This book exposes the key land use and environmental problems facing Kenya today due to lack of an appropriate national land use policy. The publication details how the air is increasingly being polluted, the water systems are diminishing in quantity and deteriorating in quality. The desertification process threatens the land and its cover. The soils are being eroded leading to siltation of the ocean and lakes. The forests are being depleted with impunity thus destroying the water catchments.

Construyendo caminos de esperanza: Narrativas de jóvenes de la Amazonia colombiana
 

 
Andrea Susana Lopez Torres,

 
Luz Dary Sotto Carvajal, Luis Eduardo López Castro

Todos participan de la iniciativa “Semillero de Investigación Inti Wayra” desarrollada en la Universidad de la Amazonia, Caquetá, Colombia. Este ensayo obtuvo el primer lugar en la séptima versión del Concurso Alimentos y pensamiento siempre en agenda cuya temática propuesta fue “Historias de vida que sobreviven la violencia y persecución en el campo en Sudamérica”. 

Although only 5 percent of Tajikistan's land area is farmable due to the country's mountainous geography, agriculture accounts for 53 percent of total employment. Among those households that engage in agriculture, almost 90 percent can be classified as small family farms. With 0.2 hectares on average, Tajikistan's smallholders operate on very marginalized farmland which makes it less surprising that on-farm income and income from non-agricultural wages are almost evenly balanced.

A new report by Small Foundation and Palladium looks at the viability of geomapping as a tool to close the smallholder farmers’ financing gap and improve their livelihoods.

With India emerging as the world’s largest groundwater irrigator, marginal farmers and tenants in many parts have come to depend on informal water markets for irrigation. Power subsidies have grown these markets and made them pro-poor, but are also responsible for groundwater depletion, and for financial troubles of electricity distribution companies of India or DISCOMs. Gujarat has successfully reduced subsidies by rationing farm power supply, and West Bengal has done so by charging farmers commercial power tariff on metered consumption.

The authors review the role of land
policies in the evolving farm structure of transition
countries in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) and the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). They show how
different policies for land property rights, degrees of
control of land rental and sale markets, and procedures for
restructuring former collective or state farms resulted in
significantly different farm structures in CEE countries

The policy reforms called for in the
transition from a socialist command economy to a developing
market economy bring both opportunities and risks to a
country's citizens. In poor economies, the initial
focus of reform efforts is naturally the rural sector, which
is where one finds the bulk of the population and almost all
the poor. Economic development will typically entail moving
many rural households out of farming into more remunerative

Orieta Belokon y Walter Mesa son colonos del INC en la Colonia San Javier. Ambos iniciaron siendo asalariados rurales. A la par empezaron a producir alquilando tierras.Luego gracias a su trabajo en la producción de leche accedieron a un crédito bancario para comprar sus tierras. Actualmente, además, alquilan una fracción al INC y continúan produciendo leche. Apuesta por su vida en el campo.