In 1999 the Scottish Parliament convened for the first time in almost 300 years and in response to long-standing popular discontent about highly concentrated land ownership passed the Land Reform (Scotland) Act 2003. Quite in contrast to the emphasis that much of the international development literature and policy have placed on the importance of individual private ownership, Scotland's land reform promotes community ownership. Rather than breaking up large private estates, land reformers aim to keep these estates whole while transferring ownership of them to local communities.

National parks are often places where people have previously lived and worked-they have been formed by a combination of natural and human processes that embody an identifiable history of cultural and political values. Conservation of protected areas is primarily about how we perceive such landscapes, how we place differential values on different landscape components, and who gets to decide on these values. Thus, conservation has been and still is very much about issues of power and environmental justice.

The South African government has endeavoured to strengthen property rights in communal areas and develop civil society institutions for community-led development and natural resource management. However, the effectiveness of this remains unclear as the emergence and operation of civil society institutions in these areas is potentially constrained by the persistence of traditional authorities. Focusing on the former Transkei region of Eastern Cape Province, three case study communities are used examine the extent to which local institutions overlap in issues of land access and control.

Agrarian reform has been a key theme on the development agenda of many countries in the Global South for decades. Whilst such interventions are often pursued for political goals and in the interests of empowerment, there is often a mismatch between these goals and the actual outcomes achieved. Within this context, this study investigates the impacts of agrarian reform in Del Rosario, a former coconut hacienda in the Philippines.

Already during the Land Reform, land properties of several land parcels were formed in the rural areas. Another factor that benefits to the fragmentation of farm properties is development of land market because buying or renting land for farm size building, it is not always possible to find adjacent land plot. Consequently, the land fragmentation not only makes land management difficult, but also increases the transport costs. With this rural land tenure system, competitive and efficient agricultural production cannot be discussed, so a large part of rural areas remains untreated.

World population is increasing, particularly in the developing countries. Groundwater reserves are being depleted; lands are being degraded. The required increase in food production must come principally from new supplies of water for irrigated lands. If irrigated lands fail to produce the required food, increased destruction of resources and degradation of the environment from increasing slash and burn agriculture is anticipated. Various countries and international agencies have recognized the possibility of future food shortage.

Growing pressures on timber resources and increasing environmental awareness have generated the need to comprehensively analyze forest management in Fujian Province, China. Fujian is the most heavily forested province in China and experiences an unprecedented property rights reform and changes in investment in forestry by rights holders. This paper focuses on the net present value (NPV) and the internal rate of return (IRR) for projected financial performance of plantation management for five species in Fujian.

The author’s periodization of the world agriculture’s formation and development, distinguishing three basic stages – preindustrial, industrial, postindustrial, is worked out. The article reveals the key technological factors of the world agriculture’s development from Neolithic period to global agricultural crisis in 2000s. It also presents the key results and gives us a stage-to-stage characteristic of the main peculiarities of the world agricultural development

This work compares the effects of neoliberal and post-neoliberal land-use policies on forest cover along the Corredor Bioceánico of southeastern Bolivia to determine if rates of agriculturally driven forest clearance have changed since the Morales’ administration came to office in 2005. Satellite image analysis, supported by semi-structured interviews with farmers and representatives of key institutions, shows that deforestation for commercial agriculture in Santa Cruz continues and has increased in certain “hotspots”.

The South African government initiated the land reform program in 1994, which is facilitated by the Department of Land Affairs. The land reform programme has three divisions, namely redistribution, restitution and land tenure. The main objectives of land reform since its inception are poverty alleviation, justice, food security, rural transformation, economic growth and to readdress the landless, the poor, women, the disposed and the previously disadvantaged to acquire land. The question can be asked: Has land reform achieved its goals in the past 10 years since its inception?

This paper provides a systematic basis, hitherto missing in the current scholarship, to quantify land transfers in Zimbabwe after 1980. It uses title deed information to determine year of sale via a number of sources. The main finding of this research is that a great deal of land changed ownership during this period, which, if the government had been committed to land reform, it could have acted upon. Evidence suggests as much as 67 per cent of white‐owned land changed ownership after 1980.

Henry Bernstein was co‐editor (with Terence J. Byres) of the Journal of Agrarian Change between 2001 and 2008 and co‐edited The Journal of Peasant Studies (where he joined Byres) between 1985 and 2000. This interview highlights some of Bernstein's major pedagogical and theoretical contributions to the fields of agrarian political economy and development studies. To do so, it traces his intellectual and political trajectory, providing important context for understanding his published work.