Land, and in particular agricultural land, is central to livelhoods in rural Zambia. Zambia is characterised by a dual legal system of customary and statutory law and by dual land tenure, with state land and customary land. A first wave of socialist-oriented reforms took place after independence in 1964, which abolished previously existing freehold land in favour of leasehold. Subsequent changes in government policies under the influence of structural adjustment programmes and a new government in 1991 paved the way for a market-driven land reform.

Turkmenistan's unique approach to
land reform and farm restructuring has produced a
significant shift to individual or household-based farming,
with more than three-quarters of the arable land leased to
individual households or small groups. Most leaseholders
consider this land to be rightfully theirs, and they expect
to keep it in the future, either as private owners, or
through extension of their leasehold. However, individual

This article explores the gendered experience of monocrop oil-palm expansion in a Hibun Dayak community in Sanggau District, West Kalimantan (Indonesia). It shows how the expanding corporate plantation and contract farming system has undermined the position and livelihood of indigenous women in this already patriarchal community. The shifting of land tenure from the community to the state and the practice of the ‘family head’ system of smallholder plot registration has eroded women's rights to land, and women are becoming a class of plantation labour.

This illustrated report examines four types of agricultural settlement in the Wetsern Cape

• Those  initiated by farm owners on large estates with minimal state involvement 
• Projects initiated by farm owners to provide workers with tenure security involving sub division of their property 
• Projects initiated by farm owners to move workers to new or existing settlements off- farm 
• Projects initiated by government to develop new settlements respond to the needs of displaced rural people 

Desarrollo rural en Uruguay
Gerardo Evia*  
 Uruguay ha sido, hasta no hace mucho tiempo, un país esencialmente ganadero. Desde el siglo XVII, cuando se introdujeron las primeras cabezas de vacunos,  hasta la fecha, el cuero, luego el tasajo, y más tarde la carne y la lana han sido el soporte de la economía del país, modelando el desarrollo de una sociedad que depende sustancialmente de las exportaciones de origen agropecuario.

This article shows that credit market imperfections have important implications for the distribution of policy rents. In a model with land as fixed factor and credit market imperfections, when an area payment is given, land rents go up by more than the subsidy. On aggregate farms may lose from the subsidy. The results depend on the extent to which subsidies have direct and indirect effects on the credit constraints, on whether farms rent or own land, and on farm heterogeneity.

Agricultural transition in Uzbekistan, as in all CIS countries, is driven by a process of land reform, which involves redistribution of land among producers and concomitant changes in farm structure. In this article we review the process of land reform since Uzbekistan’s independence and examine its impacts on agricultural growth and rural family incomes. The analysis is based on official statistics and data from a farm-level survey carried out in 2007.

A key challenge facing South Africa’s economic development is overcoming the structural poverty created through the systematic dispossession of the majority of its citizens. Although radically marginalized during apartheid, there is poor public acknowledgement of the losses experienced by those families who, through the passing of various racially biased, land and labour laws, became farm labour on commercial farms.

Refugiados del Modelo Agroexportador es la publicación de los resultados de una investigación llevada a cabo en el 2006 en comunidades campesinas paraguayas que viven rodeadas por los monocultivos de soja. Este estudio interdisciplinario detalla la dinámica de empobrecimiento y degeneración de las condiciones de vida de las familias que lleva a la expulsión rural y la migración hacia las ciudades. Esta investigación de Base Investigaciones Sociales fue llevada a cabo por un equipo multidisciplinario e internacional de investigadores, bajo la dirección del sociólogo Tomas Palau.