Madam Speaker and Honorable Members, the vision of my Ministry is “Sustainable Land Use, Land Tenure Security, Affordable, Decent Housing and Organized Urban Development”. The Mission is “To ensure sustainable land management, planned urban and rural development and decent housing for all”. The Mandate is “To ensure rational and sustainable use, effective management of land and orderly development of urban and rural areas as well as safe, planned and adequate housing for socio-economic development”.

The MLHUD Sector Strategic Plan for Statistics (SSPS) is a 5 year (2007/8 – 2011/12) plan which provides a framework for further reform and acceleration of statistical development in the sector statistical system. This Plan is intended to guide the development of an integrated, coordinated and coherent statistical system which ensures harmonized data production processes at all levels of administration. Although the Ministry is relatively new, it strives to obtain quality statistics.

Madam Speaker and Honorable Members, the vision of my Ministry is “Sustainable Land Use, Land Tenure Security, Affordable, Decent Housing and Organized Urban Development”.

The Mission is “To ensure sustainable land management, planned urban and rural development and decent housing for all”. The Mandate is “To ensure rational and sustainable use, effective management of land and orderly development of urban and rural areas as well as safe, planned and adequate housing for socio-economic development”.

The Ministerial Policy Statement is split in two main sections; Section A, which provides an overview of performance and plans for the Ministry, Central Votes and local governments and Section B, which provides past performance and future plans for each Vote Function in detail, in addition to Cross Cutting and other Budgetary Issues.

• Section A: Ministry and Vote Overview .

The Ministerial Policy Statement is structured by Vote, as follows:

• Vote Overview

This section sets out past performance and future plans for Central and Local Government Votes in more detail. It is structured as follows for each Vote: A Vote Overview sets out key details of the vote, including past performance, future plans and key performance issues to be addressed including costing implications.

• Vote Annexes

The Ministerial Policy Statement is structured by Vote, as follows:

• Staff Establishment Structure Provides details of approved staff structure for each programme and project (including names of staff and vacant posts).

This is clearly demonstrated in the form of an organogram.

Mr. Speaker Sir, my Ministry has four Vote Functions namely; 1: Administration which comprises Programme 01-Finance and Administration, Programme 02- Planning and Quality Assurance and Programme 016-Internal Audit; Vote Function 2: Land Administration and Management which comprises programmes; 03-Office of Director, Land Management, 04-Land Administration, 05-Surveys and Mapping, 06-Land Registration and 07-Land Sector Reform Coordination Unit.

Brazil has become an agricultural powerhouse, producing roughly 30 % of the world’s soy and 15 % of its beef by 2013 – yet historically much of that growth has come at the expense of its native ecosystems. Since 1985, pastures and croplands have replaced nearly 65 Mha of forests and savannas in the legal Amazon. A growing body of work suggests that this paradigm of horizontal expansion of agriculture over ecosystems is outdated and brings negative social and environmental outcomes.

The Amazonian economic occupation over the last forty years has been extremely harmful to the environment and to the traditional populations. One of the strategies to overcome this difficulty, dealing with sustainable development, is the development of productive units—starting with non-timber forest products (NTFP)—and the Payment for Environmental Services (PES) for the residents and/or owners of forest areas.

Understanding the impact of changes in cultivated land in terms of structure, distribution, and quantity on grain production potential (GPP) is essential for a sustainable land utilization strategy and food security. Cultivated land balance (CLB), as a critical policy aiming at protecting farmland in China, has greatly restricted the loss of cultivated land. However, changes in cultivated land were largely generated due to the land-use activities led by the CLB policy.

Land tenure security is widely considered to be a fundamental factor in motivating farmers to adopt sustainable land management practices. This study aims to establish whether it is true that owner-operators adopt more effective soil conservation measures than tenant-operators, and whether well-designed agro-environmental instruments can provide sufficiently strong motivation to compensate for the differences between these two groups.

Land use decision making requires knowledge integration from a wide range of stakeholders across science and practice. Many participatory methods and instruments aiming at such science-practice interaction have been developed during the last decades. However, there are methodological challenges, and little evidence neither about the methodological applicability and practicability under diverse socio-political conditions nor about their dynamics. The objective of this paper is to offer some insights on the design and implementation of reasonable science-practice interaction.