A história da agricultura mundial no último meio século tem sido, sobretudo, a história de transformações produtivas, impulsionadas pela ciência e pela intensificação tecnológica, e a resultante expansão da capacidade produtiva, pari passu com o crescimento da demanda de alimentos.
International Water Management Institute (IWMI).
Constrained access to land is increasingly recognized as a problem impeding rural household welfare in densely populated areas of Africa. This study utilizes household and plot level data from rural Kenya to explore the linkage between land access and food security. We find that a 10% increase in operated land size would increase total cereal consumption and home produced food consumption by 0.8% and 2.0%, respectively. We also find that land rental is the dominant mechanism that poor rural farmers use to access additional land for cultivation.
This paper presents results from comprehensive field surveys of jatropha projects in Mozambique, Tanzania and Mali in 2012. The article singles out the salient economic and social impact results and derives lessons. The results clearly demonstrate the weak business case for jatropha biofuel production at this time.
Biofuel plantations have been hyped as a means to reinvigorate Africa’s rural areas. Yet there is still apprehension about the negative environmental and social impacts of large-scale commercial biofuel production around rising food prices, land grabbing, ecological damage, and disruption of rural livelihoods.
The widespread acquisition of land for large-scale/commercial production of biofuel crops in Ghana has raised concerns from civil society organizations, local communities and other parties, regarding the impact of these investments on local livelihoods. This paper assessed the effect of large-scale acquisition of land for production of Jatropha curcas on farmers’ livelihoods in Ghana. The study was conducted in 11 communities spanning the major agro-ecological zones and political divisions across Ghana.
This study focuses on analyzing the ongoing land policy reform that allows collective-owned rural land transactions in the open market in Shenzhen, China. Employing a case study method, we investigate this land policy evolution through description and contextual analysis. We argue that the existing dual-track land administration system, within which the state administers market transactions, has contributed to numerous social problems, such as urban land scarcity, inefficiency of land resource allocation, and exacerbated social injustice.
In urban America, land development and residential real estate have passed through a number of different phases during the post-WWII era. In contemporary discourse on urban sustainability, attention is often expressed in terms of intensity of land development, lot sizes, and square-footage of housing units. In this paper, we reconstruct the land development trajectory of a rapidly growing southern city in the United States and assess whether this trajectory has experienced any reversal in the face of socio-economic transformations that have occurred over the past decade or so.
Nel 2012 la tempesta tropicale Isaac e l’uragano Sandy hanno martoriato Haiti, danneggiando i raccolti, facendo straripare i fiumi, allagando le strade e bloccando l’accesso alle comunità. Mentre i prezzi alimentari aumentavano e i debiti crescevano, gli haitiani poveri hanno adottato misure estreme. Alcuni sono emigrati. Altri hanno resistito riducendo il numero di pasti al giorno e svendendo le proprie terre o il bestiame. Ogni estate, gli haitiani temono lo scatenarsi della furia degli elementi.
The 2013 Global Hunger Index (GHI), which reflects data from the period 2008-2012, shows that global hunger has improved since 1990, falling by one-third. Despite the progress made, the level of hunger in the world remains “serious,” with 870 million people going hungry, according to estimates by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.Across regions and countries, GHI scores vary considerably. South Asia and Africa south of the Sahara are home to the highest GHI scores.
