AFJN travelled to Brewaniase, a town in Ghana’s Volta Region, to learn more about a potential land grab deal by Herakles Farms, a New York based agribusiness. Informed that Herakles Farm had acquired a large tract of land in the Volta Region. Less than a year ago the property was sold to a British company, Volta Red. This story is a warning to landowners in Africa and irresponsible African leaders who are carelessly mortgaging future generations’ inheritance during this global rush for land in Africa.

Chapters cover access to and distribution of land; land tenure, resource control, and conflicts; non-agricultural production strategies; agrarian labour processes and social relations; social services and reproduction strategies; local ‘grievances’ and social organisation; agrarian structure and class formation; emerging agrarian questions and politics.

The Guiding Principles are designed to help a number of stakeholders develop larger-scale agricultural investments that are more likely to prove sustainable, beneficial, and successful for communities, investors and governments.

A framework to strengthen land rights, enhance productivity and secure livelihoods. Includes background; the context of the land question; land in the national development process; the process of land policy development; land policy implementation; tracking progress in land policy development and implementation; overall conclusion.

The lobby to industrialise food production in Africa is changing seed and land laws across the continent to serve agribusiness corporations. The end goal is to turn what has long been held as a commons into a marketable commodity that the private sector can control and extract profit from at the expense of smallholder farmers and communities. This survey aims to provide an overview of just who is pushing for which specific changes in these areas – looking not at the plans and projects, but at the actual texts that will define the new rules.

Includes inheritance: a key way women access land; local mechanisms: ‘custom’, power dynamics and lack of engagement; formal justice system: community pariah status and systemic barriers. The lack of access to land cannot be framed as a failing of formal or informal systems, but rather as issues with both. The key to increasing access to justice at both formal and informal levels is to address power dynamics and understand how they operate to the detriment of women.

Includes official land rights in Kenya; refusing inheritance – widows and daughters in the patrilineage, dispute trajectories; institutionalizing women’s exclusion – local control boards, local dispute tribunals, formal courts; shifting the debate; working with constructive values in this context. The problem needs to be tackled using the avenues that currently promote the marginalization of women; the socio-cultural value systems that determine which behaviour, arguments, and actions are legitimate in a community.

Covers the rush to acquire land in Africa by foreign governments and private investors, fuelled by fears for global food security in the face of climate change and volatile food prices on the international market. Warns that the political and economic risks of these land purchases are colossal and outweigh any gains, and argues that African governments must make food security and sufficiency for their own people paramount.

Original new thesis which explores the history and politics of commercial farmers in Zimbabwe, their interactions with the state, and their contests for land and other resources. Using fresh archive and key informant sources, it provides a unique perspective on Zimbabwe’s much publicised land and race debates. Argues that the dismantling of the white farming sector disguised wider political contest and provided a source of land and assets for the ruling ZANU PF with which to placate its elaborate and increasingly militarised patronage system.

Focuses on the problems of implementing new land laws in Africa, with particular emphasis on those in Tanzania, Uganda and South Africa. Includes background, the policy environment, implementers, accommodative non-state land reform, and radical non-state land reform.

An analysis of the World Bank’s Policy Research Report (PRR) from a gender perspective and a contribution to an e-mail discussion on it. Looks at whether the latest draft has addressed the failings of an earlier version. Focuses on the notion of non-contractable labour; the household as a unit of analysis; motivated family labour; the consequences of default; equity and poverty reduction strategies; bringing women’s rights onto the agenda.

Analyses the World Bank’s Policy Research Report (PRR) from a gender perspective and is critical of the consultation process on it thus far. It has important implications for women in Africa. The Bank believes land should be viewed not as a source of subsistence but of capital. It ignores women’s unpaid labour as a factor in agricultural productivity. It treats the household as an undifferentiated unit and ignores that the family often functions as a site of oppression. The Bank stresses ‘motivated’ family labour but ignores that much of women’s labour is far from voluntary.