The present e-collection of scientific works deals with results of research on issues of economy, agrarian and engineering sciences studied by researchers, post-graduate students, magisters and students of Mykolayiv State Agrarian Univ. and other educational establishments of the Ministry of Agrarian Policy of Ukraine are elucidated. The issue comprises 30 scientific papers, distributed by three sections, in particular Economic sciences (18 papers), Agricultural sciences (10) and Engineering sciences (2 papers), and, what is important, except the Ukrainian-language contents (pp.

Over the coming 35 years, agriculture will face an unprecedented confluence of pressures, including a 30 percent increase in the global population, intensifying competition for increasingly scarce land, water and energy resources, and the existential threat of climate change. To provide for a population projected to reach 9.3 billion in 2050 and support changing dietary patterns, estimates are that food production will need to increase from the current 8.4 billion tonnes to almost 13.5 billion tonnes a year.

Land policy and the proposed land tenure reforms of Government have important implications for the development of the agriculture sector in Zambia. The purpose of this report is to ‘identify the critical issues that will need to be assessed further if DFID decides to offer support to the agricultural sector.’

In the context of the global land rush, some portray large-scale land acquisitions as a potent threat to the livelihoods of already marginalized rural farming households in Africa. In order to avoid the potential pitfall of studying a particular project that may well have atypical effects, this paper systematically investigates the impact on commercial farm wage incomes for rural smallholder households of all pledged investments in the agricultural sector in Zambia between 1994 and 2007.

Over the past decade issues pertaining to land sharing/land sparing have gained some space in the debate on the study of land-use strategies and their associated impacts at landscape level. State and non-state actors have, through their interests and actions, triggered changes at the landscape level and this report is a synthesis of some of the main findings and contributions of a scoping study carried out in Zambia as part of CIFOR’s Agrarian Change Project. It focuses on findings in three villages located in the Nyimba District.

The past decade has ushered in an era of increasingly contentious land politics in Zambia, with investors, the government, and chiefs simultaneously blamed for injustices in land allocation. These conflicts over land have been exacerbated, and at times caused by the lack of transparency and available data on the status of land. While a variety of actors has real grievances with the security and efficiency of the current system of land allocation, smallholder farmers bear the brunt of the risk of continuing the status quo in land policy.

The paper shows that pre-colonial ecologies of agricultural systems in some parts of rural Zambia were sustainable and resilient to prevailing environmental conditions, and were therefore able to ensure relative food security, under communal land tenure. However, colonial policies of land alienation and labour migration impacted negatively on food production systems of some ethnic groups like the citemene system of the Bemba and the flood plain cultivation system of the Lozi, making them extremely vulnerable due to the absence of large numbers of males.

In the name of development, governments in southern Africa are reformulating land policies to facilitate privatisation of customary land rights. It is argued that this can stimulate land markets, (foreign) private investment, access to formal credit, and enhance security of tenure (by way of holding title), thereby leading to economic growth and poverty alleviation.

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This article examines the impact of the land reforms undertaken in Zambia and Zimbabwe on agricultural development. The Zambian land reform of 1995 has led to significant improvements in agricultural productivity and output since the early 2000s, allowing for a rising GDP and hopes that such growth will be redistributed across the education and health sector.

Customary land is the foundation of smallholder agriculture in Zambia. In recent decades much of this land has under gone significant change as the result of population pressures, land alienation, infrastructure investments, and climate change. Despite these changes, knowledge about both the quantity of customary land and the quality of this land for agricultural commercialization purposes is scant.

Land is the most fundamental resource in any society because it is the basis of human survival. Land is the space upon which all human activities take place and provides continued existence of all life forms and minerals.