A contribution to the current vibrant debate on land in Kenya following recent upheavals. Argues the need for a radical restructure of the way property relations are governed because what is being contested today is not just property but power over property. Makes practical suggestions for genuinely local democratisation of land governance. Need to act on identified illegal allocation of public land; devolve, not de-concentrate, land administration and to the most local level possible; and vest radical title in real communities, not district/tribal territorial domains.

The ongoing HIV/AIDS pandemic in southern Africa continues to manifest itself in unexpected ways. While the consequences of the disease appear straightforward in some aspects—eg., medical, labor, cost—in other respects the repercussions, while large, are nonetheless highly nuanced and can be counterintuitive.

This paper analyses the impacts of the Ethiopian Land Certification Program on productivity. It aims to identify how “technological gains” would measure up against the benefits from a resultant improvements in “technical efficiency”. Based on its results, the paper concludes that farms belonging to the group without land use certificate are less productive than those certified plots. However, it suggests that this is not due to so much lack of internal technical efficiency. Rather, the paper finds the reason is down to a technological disadvantage.

This study examined food security among HIV/AIDS-impacted households (compared to non-HIV/AIDS-impacted households) in rural South Africa, with a particular focus on the role of savanna woodland resources (e.g. wild foods) in shaping household resilience following the death of a prime-age adult. The study was conducted in the Agincourt health and demographic surveillance site in the rural north-east of South Africa. A cross-sectional survey was conducted in 290 rural households in May and June 2006.

"During the past decade and a half, Ethiopia’s approach to promoting development and improving the lives of the country’s rural population has been driven by a government strategy called Agricultural Development–Led Industrialization (ADLI). This strategy’s main goal is to encourage fast, broad-based development within the agricultural sector in order to power economic growth.

"Pig production in the Philippines has intensified in the urban and peri-urban areas in response to a radical structural change in the pig industry and a growing demand for pork products. Alongside this rapid growth is the emergence of societal concern about the increasing negative environmental externalities that the industry produces, particularly those related to the disposal of waste and dead animals. Pig producers are said to benefit from negative externalities when they do not bear the full social costs of their business enterprise.

"Malawi has experienced modest economic growth over the last decade and a half. However, agricultural growth has been particularly erratic, and while the incidence of poverty has declined, it still remains high. The Malawian government, within the framework of the Agricultural Development Plan (ADP), is in the process of implementing the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP), which provides an integrated framework of development priorities aimed at restoring agricultural growth, rural development and food security.

Ethiopia experiences a fierce political debate about the appropriate land tenure policy. After the fall of the socialist derg regime in 1991, land property rights have remained vested in the state and only usufruct rights have been alienated to farmers – to the disappointment of international donor agencies. This has nurtured an antagonistic debate between advocates of the privatization of land property rights to individual plot holders and those supporting the government’s position. This debate, however, fails to account for the diversity and continuities in Ethiopian land tenure systems.

Most of Nigeria's poor reside in rural areas and gain their livelihood from agricultural work. If the government's poverty reduction goals are to be achieved, Nigeria will need an adequate level of strategically targeted investments in agriculture to upgrade rural infrastructure, boost productivity, and increase competitiveness. Before effective investment programs can be designed and implemented, however, it is important to have a clear understanding of the current pattern of public spending on agriculture.

Human activities such as fossil fuel burning and deforestation have significantly increased the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases (GHG) leading to global climate change. Global climate change and its associated weather extremes pose considerable challenges worldwide, and mitigating the adverse impacts of climate change is a high priority for the international community. To reduce global emissions and curb the threat of climate change, many countries are participating in carbon trading.

"Tomato, cabbage, and garden egg (African eggplant, or Solanum aethiopicum) are important crops for small-scale farmers and migrants in the rural and peri-urban areas of Ghana. Genetic modification has the potential to alleviate poverty through combating yield losses from pests and diseases in these crops, while reducing health risks from application of hazardous chemicals.

"Believing that complex problems call for complex solutions and that stakeholders should have a say in policies that concern them, policymakers have strongly promoted the development of forums and organizations made up of many stakeholders to address complex governance issues such as water management. Both developing and developed countries have instituted multistakeholder water governance bodies on local, national, and international levels.