The Chinese central government has consistently taken decisive legal and policy measures over the past 35 years to secure, enhance, and expand farmers’ rights to farmland and forest land in order to reduce the

Paper focuses on the resettlement of people displaced by Eritrea's 30 year liberation war. However, Eritrea's 1998-2000 war with Ethiopia poses new reconstruction problems which are only now emerging.

Latest report from Friends of the Earth's Coporates Campaign looking at linkages between financial institutions, pulp and paper manufaturers and paper merchants in forest destruction. The report focuses on the activities of Asia Pacific Resources International Holding Ltd (APRIL) - one of the worlds largest pulp and paper companies - and their subsidiary operations in Sumatra.

This paper summarises the findings of a short exercise to identify land issues in present-day Afghanistan.

Based on worldwide experience and encouraging evidence from country pilots in African countries such as Ghana, Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania,and Uganda, this new report suggests a series of ten steps that may help to revolutionise agricultural production and eradicate poverty in Africa. These steps include improving tenure security over individual and communal lands, increasing land access and tenure for poor and vulnerable families, resolving land disputes, managing better public land, and increasing efficiency and transparency in land administration services. 

A new Land Act introduced in Angola in 2004 demonstrates a genuine interest in the protection of the customary land rights of rural communities and underlines rural communities’ rights to their land. However, the documentation of customary rights in Angolan agriculture is limited. This report describes and analyses customary land rights in two villages in Huambo province, both situated some 60 to 90 km from the provincial capital. The report demonstrates that despite of many similarities there exist huge differences in agricultural practices and in how customary land rights are conceived.

Secure land rights are important for development and poverty reduction and the greatest challenges for providing such rights are in urban, peri-urban areas, and the most productive rural areas. This publication updates and revises UN-HABITAT’s 2004 publication ‘Urban Land for All’, and stresses the need for policies that facilitate access to land for all sections of their existing and future populations – particularly those on low or irregular incomes.

This tool aims to support the scrutiny and the improvement of positive outcomes of laws for rural communities. It explores the reasons behind variable practical outcomes (good, average and bad) then suggests changes in how to develop laws, put them into practice or enforce them.

This paper examines the current wave of land tenure reform in eastern and southern Africa. It discusses how far tenure reform reflects a shift in powers over property from centre to periphery. A central question is whether tenure reform is designed to deliver to rural smallholders greater security of tenure and greater control over the regulation and transfer of these rights.Policy conclusions include:whilst diverse in initial objective, and uneven in delivery, tenure reforms address a remarkably common set of concerns.

Since Independence, India’s states have employed several land reform ‘tools,’ including reforming tenancy, imposing land ceilings, distributing government wasteland, and allocating house sites and homestead plots. This article briefly summarises some of these past efforts and attempts to draw broad lessons for informing possible policy paths ahead.To date, the authors argue, the effectiveness of the legislation has been mixed and progress over the last few years has slowed. But the link between rural poverty and landlessness remains.

Extractive industry investment in Latin America has increased considerably since the early 1990s, especially in the last decade. Expansion of extractive activities into new territory has led to new rounds of conflict and contestation in the region, including over resource use and control, territorial occupation, relationships between existing rural livelihoods, and extractive investment and conservation versus extraction.

Women’s land ownership and control have important connections with their empowerment in Pakistan’s agricultural context. However, the link between these has largely remained unexplored; and there has been only a few research to determine how many women own or control land in Pakistan. The Sustainable Development Policy Institute (SDPI) carried out a multiple pronged research in 2007-09 to fill this knowledge gap and to examine the reason behind women’s land ownership and empowerment.