Over the last decade, the highlands of Ratanakiri province in northeastern Cambodia have witnessed massive land acquisitions and profound land use changes, mostly from forest covers to rubber plantation, which has contributed to rapidly and profoundly transform the livelihoods of smallholders relying primarily on family-based farming. Based on village- and households-level case studies in two districts of the province, this paper analyses this process and its mid-term consequences on local livelihoods. We first look at who has acquired land, where, how and at what pace.

This paper uses five waves of the Vietnam Access to Resources Household Survey (VARHS) to analyse land issues in Viet Nam from a number of different angles. The VARHS provides panel data at plot as well as household level and I use this rich data set to present descriptive results on landlessness, land fragmentation, land market activities, and land property rights. I use plot level, fixed effects regressions to investigate the effects of land titles (Land Use Certificates) on household investment.

As BRICS-led foreign investment in agriculture has increased dramatically worldwide in recent years, China in particular, has begun to secure huge quantities of foreign land as an additional measure for securing future food and energy supplies. While an increasing amount of academic research has been conducted on the expansion of land deals in Latin America and Africa in recent years, Southeast Asian cases are just beginning to receive significant attention and have become the focus of some emerging academic and non-academic research.

Poverty reduction has become a worldwide promise, yet the term itself has been commonly abused to legitimize development policies and projects with truly questionable impacts on the poor. This article critically reflects on how claims of poverty reduction through agricultural development have been turned into tactics of land capture in Cambodia.

Includes good for corporations, bad for producers; the push for corporate food systems in Africa; the UK’s role; towards food sovereignty; recommendations for the UK government. Concludes that the expansion of corporate control over African food and agriculture, under the guise of tackling hunger, is taking power and resources away from African producers and will further impoverish the continent’s people. The UK and other governments must end their support for initiatives which assist this corporate takeover.

Covers land rights and economics in 13 communal conservancies in Caprivi and the Namibian state in rural Caprivi – ministries of lands, agriculture, the environment, and the police. Comments on the lack of legal capacity in rural Namibia.

Includes land regulatory framework; foreign direct investment and large-scale land acquisition; mechanized farming agriculture; lack of transparency and corruption in land use and allocation; land and conflict. Argues that land tenure insecurity has resulted from the imposition of formal law that does not recognize individual rights to unregistered land. State authorities have considered unregistered land to be state land and thus available to transfer to private commercial interests, the military, land speculators, and elites without regard for customary rights.

Argues the need for landowners in South Africa to draw lessons from events in Zimbabwe and to be much more radical, proactive and imaginative in promoting needed changes in land reform, failing which they will have no future, as pressures from the landless intensify. The current status quo is unsustainable and the national effort inadequate. The private sector has a key role to play to break the current logjam. Increasing number of landowners are beginning to see the light and accept political realities. Calls for a land summit to negotiate a comprehensive agrarian transformation.

A 78-page list, much of it pretty grim reading. Divided into reports and press cuttings, in alphabetical order. The reports section comprises a ‘1stXI’ of Future Agricultures Consortium, GRAIN, IIED, IISD, Mokoro, Oakland Institute, Oxfam, Pambazuka News, PLAAS, RRI and TNI, followed by a further 36 from Action Aid to the World Resources Institute. The press cuttings cover Global, Africa, 31 African countries or regions from Angola to Zimbabwe, followed by Middle East, Asia and China. Countries with greatest coverage are Ethiopia, Liberia, Mozambique, Sierra Leone, and Tanzania.

A guide to a report from the World Bank’s Agriculture and Rural Development Department which is likely to prove extremely helpful to practitioners. The structure of the report is first given in detail to illustrate its coverage. This is followed by a section which gathers together some of its contents and conclusions, interspersed with comments.

Malawi, like other countries in Africa, has a new land policy designed to clarify and formalise customary tenure. The country is poor with a high population density, highly dependent on agriculture, and the research sites are matrilineal-matrilocal, and near urban centres. But the case raises issues relevant to land tenure reform elsewhere: the role of ‘traditional authorities’ or chiefs vis-a-vis the state and ‘community’; variability in types of ‘customary’ tenure; and deepening inequality within rural populations.

Investigates the processes and impact of commercialisation of land in Malawi – specifically the acquisition of huge tracts of communal lands by foreign companies and local elites for sugarcane production in Nkhotakota and Chikwawa districts. The main finding was that ‘land grabbing’ for large-scale commercial agriculture in these two districts negatively affected the livelihoods of the poor communal farmers. The costs to the affected communities outweighed the benefits