The conservation compliance provision of the 1985 Food Security Act requires highly erodible land to be cropped according to a locally approved conservation plan. There is overwhelming evidence that conservation compliance has reduced soil erosion. A key issue confronting Congress as they consider 1995 Farm Bill options is the fate of these erosion benefits if commodity programs are eliminated or it the subsidy level is greatly reduced.

Despite its importance in agricultural development, the oft-observed inverse relationship between farm size and land productivity in developing countries has received very limited attention in Africa. This work tries to fill the gap by analyzing the relationship between farm-size and
productivity in Rwanda.

Atemporal and intertemporal use of public lands, the determination of optimal levels of wilderness designation and habitat preservation, and the appropriate regulation of natural resources have all been "hot button" issues in the American West for quite some time now. In this paper, I propose and describe a research agenda which promises to yield interesting and useful new policy insights into these fractious resource issues.

Tax provisions for land care are often justified as corrections for externalities. It is argued in this paper that land care provisions can be justified independently of an externality correction objective, since land care provisions can be viewed as a partial correction of the failure of the depreciation provisions in the Income Tax Assessment Act 1936 to recognise that items other than plant and articles devalue through use. This argument only applies to depreciation over the effective life of the asset and not to the provision of accelerated depreciation.

In October 1992, the Peace Accord was signed in Mozambique. Many positive changes have taken place since then. and the countryside in postwar Mozambique is in a state of intense transformation. Nevertheless, the government has been largely silent on the issue of land tenure reform, while some of the recommendations regarding land-policy reform that have been proposed are simplistic, uninformed, and fail to reflect the present political reality in Mozambique.

In this paper, the main socio-economic concepts and their applications in the study of soil degradation are reviewed under three broad headings: soil conservation as an input in agricultural production; topsoil as a natural resource somewhere between being renewable and nonrenewable; and the effects of dealing with common property resources. The treatment of soil conservation as an input has involved the demonstration of damage functions and a study of factors influencing the adoption of soil conservation.