Improving the productivity of
smallholder farms in Sub-Saharan Africa offers the best
chance to reduce poverty among this generation of rural
poor, by building on the limited resources farming
households already possess. It is also the best and shortest
path to meet rising food needs. Using examples from
farmers' maize and rice fields, and comparisons with
Asia, this paper examines why the set of technologies

Presentación del caso 90 del Movimiento Regional por la Tierra y el Territorio expresado en el documental El camino es el río, de Producciones Cinematográficas Huayrurito. La actividad tuvo la participación de Oscar Bazoberry, coordinador del IPDRS, y del antropólogo Xavier Albó.

In this Special Issue on “Agent-Based Modelling and Landscape Change” we aimed to bring together articles that showcase innovative uses of agent-based models (ABMs) for investigating and explaining landscape change and dynamics.[...]

European agricultural landscapes have been shaped by humans to produce marketable private goods such as food, feed, fiber and timber. Land-use intensification to increase provisioning services in such productive landscapes alters the capacity of ecosystems to supply other services (often public goods and services) that are also vital for human wellbeing. However, the interactions, synergies and trade-offs among ecosystem services are poorly understood.

The notion that the formal titling and individualization of land rights in developing countries lead to higher investments in land and agricultural productivity holds sway in academic and development circles. In this paper, this notion is analyzed based on a comparative study of land reform programs and their implications for access to land, credit, and agricultural investments in Ghana, Kenya, and Vietnam. It focuses on how different access routes to land influence access to credit, and the transaction costs of land reform programs for agricultural investments.

In this paper we draw on in-depth research to explore inter-professional working in rural land and livestock management and introduce the novel concept of inter-professional expertise.

In much of sub-Saharan Africa, women have little say in decisions over land. Unless proactive steps are taken to enable women to have a stronger voice, large-scale agribusiness projects will leave them even more marginalised. Though there has been little research in this area, an emerging body of thinking and practice provides clear pointers as to how governments, NGOs and investors might mitigate such risks in future, particularly by explicitly addressing gender issues head-on from the very outset.

The recent wave of land deals for agribusiness investments has highlighted the widespread demand for greater accountability in the governance of land and investment. Legal frameworks influence opportunities for accountability, and recourse to law has featured prominently in grassroots responses to the land deals. Drawing on comparative socio-legal research in Cameroon, Ghana and Senegal, this report explores how the law enables, or constrains, accountability in investment processes.

Groundwater is a vital yet threatened
resource in much of South Asia. This paper develops a model
of groundwater transactions under payoff uncertainty arising
from unpredictable fluctuations in groundwater availability
during the agricultural dry season. The model highlights the
trade-off between the ex post inefficiency of long-term
contracts and the ex ante inefficiency of spot contracts.
The structural parameters are estimated using detailed

To explain persistent gender gaps in
market outcomes, a lab experimental literature explores
whether women and men have innate differences in ability (or
attitudes or preferences), and a separate field-based
literature studies discrimination against women in market
settings. This paper posits that even if women have
comparable innate ability, their relative performance may
suffer in the market if the task requires them to interact

Participatory community development
programs are designed to match government investments with
local needs. In Morocco, where issues of inequality and
poverty are high on the national agenda, a community
development program, the National Initiative for Human
Development, targeted high-poverty areas for additional
investments. This paper examines whether, in addition to
reducing poverty, such programs can also promote human

Governments must decide how to allocate
limited resources for infrastructure development,
particularly since financing gaps have been projected for
the coming decades. Social cost-benefit analysis provides
sound project appraisal and, when systematically applied, a
basis for prioritization. In some instances, however,
capacity and resource limitations make extensive economic
analyses across all projects unfeasible in the immediate