In view of the importance of land to Africa’s social, political and economic development, as well as sustainable resource management, AU/NEPAD, ECA and ADB, under the leadership of the AU Commission, agreed to work jointly during 2006-2007 to develop a land policy framework and guidelines, as well as the modalities for its implementation at country, regional and continental levels.

The consultative workshop, which took place 27-29 March 2006 at the United Nations Conference Centre (UNCC), Addis Ababa, was the first step in the process of developing a land policy framework and guidelines. The discussions were informed by an issues/discussion paper, and brought together representatives from African governments, Regional Economic Communities, Civil Society including farmers' organizations, African private sector, Centres of Excellence and Development Partners.

The World Trade Organization (WTO) hailed the recent Hong Kong Sixth Ministerial Meeting last December 2005 as a positive movement towards the conclusion of the Doha Development Round. The round was supposedly geared towards ensuring that trade contributes to the development objectives of least developed and developing countries.

O tema do mercado de terras integra a agenda contemporânea das políticas agrárias, tanto no Brasil como em outros países. No caso brasileiro, decorre da história de ocupação do território e da própria formação social e econômica que produziram um quadro de ilegalidade, de instabilidade jurídica e de fragilidade institucional.

We test the effect of minimum lot zoning on rural-to-urban land use conversion using Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD), a technique that exploits natural discontinuities in the data to identify causal effects. Observations are drawn from either size of a discontinuous minimum lot size zoning boundary. Using these selected sub-samples, a binary discrete choice model of residential land use change is estimated using parcel-level data and other spatially explicit data from an exurban county that lies on the fringes of Cleveland, Ohio.

Agricultural nitrogen losses are the major contributor to nitrogen loads in the Mississippi River, and consequently, to the existence of a hypoxic, or “dead”, zone in the Gulf of Mexico. Focusing on two small agricultural watersheds in southeast Minnesota, simulation results from the Agricultural Drainage And Pesticide Management (ADAPT) model were combined with a linear-optimization model to evaluate the environmental and economic impact of alternative land-use policies for reducing nitrogen losses.

The purpose of the study was to find out the factors affecting farmland prices in Finland. A hedonic pricing model that takes into account the presence of spatial dependence was applied for a very large sales price data (6 281 observations). The results confirmed the importance of land quality and the structural change as determinants of land price. In addition, off-farm job possibilities seemed to have a significant role in determining land prices.

Over recent years considerable research has been devoted to the assessment of the rural landscape value. These studies have concerned both use and non-use value estimation. An important issue in monetary evaluations is about taking (or not) into account the structural complexity of landscape. Three analytical approaches may be recognized on the basis of whether landscape structural attributes are involved (global, mono-attribute and multi-attribute approach). The present work is part of a research aimed to seek out rational instruments for guidance policies on rural landscape.

This paper examines the relationship between farm size and productivity in China's agriculture. In developing agriculture where there is a broad range of farm sizes, farm size and productivity or output per unit of land are often found to be inversely related. In China, where average farm size is small and the distribution of farm sizes is relatively compact, farm size and productivity are weakly inversely related.

The land restitution in Bulgaria led to a severe fragmentation in land ownership. This has an impact on the agricultural development and land market. The article investigates the land transactions on the sale and rentals markets. In order to explain the processes three new institutional economic theories will be employed: property rights theory, transaction costs theory and agricultural contract theory. First, the article reviews the appropriateness of each theory, and second, results of conducted survey in two regions of Bulgaria with different degrees of land fragmentation.