Globalization offers a mix of new trajectories for agriculture, livelihoods, resource use, and environmental conservation. The papers in this issue share elements that advance our understanding of these new trajectories.

Using county data for West Virginia, Maryland, and Pennsylvania, estimation of a system of simultaneous equations shows that population growth, higher taxes, high farmland value, and high initial per capita income accelerate farmland development, but return on farmland, government assistance to farmers, farmland conservation, and farming agglomeration reduce development pressure.

The lack of concrete instances in which conservation and development have been successfully merged has strengthened arguments for strict exclusionist conservation policies. Research has focused more on social cooperation and conflict of different management regimes and less on how these factors actually affect the natural environments they seek to conserve. Consequently, it is still unknown which strategies yield better conservation outcomes?

The paper examines the rural land and labour markets in the context of economic liberalization in India. Land and labour are the two fundamental resources available to the rural people for income generation. The access to land and to employment for labour become basic determinants of well-being for the rural households. Reforms are often seen as hostile to rural areas and the poor, although they should be beneficial not only for overall growth, but also rural growth and poverty alleviation.

Zoning decisions related to residential lot size and density affect residential land value.Effects of size on residential parcel value in Roanoke County, VA, are estimated with fixedeffects hedonic models. Parcel size; elevation; soil permeability; proximity to urban areas,malls, and roads; and location influence parcel value, but the effects vary by value ofconstruction and development status. Parcel value per square meter declines with increasingparcel size.

The Theory of the Second Best implies that any country with less-than-ideal resources can lose from international trade. Recently it has been suggested this means the South (poor countries) are better off suppressing trade with the North, especially trade in natural resource products, since the North has better developed rights to protect its natural resources. Here we show that the suppression of such trade may also impede the development of property rights in the South, but that even taking this into account, trade liberalization need not improve Southern welfare.

Zambia Agriculture Development Goal:

Reduce poverty through broadbased income growth for those in the agricultural sector

Zambia’s Economic Achievements:

Classified as low-middle income by World Bank
 GDP growing at 6% per annum
 Agricultural growth rate at 7%, above 6% CAADP Goal
 Three consecutive maize bumper harvest years

Despite extensive research into rural development in sub-Saharan Africa, little is known about structural transformation1 in rural areas on the continent. Zambia was chosen as one of three case study countries2 in order to identify and to analyse rural transformation processes and their main influencing forces aiming at defining strategies and measures to influence such processes towards social inclusiveness and environmental sustainability until 2030.
Zambia shows a persisting copper-dependent mono-structure with selective transformation processes

This LEGEND bulletin explores the relationship between agribusiness and land rights. It features articles on the power of local engagement for financial investment, using technology for mapping rights, and catalysing private sector respect for community land rights.

Traditionally, in the context of environment and natural resources management, many communication efforts have focused on the dissemination of technical information to end-users who were expected to adopt them. Development practitioners were trying to ‘push’ their products on communities in order to receive community commitment to their development initiatives.

The report provides a conceptual framework for understanding the application of 'adjudication' to land rights verification as part of a general land administration function that includes offregister rights; and outlines the motivation for developing such as system in South Africa, with some provisional ideas about systematising and institutionalising land rights adjudication to include off-register rights.