Despite the growth in the agricultural sector in Latin America and the Caribbean, 8 out of every 10 farmers, small-scale producers who are at the base of domestic food production, remain largely excluded from the related benefits. Government efforts for strengthening agriculture allocate public resources to few lines of spending that favour a minority. Investment on small-scale agriculture is difficult to track and where possible, it is disproportionately lower than this group´s contribution to the sector.

This article discusses how one group is contributing to critical thinking about how the Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGs) are implemented. The Future Agricultures Consortium (FAC) - an Africa-based alliance of agricultural research organizations - is both tracking implementation of the VGs and launching a study that will, among other things, investigate the multiple pressures toward the commercialization of land and the resulting impacts on land rights in Southern Africa.

This article focuses on recent policy changes implemented by the Government of Tanzania. The Government has been criticized in local and international media for supporting harmful large-scale land acquisitions. In response, policy makers have placed a cap on transfer size: investors can acquire no more than 10,000 hectares for sugar production and no more than 5,000 hectares for rice production (two key agricultural commodities in the country). But will a cap stop harmful transfers? Maybe, but caps are not necessarily the “major step” that the article suggests.

Recent stories from Burma and Ethiopia illustrate the contentious issues surrounding the large-scale acquisition of land for agricultural production. In Ethiopia, the government may be re-assessing its policy of granting large tracts of land to investors, reducing the size of initial allocations and increasing the scrutiny of investors' capacity to achieve their proposed plans and fulfill contractual obligations.

The past decade has seen several African countries increasing their agricultural growth, a trend largely underpinned by increases in land area cultivated instead of productivity increases. Meanwhile, scholars debate whether Africa should pursue a strategy of large-scale or smallholder farms, paying little attention to a special group of smallholder farmers who have transitioned to become medium- and large-scale farmers. This study, therefore, begins to analyze this group of farmers, using qualitative data from in-depth interviews and focus group discussions in Ghana.

The 1: 2 000 000 Soil Associations map is based on

the Geomorphology and Soils map, at 1: 1 000 000 scals, prepared

by the FAO/UNDP Eth/78/003, Assistance to Land Use PlJ

Project in 1981 It incorporates some new information ob%,3 _

since the finalizing of the Geomorphology and soils map.

"A dramatic increase over the past fifteen years in domestic pork demand and production in the Philippines has created a potentially profitable opportunity for poor rural and agricultural households. In Southern and Central Luzon, the two biggest markets, however, smallholder pig producers hold only a minority share of total production compared to larger commercial farms. This report seeks to assess the scope for smallholders to remain in business by analyzing the relative profitability of small and large farms.

Increasing competition for water across sectors increases the importance of the river basin as the appropriate unit of analysis to address the challenges facing water resources management; and modeling at this scale can provide essential information for policymakers in their resource allocation decisions.

Recently scientists have started to examine how land-uses and land-use technologies can help mitigate carbon emissions. The half million small-scale farmers inhabiting the Amazon frontier sequester large stocks of carbon in their forests and other land uses that they might be persuaded to maintain or even increase through the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) of the Kyoto Protocol.

The results of this paper challenge the
conventional wisdom in the literature that productivity
plays no role in the economic development of Singapore.
Properly accounting for market power and returns to scale
technology, the estimated average productivity growth is
twice as large as the conventional total factor productivity
(TFP) measures. Using a standard growth accounting
(production function) technique, Young (1992, 1995) found no

International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in collaboration with the Savannah Agricultural Research Institute (SARI) of Council for Scientific and Industrial Research and Ministry of Food and Agriculture designed "Medium and Large-Scale Farmers and Agricultural Mechanization in Ghana" survey targeting large to medium scale farmers and tractor owners.

Landscape changes and the processes driving them have been a critical component in both research and management efforts of savanna systems. These dynamics impact human populations, wildlife, carbon storage, and general spatio-temporal dynamism in response to both anthropomorphic and climatic shifts. Both biophysical and human agents of change can be identified by isolating their respective spatial, temporal, and organizational contingencies.