A recent wave of large-scale commercial investments in agriculture;extractive industries and other land-based sectors has compounded the ‘global resource squeezein low- and middle-income countries. But many communities affected by land rights violations struggle to assert their rights or obtain redress. Demand for legal support outstrips resources and what is available is not always appropriate. Pursuing litigation often presents significant obstacles and risks to the communities involved without offering any certain outcomes.

An analysis of the July South African report on land and agriculture which documents the sorry tale of land reform since 1994. Says action on land reform is long overdue. Makes sensible recommendations on expropriation. Suggests a policy shift towards equity as a goal of land reform and a shift towards redistribution. Makes the case for substantial (at least half) allocations to women and a focus on urban/peri-urban land. Adding to redistribution;restitution and land tenure reform;it suggests a fourth pillar – land administration.

Covers rights violations in Liberia – responsibility in Switzerland; rubber and Socfin in Switzerland; evictions for plantation expansions; access to food and water; violence on the plantations; limited opportunities for jobs and schooling; conclusions; bibliography.

In advance of the release of the World Bank’s 2019 Enabling the Business of Agriculture (EBA) report;the Oakland Institute exposes the Bank’s new scheme to privatize land in the developing world. It details how the Bank’s prescribed reforms;via a new land indicator in the EBA project;promotes large-scale land acquisitions and the expansion of agribusinesses in the developing world. Initiated as a pilot in 38 countries in 2017;the land indicator is expected to be expanded to 80 countries in 2019. The project is funded by the US and UK governments and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

For more than five years;Ardhi Yetu Programme through its partners (HAKIARDHI;Tanzania Natural Resources Forum (TNRF);and PAICODEO) has been working with communities to advocate for land rights;gender equality and climate change adaptation. AYP’s main goal is to ensure that national level advocacy;policy dialogues and campaigns are driven by community voices;actions and realities. This report documents individual and collective efforts by project beneficiaries;particularly women.

A new wave of agricultural commercialisation is being promoted across Africa’s eastern seaboard;by a broad range of influential actors – from international corporations to domestic political and business elites. Growth corridors;linking infrastructure development;mining and agriculture for export;are central to this;and are generating a new spatial politics as formerly remote borders and hinterlands are expected to be transformed through foreign investment and aid projects.

Liberia has long maintained a dual land tenure system over statutory and customary lands characterized by unclear terms of ownership. Most rural Liberians depend on common resources for their survival. These are largely communally owned;used and managed. But the Liberian government has effectively treated all un-deeded land as public land to be administered by the State. This has undermined the land rights of the majority.

A paper from the Agricultural Policy Research on Africa (APRA) programme in Zimbabwe supported by a DFID grant to IDS;Sussex. Explores the intersecting factors that have shifted pathways of commercialisation;mostly of tobacco and maize;in Mvurwi area in northern Mazowe district;Zimbabwe;since 1890. Looks at five periods;starting with early colonisation by white settlers;then examines the consolidation of ‘European agriculturefollowing World War II;before investigating the liberation war era from the mid-1970s.

This article examines the empirical facts about the actual outcome of Zimbabwe's land reform, based on years of field research. It shows that the popular assumption about failed land reform in Zimbabwe is wrong on several counts: the character of Zimbabwe's land reform has been redistributive, and the extent of this has been wide enough to trigger significant progressive changes in the agrarian structure. This is despite some elites having benefited from the process and foreign-owned agro-industrial estates and conservancies being retained.

Across many parts of Indonesia, investment in oil palm has brought accelerated forms of land acquisition and market engagement for communities, signalling far-reaching implications for equity and well-being of current and future generations. This paper uses a conjunctural feminist political ecology approach to explore gendered and generational engagements with oil palm in Indonesia.

Land questions have invigorated agrarian studies and economic history, with particular emphases on its control, since Marx. Words such as ‘exclusion’, ‘alienation’, ‘expropriation’, ‘dispossession’, and ‘violence’ describe processes that animate land histories and those of resources, property rights, and territories created, extracted, produced, or protected on land. Primitive and on-going forms of accumulation, frontiers, enclosures, territories, grabs, and racializations have all been associated with mechanisms for land control.

Contemporary large-scale land transactions (LSLTs), also called land grabs, are historically unprecedented in their scale and pace. They have provoked robust scholarly debates, yet studies of their gender-differentiated impacts remain more rare, particularly when it comes to how changes in control over land and resources affect women's labor, and thereby their livelihoods and well-being.