Paper systematically evaluates the political economy of Zimbabwe's emerging land policy in the 1990s in the context of other land reform programmes in Southern Africa.

This white paper looks at one example of private land reform, Agros International, within the context of the global and historical scope of land reform methods.The paper states that methods of land reform can be understood within three general categories: government-directed reform, popular social mobilization, and market -based reform. However, despite the many benefits of secure land access, the application of effective land reform has proven difficult and rare.

Since 1994, the South African government has embarked on an ambitious land reform programme to redistribute and return land to previously disenfranchised communities. However, many black people lack the knowledge, skills and experience needed to manage their land.

Sharp inequalities in the distribution of land remains a major cause of extreme poverty in many developing countries. Some instances are the result of ownership patterns inherited from colonial administrations, others are linked to the struggle for economic prosperity in the post-independence era.Landlessness is therefore a significant problem for the rural poor. Most remedies that have been undertaken previously have not yielded positive results, as can be witnessed in Southern Africa today.

South African president Mbeki has characterised the developmental challenge in his country in terms of integrating the structurally disconnected ‘two economies’. On the one hand the modern industrial, mining, agricultural, financial and services sector, and on the other the ‘third world economy’ found in those urban and rural areas where the majority of poor people live.This draft chapter challenges this characterisation and focuses on the rural dimensions of the ‘two economies’ debate.

Articles in this edition develop several areas and introduce specific experiences relating to land reform. The main thread running through the articles is that of change; how we can help to understand what change means and how it can be managed.

Today, many rural poor Filipinos are using state law to try to claim land rights. In spite of the availability of a much stronger set of legal resources than ever before, claiming legal land rights remains difficult. Some argue these difficulties are a reason to turn away from state-led land reform and toward a market-assisted land reform (MALR) model.

In the paper short data on the results of implementation of pilot land consolidation projects in 6 villages of the Republic of Moldova in 2007-2009 are presented. As a result it became possible to accumulate the experience necessary for extension of these works in scales of all country. Simultaneously a number of difficulties and problems have been identified. It will be difficult to realize these works without elimination of them.

La propiedad de la tierra en Turquía está muy fragmentada, tal y como sucede en los países de Europa central. Este fenómeno impide que el rendimiento llegue a los niveles deseados. La concentración parcelaria implica la redistribución de la propiedad, lo que provoca que los agricultores individuales obtengan menos parcelas, pero más contiguas y compactas y de mayor tamaño.

In 2011, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) collected data for the final round of a panel survey to
evaluate how the resettlement project affected the food security of program participants in the long term. Although
programs like the CBRLDP appear in other African countries, few quantitative evaluations measure the short- or longterm
impact of resettlement policies. However, great lessons can be learned from ongoing research on this matter in
terms of the roles of land reform and migration in improving food security in sub-Saharan Africa.

Almost two decades have passed since China first enacted legislation to protect farmland from conversion to nonagricultural use. Yet hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land are still developed to urban area each year, raising the question of whether the legislation is effective in preserving farmland from development. This paper examines the effectiveness of the Basic Farmland Protection Regulation in protecting high-quality farmland from urban development in China in the first decade after it came into effect (1995‒2005).

This issue of Land Reform, Land Settlement and Cooperatives contains an interesting and

wide-ranging set of contributions providing insights into land related issues ranging from

Italy to the Central Andes, and from the historical development of sustainable tenure

practices to aspects of agriculture sector planning.

The eight articles featured open with that of Lavigne Delville, which addresses issues

relating to insecurity of tenure in West Africa, and identifies what the paths of change