Sustainable agriculture has emerged as a key issue in agricultural development and natural resource management because of widespread and growing concern about the seriousness of degradation of the world's natural resource base and ever-increasing pressures on these resources from continuing rapid population growth. This paper examines the changes in land use and the problem of tropical deforestation affecting the world's land resource base for sustainable agricultural development. Global land-use changes have been slow in the last decade.

Although increased global demand for land has led to renewed interest in African land tenure, few models to address these issues quickly and at the required scale have been identified or evaluated. The case of Rwanda's nation-wide and relatively low-cost land tenure regularization program is thus of great interest. This paper evaluates the short-term impact (some 2.5 years after completion) of the pilots undertaken to fine-tune the approach using a geographic discontinuity design with spatial fixed effects. Three key findings emerge from the analysis.

This paper discusses the key issues and concerns regarding sustainable Philippine watershed management. Emphasis is made on the various requisites of a sustainable management with a focus on the critical roles of land use planning. land use planning, land management, watershed

ERES:conference

The paper looks at the development of conservation policy since the mid-20th Century. It reviews how land conservation policy developed in the UK, and the ethical and policy design issues which emerged as the focus of conservation expanded. It then considers how the lessons learned may be applied to address environmental conservation needs in developing society situations. The first steps in UK conservation policy entailed legislation to establish public rights over privately owned resources.

Adopted about one year after the 1989 Revolution, Land Law (Law 18/1991) represented the starting point of land reform in Romania. As a result of this law implementation, at the beginning of the year 2000 the private sector owned 84% of total agricultural land: 82% of arable land, 74% of land under vineyards, 67% of land under orchards and 87% of land under meadows and pastures.

This paper analyses the income and structural effects of the Single Payment Scheme (SPS). In particular, we analyze how the income distributional effects and farm restructuring are impacted by the SPS by accounting for entitlement tradability, cross-compliance and CAP 'greening' requirements, different SPS implementation models, and the entitlement stock. Our results suggest that the SPS implication details are highly important: farmers’ benefits can range from 100% of the SPS value to a negative policy incidence, and farm structural change may be hindered by the SPS.

Alternative land use remains a controversial issue in Indonesia, particularly with regard to regions outside Java. This paper aims to highlight forest land use dynamics in Indonesia, and particularly the difficulties of resolving the conflicts between conservation, the need to preserve local livelihoods, the demands of the logging industry, both legal and illegal, and the pressures to convert land from forest use to other uses, mainly agriculture, plantations and mining.

The relative scarcity of land resources to meet the growing needs of land-users has compelled land specialists to consider the need for a better system in the proper use and management of land resource. Forestlands comprise a major component of the national land and are currently the most degraded areas.

Land Economics/Use,

The purpose of this paper is to highlight the detrimental impact of land tenure insecurity on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. It is related to recent controversies about the detrimental impact of land laws on deforestation, which seem to legitimize land encroachments. The latter is mainly the result of land tenure insecurity which is a key characteristic of this region and results from a long history of interactions between rural social unrest and land reforms or land laws. A simple model is developed where strategic interactions between farmers lead to excessive deforestation.

This study aims to examine current land access and youth livelihood opportunities in Southern Ethiopia. Access to agricultural land is a constitutional right for rural residents of Ethiopia. We used survey data from the relatively land abundant districts of Oromia Region and from the land scarce districts of Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples’ (SNNP) Region. We found that youth in the rural south have limited potential to obtain agricultural land that can be a basis for viable livelihood. The law prohibits the purchase and sale of land in Ethiopia.