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.

The increasing expansion of cropland is major driver of global carbon emissions and biodiversity loss. However, predicting plausible future global distributions of croplands remains challenging. Here, we show that, in general, existing global data aligned with classical economic theories of expansion explain the current (1992) global extent of cropland reasonably well, but not recent expansion (1992–2015).

In recent years modern societies have attached a multifunctional requirement to the use of renewable resources, making their optimal sustainable management more complex. In the last decades, in many cases, this complexity is addressed by formulating management models with the help of the concepts and methods belonging to the well-known multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) paradigm. The purpose of this paper was to undertake a hermeneutic meta-analysis of the literature provided in primary journals on issues related to the management of these resources with the help of the MCDM paradigm.

In West Africa, where the majority of the population relies on natural resources and rain-fed agriculture, regionally adapted agricultural land-use planning is increasingly important to cope with growing demand for land-use products and intensifying climate variability. As an approach to identify effective future land-use strategies, this study applied spatially explicit modeling that addresses the spatial connectivity between the provision of ecosystem services and agricultural land-use systems.

This report responds to heightened concerns over rising levels of farmer-herder conflict across a wide band of semi-arid Africa. We assess the quantitative evidence behind this general impression and review the explanations in the scientific literature, in the light of known issues with long-standing attitudes towards pastoralism and mobile populations. Looking at the data available, we find that total levels of all forms of violence have been rising in the last ten years — especially in some countries in West and Central Africa.

Land-use planning is an important policy instrument for governing landscapes to achieve multifunctionality in rural areas. This paper presents a case study conducted in Na Nhan commune in the northwest montane region of Vietnam to assess land-use strategies toward multiple ecosystem services, through integrated land-use planning.

Monitoring of irrigated land cover is important for both resource managers and farmers. An operational approach is presented to use the satellite-derived surface temperature and vegetation cover in order to distinguish between irrigated and non-irrigated land. Using an iterative thresholding procedure to minimize within-class variance, the bilevel segmentation of surface temperature and vegetation cover was achieved for each irrigation period (Spring, Summer and Autumn).

La terre a toujours été un bien très contesté. Le contrôle des terres et des ressources liées reflète les relations de pouvoir d’une région, d’un pays et constitue un indicateur des injustices sociales existantes. En même temps, ces ressources sont centrales dans la question des droits, des moyens d’existence et de l’identité de petits producteurs alimentaires. Depuis le début, elles ont été au cœur du mouvement pour la souveraineté alimentaire. Ce numéro de la Nyéléni Newsletter est la seconde édition de cette année consacrée au thème de la terre.

As central policies for biodiversity conservation in agricultural landscapes in the European Union (EU), the Habitats Directive and Agri-environmental programmes (AEP) have largely failed to halt biodiversity loss. In response, the German federal state of Saxony combined the instrument of management plans with AEPs to support the implementation of the Habitat Directive. In this study, we investigate the determinants of a farmers’ decisions to adjust their farming practices.

The conciliation between different issues such as agriculture production, biodiversity conservation and water management remains unsolved in many places in the world. As a striking example, the wet grasslands of the Marais Poitevin region (France) presents many obstacles against the integration of these issues, especially in terms of public policy design.

Under the banner of a "New Green Revolution for Africa," agricultural intensification programs aim to make smallholder agriculture more productive as well as "climate smart". As with Green Revolutions in Asia and Mexico, agricultural innovations (hybrid seeds, agronomic engineering, market linkages,and increased use of fertilizer and pesticides) are promoted as essential catalysts of agriculture-led economic growth.

This publication will demonstrate how the project was a catalyst leading to improvements in conditions in the Senegal River Basin, under which land is held or occupied in agriculture sectors. The VGGT addresses problems of weak governance of tenure and the growing pressure on natural resources, assisting countries to achieve food security for all. The project focused on four separate Multi-Stakeholder Platforms (MSPs) located in Guinea, Mali, Mauritania and Senegal.