and litigation. Data suggest that mediations fail because one of the key disputing parties does not play a direct role in mediation and litigation. The data then inform a predictive model of litigated outcomes in which disputants share in the responsibility for conflict.