Across rural Africa, land legislation struggles to be properly implemented, and most resource users gain access to land on the basis of local land tenure systems.
Most of the world’s poor work in the “informal economy” – outside of recognized and enforceable rules. Thus, even though most have assets of some kind, they have no way to document their possessions because they lack formal access to legally recognized tools such as deeds, contracts and permits.
The present paper seeks to cover the key issues, trends, constraints, challenges, knowledge gaps and policy options on a range of dimensions of land access. Land access is broadly defined as the processes by which people individually or collectively gain rights and opportunities to occupy and utilise land (primarily for productive purposes but also other economic and social purposes) on a temporary or permanent basis.
In order to check and promote the positive synergies between private companies and rural households, an analysis of past and ongoing experiences of contract farming is required. It represents the main objective of this report. The objectives of this study are to: describe the effects of contract farming schemes, characterize the factors limiting or promoting these various impacts, identify key findings to promote the emergence of positive synergies.
The Symposium on Legal Aspects of Large Scale Investments in Land: Implications for Food Security and Rural Development was held at FAO Headquarters in Rome on March 4th 2011. The Symposium was co-hosted by FAO and the World Food Law Institute at Howard University School of Law.
Land Tenure Working Paper 11. This co-publication of FAO and UN-HABITAT seeks to better understand and define the processes, mechanisms and institutions of governance of tenure in rural and urban areas. The paper recognises that excellent land policies, laws and technical reforms have been developed. However, in many cases their implementation has slipped, stalled or even been reversed. By adopting a governance and political economy perspective, the paper offers insights for the design of reforms and for the development of land governance tools.
Given the recent trend of granting vast areas of African land to foreign investors, the urgency of placing real ownership in the hands of the people living and making their livelihood upon lands held according to custom cannot be overstated. This study provides guidance on how best to recognize and protect the land rights of the rural poor. Protecting and enforcing the land rights of rural Africans may be best done by passing laws that elevate existing customary land rights up into nations' formal legal frameworks thereby making customary land rights equal to documented land claims.
This book synthesizes IFPRI's recent work on the role of gender in household decisionmaking in developing countries, provides evidence on how reducing gender gaps can contribute to improved food security, health, and nutrition in developing countries, and gives examples of interventions that actually work to reduce gender disparities. It is an accessible, easy-to-read synthesis of the gender research that IFPRI has undertaken in the 1990s.
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