A Case Study of Selected Agricultural Investments in Northern Tanzania (2013)

For early reports, see FAO’s Corporate Document Repository

CIHEAM - Watch Letter N.28 released: "Land Issues in the Mediterranean Countries"

Since 2007 CIHEAM is publishing a quarterly Watch Letter devoted to Major Issues in Mediterranean Agriculture, Food and Rural Areas. Each Issue contains a series of articles on a specific topic, together with information on CIHEAM current activities.

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"For millions of people living in the world’s poorest countries, access to land is a matter not of wealth, but of survival, identity and belonging. Most of the 1.4 billion people earning less than US$1.25 a day live in rural areas and depend largely on agriculture for their livelihoods, while an estimated 2.5 billion people are involved in full- or part-time smallholder agriculture.

In line with the conventional view that customary land rights impede agricultural development, the traditional tenure system in Nigeria has been perceived to obstruct the achievement of efficient development and agricultural transformation. This led to the Land Use Act (LUA) of 1978.

Food First Backgrounder, Spring 2014, Vol. 20, No. 1

Introduction: Land, Race and the Agrarian Crisis

The disastrous effects of widespread land grabbing and land concentration sweeping the globe do not affect all farmers equally. The degree of vulnerability to these threats is highest for smallholders, women and people of color—the ones who grow, harvest, process and prepare most of the world’s food.

28 May 2014

GRAIN | La Vía Campesina

For immediate release

Friends of the Earth’s report, ‘What’s your pension funding? How UK institutional investors finance the global land grab’, highlights the investments of UK institutional investors, such as British Airways Pension Fund, Legal & General and Standard Life, in companies accused of grabbing land, destroying the environment, and undermining sustainable livelihoods.

Summarizes recent research (to 1991) on rural land markets in the Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region and on the relationship between this research and broader land tenure issues. The purpose of the project that prompted this paper was to carry out cross-country and longitudinal research on land tenure issues in the LAC region so as to provide an instructive and informative analysis of how tenure patterns affect economic, rural development, and environmental issues.

The structure of ownership of agricultural land, despite of the developing market with agricultural land in recent years, has not changed considerably. Most of agricultural land in Slovakia is, even after 6 years from the entry of Slovakia into the EU, leased. According to the Structural census of farms (2001), the lease of agricultural land represents 96%, in 2010 it was 91% (EUROSTAT, 2010).

Mexican rural reform has questioned the role of the peasantry and private national producers in agriculture. The reform followed a neoliberal paradigm for incorporating the nation into the global village. As part of a government strategy, land reform in Mexico aims to change entrepreneurial and land tenure patterns in rural areas into an individual, private, large-scale, and capitalist productive structure, and the land market is vital in allowing the land transfers needed to change the land tenure pattern.

The ownership of land has always been an important precondition for lasting socio-economic situation and the development of the country. Despite that, there is a process of learning going on in practically all the new member countries, which are still learning that production efficiency of agriculture depends in a large part on the stability of land ownership and its tranquil farming. Despite many fundamental and substantial differences, we can say that hitherto development in land law was tremendous.

Economic aspects of land market in Slovakia were studied in two different regions, characterized by different soil and natural conditions. Two groups of Slovak land owners were analysed. The first group consisted of 412 private farmers with 43.2 ha of agricultural land (LA) per farm on average, the second one of 150 big enterprises such as cooperatives with 1,866 ha of LA on average. In addition, some facts about land markets in Bulgaria, Latvia, Poland, Romania and Ukraine are presented in this article.