I consider Paul Thompson’s Agrarian Vision from the perspective of the philosophy of technology, especially as it relates to certain questions about public engagement and deliberative democracy around food issues. Is it able to promote an attitudinal shift or reorientation in values to overcome the view of “food as device” so that conscientious engagement in the food system by consumers can become more the norm?

This article examines the process of agroecological research on beekeeping systems, developed jointly by the Temperate Agriculture Program of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Company (EMBRAPA), and the Institute of Sociology and Peasant Studies (ISEC), of the University of Córdoba. The investigation was carried out on different beekeeping experiences in southern Brazil: peasant family farms, settlements of agrarian reform, and Afro-descent quilombola and Guarani indigenous villages.

This paper analyzes the intersection of two parallel developments that have had a curious impact on agrarian politics in Colombia: on the one hand, attempts to appropriate land for ‘green’ ends such as biofuel production, which have become ubiquitous all across Latin America, and on the other, the implementation of multicultural reforms, which in Colombia resulted in the collective titling of more than five million hectares of land for ‘black communities’.

Martin Ravallion and Dominique van de Walle argue that growing landlessness in Vietnam is a function of people capitalizing on the higher returns to education witnessed in wage labour when compared with farming. So, growing landlessness is a sign of economic success. This review argues that Ravallion and van de Walle misconstrue landlessness, misinterpret the associated data and downplay the constraints facing rural Vietnamese. In so doing, they fail to capture the complex realities of Vietnam's agrarian transition.

The subject of the treatise are the forests (woods) and their economy on _iče and Fraj_tanj estates in the Lower Styria, which were the property of the Styrian Religion Fund, in the period between the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century. The first estate possessed 2365 and the second 1423 yokes of forests. The distribution of the tree species and the state of the forest stands, which were with some exceptions generally bad, are described.

Historically proven fact is that land fragmentation is a logical consequence of each land reform. The ownership restitution of land on small noncontiguous and spatially dispersed parcels prevents establishing of viable and profi table farms and hence becomes a holdback to an effi cient agriculture. This negative effect becomes increasingly stronger. The small land parcels impede applying of new technologies and production models, as well as the labor and machines’ efficient use. The scattered parcels make diffi cult the planned operation of land.

Abstract.

Biomass is being researched as a possible alternative to fossil sources of energy, in order to avoid externalities from fossil fuel use that affect the environment and the economy. Some biomass-based energy production systems may produce unwanted externalities in their own right, such as increasing the production pressure on the agricultural land base, resulting in a rise in prices of food commodities. Using marginal land for biomass production has been suggested as a solution. However, the definition of what constitutes marginal land is poorly understood.