The basic cause of needless poverty and hunger in the rural Africa to-day is the stagnation of its main economic base - agriculture. It has settled down to a low level of equilibrium of income, saving and investment over time. Hence, most of the rural people of the region is caught in a vicious circle of a poverty trap. They are below the "absolute poverty line". The country studies show all of them are food-deficit.

The challenges to tenure security in both urban and rural areas are not only large, but they are increasing due to the different types of pressures making land more and more scarce. There is growing acceptance that only by recognizing and supporting a continuum of land rights, can tenure security be reached for all people in an inclusive way.

The SPIRAL-Project (the "Project"), financed by the UK government under the LEGEND Challenge Fund and implemented by Deutsche Welthungerhilfe ("WHH") and a private-sector partner (the "Investor"), establishes and tests a fair, transparent, and inclusive business approach (the CPC model) for responsible land-based agricultural investments in the Sierra Leonean Cocoa Sector.

Land plays an important role in the economies of developing countries, and many theories connecting land inequality with different dimensions of economic development already exist. Even though efficacious land distribution allows societies to transition from poverty to a human capital-based developed economy, ongoing issues related to property rights, inequality, and the political economy of land distribution are unavoidable. The general objective of this paper is to explore the nexus between land distribution and economic development.

The planning of protected rural areas is usually defined by institutional decision-makers without considering the preferences of the local communities that live on the land, which frequently leads to conflicts in land management. This paper proposes a voting method based on the Borda count to rank the management goals of a protected rural area. The method was applied in a Spanish-Portuguese reserve called Iberian Plateau with the aim of collecting the preferences of institutional decision-makers (government and scientists) and rural landowners (farmers and businesspersons).

Sustainable rural development (with the development of social functions) is currently one of the basic objectives of the rural areas policy in Poland. The main purpose of this article is to determine the level of social development of rural areas and to examine whether the National Support Center for Agriculture (NSCA) activities (in the form of transferring land to communes for the implementation of social goals) have an impact on that development, and to what extent. In this article, an assessment of the social development level of rural areas using the Hellwig method was carried out.

É importante destacar incialmente que não é possível compreender o processo de resistência em Casa Nova sem compreender a rede de resistência que se formou na Zona da Mata Mineira contra um conjunto de empreendimentos que ameaçava as comunidades ribeirinhas na época.

A questão agrária no Brasil e na América Latina é politicamente elaborada diante da concentração fundiária e da correspondente dificuldade de acesso dos camponeses à terra. As experiências de despejo têm sido marca constitutiva do imaginário social e da vida de inúmeros trabalhadores e trabalhadoras rurais em todo o território brasileiro (MARTINS, 1983, 2003). Trata-se de uma experiência dramática e que, dada a sua recorrência e intensidade, é constitutiva da experiência dos despossuídos rurais no Brasil.

Construcción de la justicia desde la justicia indígena: Experiencias interlegales de Inquisivi
 
Magali Vienca Copa Pabón[1] / Amy Michelle Kennemore[2]
 
Introducción

In most European countries, there has been a decrease in the number of farms, while the area of agricultural land has remained almost the same. This ongoing process of land concentration can affect Europe’s small farms and rural areas. The EU has acknowledged that the problem is serious and that, to solve it, it must be studied more closely.

The World Social Forum in Nairobi in January 2007 was a timely New Year rallying event for Kenyans to revisit the fundamental principles for building a democratic and sustainable society as we prepare for December 2007 elections.The current organizing principles of the institutions that govern us in Kenya are narrow and serve the few at the expense of the many millions of Kenyans that live in abject poverty. Yet, from all corners of the country it is acknowledged that it is within our collective ability to create a healthy and sustainable society that serves and work for all

China has a unique land use system in which there are two types of land ownership, namely, state-owned urban land and farmer collective-owned rural land. Despite strict restrictions on the use rights of farmer collective-owned land, rural land is, in fact, developed along two pathways: it is formally acquired by the state and transferred into state ownership, or it is informally developed while remaining in collective ownership.