In the face of trends towards a widening “food gap” and general poverty, this paper attempts to address the problem by discussing the methodologies necessary for sustainable land management to ensure improved food security, rapid economic development and poverty reduction in developing countries of Africa. The authors explain that the population of the world has been increasing at an exponential rate over the past few decades. Present projections suggest that it will be 11 billion by the year 2100.

Although several institutional and management approaches that address the degradation of the rangelands have been tested in the dry areas of Central and West Asia and North Africa (CWANA), impact has been limited. Nonetheless, the development of National Action Plans to combat desertification highlights the interest of governments to tackle this issue. Payment for Environmental Services (PES) may be a viable policy option, though, to date, most PES programs have focused on the management of different resources (forests, watersheds).

Although Cambodia has made significant progress in improving human well-being, poverty in rural areas persists. This Human Development Report for Cambodia assesses the state of rural livelihoods and their relationship with natural resources. It describes the status of human development at the regional and provincial levels, and distinguishes high performance areas from those which require more attention.

ABSTRACTED FROM THE SUMMARY: The impact of land titles on social and economic development and poverty reduction in the rural sector can be optimized by targeting land-titling efforts in areas where government agencies, NGOs, and private investors are actively engaged. The benefits for disadvantaged households can also be increased by policies that specifically link land-titling efforts to pro-poor development objectives.

SUMMARY: Deforestation has become an issue of increasing concern in many tropical countries. In Vietnam, the response of policymakers has been embodied in several policies and programs, including land classification, land use rights devolution and reforestation schemes. Understanding how these state initiatives have affected the farmer’s land use decisions is essential to further guide policymakers in developing national planning strategies.

TAKEN FROM EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This report documents the contemporary ecological, social and economic transformations occurring in one village in Lao PDR’s central Khammouane province under multiple sources of development-induced displacement. Rural development policy in Laos is focused on promoting rapid rural modernisation, to be achieved through foreign direct investments in two key resource sectors: hydropower and plantations.

This paper is part of a collection of five policy briefs was commissioned by the World Bank for the 2009 World Development Report Reshaping Economic Geography. Through relocation policies, the Government of Lao PDR seeks to transform what it considers to be a traditional, rural economy into a modernised market-oriented system by eradicating shifting cultivation, changing the way that land is allocated and by reaching communities.

"An economywide, multimarket model is constructed for Ghana and the effects of agricultural soil erosion on crop yields are explicitly modeled at the subnational regional level for eight main staple crops. The model is used to evaluate the aggregate economic costs of soil erosion by taking into account economywide linkages between production and consumption, across sectors and agricultural subsectors... Sustainable land management (SLM) is the key to reducing agricultural soil loss.

This participatory poverty assessment (PPA 2006) comprises one component of ADB’s Technical Assistance to the Lao People’s Democratic Republic for Institutional Strengthening for Poverty Monitoring and Evaluation. The goal of this PPA, as with the first PPA in 2000, is to complement the statistical analyses of poverty in a meaningful way and to record the experiences and concerns of the poor in order to initiate and identify more effective forms of public and private actions to alleviate poverty.

The paper documents how the implementation of the land tenure policy of the Vietnamese government has affected the agricultural system, livelihood strategies and food self-sufficiency of Thai farmers in a remote upland village, Que, in Nghe An Province, North Central Vietnam. It is shown that the enforcement of restrictions on the area under swidden agriculture has resulted in a strong reduction of swidden agriculture production and shortened fallow periods, not compensated for by the slow increase in paddy rice production.

La herramienta de mapeo (o cartográfica) del WOCAT/LADA se basa en el cuestionario de mapeo original del WOCAT (WOCAT, 2007). Este ha sido ampliado para prestar más atención a cuestiones como la degradación biológica e hídrica y hacer más hincapié en las causas directas y socioeconómicas de esos fenómenos, incluyendo los impactos sobre los servicios ecosistémicos. Se evalúa el tipo de degradación de la tierra que esta ocurriendo actualmente, dónde y por qué ocurre y qué se hace al respecto en términos de Manejo Sustentable de Tierras (SLM), bajo la forma de un cuestionario.