The paper presents case studies from Kenya, Lesotho and South Africa in order to examine the impact of HIV/AIDS upon land, and present preliminary policy recommendations.

Land reform in Southern Africa is currently at an impasse. This paper analyses the constraints to sustainable land reform and identifies ways and means of moving things forward. In addition, appendices to the document include country by country reviews of the status of land reform in each country, and a matrix providing an overview of current land issues in the region.The document finds that whilst some progress has been achieved with tenure reform in Botswana, Malawi and Mozambique, many challenges remain across the region, particularly for Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia.

Tenure reform aims to secure people's land rights. In Southern Africa most so-called 'communal' land, reserved for Africans, is still held by the state. In these areas, land rights are increasingly insecure. Yet, the confirmation of the rights of those who have long occupied and used the land lags behind programmes that aim to transfer white-held land to Africans. Many colonial and apartheid land laws are still in force, particularly those relating to chiefs, who resist any reduction to their power.

The Tanzanian government has put agriculture at the forefront of its development agenda through its “kilimo kwanza” (agriculture first) initiative, which was established in 2009. For a country like Tanzania, which is gifted with a rich diversity of natural and human resources and has a population that is still largely rural, investment in agriculture can offer considerable development potential. 

Land redistribution or the transfer of ownership rights to the tiller has been the focal point of the land reform program in the Philippines. This transfer was envisioned to result in a significant shift in income and productivity in the agrarian sector. While some equalisation of incomes may have indeed occurred, the full benefits of this asset transfer, however, have not been realised.

This paper argues that mining can not be considered ‘sustainable’ if indigenous cultures are rendered unsustainable in the process. Given that many remaining unexploited ores lie under indigenous lands, there is increasing pressure to mine on or near indigenous lands.

Today, many rural poor Filipinos are using state law to try to claim land rights. In spite of the availability of a much stronger set of legal resources than ever before, claiming legal land rights remains difficult. Some argue these difficulties are a reason to turn away from state-led land reform and toward a market-assisted land reform (MALR) model.

Greater investment in agriculture is needed to reduce rural poverty and improve food security; but how investment is made, its context and conditions, is at least as important as how much is invested.

The Land Policy in Tanzania is an example of citizens engaging in a protracted struggle for effective participation in the policy process, despite the long exclusion they have experienced in policy making. This paper looks at the evolution of the policy, and the interactions between civil society and the state in its development.The paper concludes that this was the first serious and systematic civic organizations' challenge to the state command model of policy process.

This bi-annual addition of id21 Natural Resources Highlights looks specifically at rural livelihoods. It contains the following three articles:

New thinking needed to tackle the rural employment crisis

A further 106 million people will have joined the rural labour force in the developing world by 2015. This article asks whether enough jobs can be created in rural areas to meet this demand, or whether further urban migration is the only answer.

How can small-scale producers compete globally?

Land tenure security is crucial for women's empowerment and a prerequisite for building secure and resilient communities. Tenure is affected by many and often contradictory sets of rules, laws, customs, traditions, and perceptions. For most rural women, land tenure is complicated, with access and ownership often layered with barriers present in their daily realities: discriminatory social dynamics and strata, unresponsive legal systems, lack of economic opportunities, and lack of voice in decision making.

This paper examines the marginalization of women's land rights by governmental institutions and rural women's movements in Brazil.