What can governments in rich countries do about poverty in poor countries, apart from increasing and improving aid and endorsing ambitious poverty reduction goals? Answer: get serious about reforming their own farm policies and start dismantling the agricultural trade restrictions and subsidies that contribute to mass poverty across the developing world.

"This paper discusses the internal processes and decisions that characterized the transition from collectively held group ranches to individualized property systems among the Maasai pastoralists of Kajiado district in Kenya. It addresses the question of why group ranch members would demand individualized property systems, but then turn against the outcome. In addressing this puzzle the paper discusses the process of land allocation and distribution during group ranch subdivision.

Globalization could and should benefit developing countries. But unlike a rising tide that lifts all boats, large and small, globalization is unequal. It has fallen far short of its much-ballyhooed potential to help the world’s poorest people out of poverty. Instead, a combination of policies in both rich and poor countries creates conditions for the rich to prosper and many of the poor to fall more deeply into destitution. Agricultural protectionism in rich countries enables them to skew markets in their favor. Tariffs and trade barriers routinely exclude developing-country products.

This paper reviews the constraints hindering growth of agricultural productivity in Nigeria by providing an overview of the policy environment that affects agricultural productivity, establishing how the policy environment affects productivity improvement, and proposing lessons relevant for future research and policymaking to promote productivity growth in Nigeria

"Advocates of reforms in land rights and land markets frequently posit two important hypotheses: (1) African countries must grant land titles to farmers because titles increase land tenure security and facilitate access to input, land, and financial markets; and (2) land markets constitute the most efficient mechanism for allocating resources and improving access to productive resources by the poor, especially women and other marginalized groups...

The paper uses the concept of credit limit to analyze the determinants of household access to and participation in informal and formal credit markets in Malawi. Households are found to be credit constrained, on average, both in the formal and informal sectors; they borrow, on average, less than half of any increase in their credit lines. Furthermore,they are not discouraged in their participation and borrowing decisions by further increases in the formal interest rate and/or the transaction costs associated with getting formal credit.

Millions of the rural poor now participate in collaborative forest management schemes under a variety of tenurial and organizational arrangements.We examine those arrangements and ask whether local people have indeed gained more access to benefits from and control over forests. Our findings suggest that most co-management projects actually maintain and even extend central government control. -- from Text.

This report identifies the links among economic growth, poverty alleviation, and natural resource degradation in Brazil. It examines the effects of (1) a major devaluation of the Brazilian real (R$); (2) improvements of infrastructure in the Amazon to link it with the rest of Brazil and bordering countries; (3) modification of land tenure regimes in the Amazon agricultural frontier; (4) adoption of technological change in agriculture both inside and outside the Amazon; and (5) fiscal mechanisms to reduce deforestation." -- from Author's Abstract

The United Nations declared 2014 the International Year of Family Farming. Although many forms of production were once family-based, agriculture is now one of the few that are still dominated by families. Because family farms are so prevalent, making them more productive could help combat poverty and hunger in many rural areas around the world. Family farms are mostly small in scale, but they are highly diverse in other ways, and their pathways out of poverty will vary.

It is widely believed that land tenure insecurity under a customary tenure system leads to socially inefficient resource allocation. This article demonstrates that land tenure insecurity promotes tree planting, which is inefficient from the private point of view but could be relatively efficient from the viewpoint of the global environment. Regression analysis, based on primary data collected in Sumatra, indicates that tenure insecurity in fact leads to early tree planting.

A wide range of issues are captured and reiterated in the 12 briefs contained in this collection. These include: the prevalence and importance of customary tenure; the prevalence and importance of common property arrangements; constraints to women’s access under both customary and statutory tenure; the need to secure common property and other forms of tenure; and the importance of broad based participation to secure broad consensus among multiple actors in order to enhance the efficiency, equity and sustainability objectives of land tenure reforms.