The use of groundwater in irrigated agriculture is often regarded as an effective way of increasing farm productivity. However, the effects of differential access to groundwater by farmers have rarely been studied at the microeconomic scale, particularly the possibly negative effects of marginalization of small farmers. During the hydraulic crisis that has affected Algerian irrigation schemes since the 1980s, groundwater has become a major source of irrigation for farmers. A process of farm differentiation occurred linked to farmers' access to groundwater, causing social inequity.

In the midst of neoliberal restructuring and a project of market-led agrarian reform (MLAR), Guatemalan rural communities and peasant organizations have fought to access, reclaim, or hold onto communal land through direct action. This essay explores the dynamics of organized agrarian struggle in contemporary Guatemala, arguing that three forms of organizing that have been labeled officially as ‘agrarian conflicts’ – historical land claims, rural labour disputes, and land occupations – together account for more peasant land access than has been delivered through the MLAR system.

This paper investigates the changing relationship between land, citizenship, and power in Brazil, where land-related policies have historically served to situate political and economic rights in the hands of an elite land-owning minority.

The debate about ‘land grabs’ by foreign agents should not obscure the role of national governments or the accelerating process of appropriation of land by national agents. Much of the appropriated land is under forms of ‘customary’ tenure. In arguing that a fundamental problem is the denial of property in land to Africans, I lay out the colonial and post-colonial reproduction of ‘customary’ tenure as not equivalent to property rights, the documentation of mounting competition and conflict centring on land, and the more recent threats by national and international agents.

This paper examines how people mobilize around notions of distributive justice, or ‘moral economies’, to make claims to resources, using the process of post‐socialist land privatization in the Mekong Delta region of southern Vietnam as a case study. First, I argue that the region's history of settlement, production and political struggle helped to entrench certain normative beliefs around landownership, most notably in its population of semi‐commercial upper peasants.

The objective of this study was to evaluate response of parcel orientation on crop yield and yield characteristics. The study was carried out on second crop maize in Bafra District of Samsun province in 2001 and 2002 years. The experiment was established at four different directions (east-west, north-south, northeast-southwest and northwest-southeast) containing the plots with 70x12 cm row spacing and row planting distances in three replications.

I consider Paul Thompson’s Agrarian Vision from the perspective of the philosophy of technology, especially as it relates to certain questions about public engagement and deliberative democracy around food issues. Is it able to promote an attitudinal shift or reorientation in values to overcome the view of “food as device” so that conscientious engagement in the food system by consumers can become more the norm?

This article examines the process of agroecological research on beekeeping systems, developed jointly by the Temperate Agriculture Program of the Brazilian Agricultural Research Company (EMBRAPA), and the Institute of Sociology and Peasant Studies (ISEC), of the University of Córdoba. The investigation was carried out on different beekeeping experiences in southern Brazil: peasant family farms, settlements of agrarian reform, and Afro-descent quilombola and Guarani indigenous villages.

This paper analyzes the intersection of two parallel developments that have had a curious impact on agrarian politics in Colombia: on the one hand, attempts to appropriate land for ‘green’ ends such as biofuel production, which have become ubiquitous all across Latin America, and on the other, the implementation of multicultural reforms, which in Colombia resulted in the collective titling of more than five million hectares of land for ‘black communities’.

Martin Ravallion and Dominique van de Walle argue that growing landlessness in Vietnam is a function of people capitalizing on the higher returns to education witnessed in wage labour when compared with farming. So, growing landlessness is a sign of economic success. This review argues that Ravallion and van de Walle misconstrue landlessness, misinterpret the associated data and downplay the constraints facing rural Vietnamese. In so doing, they fail to capture the complex realities of Vietnam's agrarian transition.