Cette publication d’Options Méditerranéennes (OM) réunit les travaux du réseau Foncimed présentés au séminaire de Cargèse d’octobre 2011 et de Montpellier de juillet 2013. Foncimed est un réseau méditerranéen pluridisciplinaire et interinstitutionnel d'échanges et de comparaisons d'expériences sur la question foncière. Il fonctionne depuis 2007 animé conjointement par le CIHEAM-IAMM et l'INRA-SAD.

Countries of the Near East, North Africa, Europe and Central Asia (NEN) region face a myriad of social, economic and political challenges that have stalled their structural and rural transformation processes. This has had a detrimental impacton rural youth, who, as a result, face limited economic opportunities. The NEN region has the highest youth unemployment rates in the world. Weak education systems are failing to provide youth, especially in rural areas, with the cognitive and non-cognitive skills they need to compete in a global economy.

This article offers a general picture of the situation of rural youth in Latin America and the Caribbean(LAC). The population is described through its demographic dynamics, its socio-economiccharacteristics, the situation of priority groups (women and indigenous peoples) and subjects ofinterest for these particular population groups (use of IT, sexual and reproductive health, violence andsocial participation).

This paper examines the intersections between youth access to land, migration decisions and employment opportunities using nationally representative and multi-year data from multiple African countries. We document evidence on the evolving dynamics in land distribution and ownership patterns, the effect of land access on youth livelihood choices and development of rental and sales market in the region.

A narrative on rural youth in Africa has continued to evolve in policy circles around the world. Much of it is driven by population statistics that point to an imminent youth bulge in Africa and concerns about a poor economic outlook (stagnation) for African productivity and growth. Fears of massive unemployment, social unrest and undesirable migration due to limited economic growth drive the bulk of the discourse. This is juxtaposed with the promise of a youth dividend for the continent, which is highlighted by some quarters of the policy debate.

In the search for rural transformation, this paper analyses the effect of agriculture on rural nonfarm entrepreneurship (NFE) highlighting the role of land rights and assesses the impact of rural NFE on households’ livelihood focusing on rural Burkina Faso. To achieve these objectives, the study uses two techniques: (i) propensity score matching technique to investigate the nonfarm entrepreneurship impact on farm households’ income; (ii) logistic regression to assess the role of agriculture in the development of nonfarm enterprises.

Utilization of agricultural land for non-agricultural purposes poses a threat to food production and agriculture commercialization. Hence, this study examined Rural Land Utilization and Commercial Agriculture among Female arable Crop Farmers in South West Nigeria. A multistage sampling procedure was used to collect primary data through questionnaire administration. Findings shows that 71.62% of the women had land market index of 0, indicating that they obtained their land through non-transaction based method and 28.38% acquired their land through transaction based method.

This study examines the effect of land rights on agricultural outcomes in Rwanda. We characterize the effects of land rights from two perspectives. The first one is land rights indicated by the right to sell and guarantee land and the second one is land titling. The agricultural outcomes include agricultural productivity, food security and nutritional diversity. From the results, land rights are found to have a positive relationship with all the outcome variables. The effect of land rights on agricultural productivity is larger if the household head is male.

This paper focuses on gender mainstreaming in modeling the impacts of climate change by development sector. Inspired by the methodologies of the Guillaumont economic vulnerability index (2008, 2009) and the UNDP poverty vulnerability ratio (2011), a synthetic index called the ‘Index of Inequality of Gender Vulnerability to Climate Change (IIGVcc)’, which is a modeling by development sector, of vulnerability inequalities to climate change between men and women, is proposed.

Oil palm plantations in Indonesia have been linked to substantial deforestation in the 1990s and 2000s, though recent studies suggest that new plantations are increasingly developed on non-forest land. Without nationwide data to establish recent baseline trends, the impact of commitments to eliminate deforestation from palm oil supply chains could therefore be overestimated. We examine the area and proportion of plantations replacing forests across Sumatra, Kalimantan, and Papua up to 2015, and map biophysically suitable areas for future deforestation-free expansion.

Climate change is a major driver of land use with implications for the quality and quantity of water resources. We apply a novel integrated impact modelling framework (IIMF) to analyze climate change impacts until 2040 and stakeholder driven scenarios on water protection policies for sustainable management of land and water resources in Austria. The IIMF mainly consists of the sequentially linked bio-physical process model EPIC, the regional land use optimization model PASMA[grid], the quantitative precipitation/runoff TUWmodel, and the nutrient emission model MONERIS.