Investigates the processes and impact of commercialisation of land in Malawi – specifically the acquisition of huge tracts of communal lands by foreign companies and local elites for sugarcane production in Nkhotakota and Chikwawa districts. The main finding was that ‘land grabbing’ for large-scale commercial agriculture in these two districts negatively affected the livelihoods of the poor communal farmers. The costs to the affected communities outweighed the benefits

Notes from a conference on land grabbing in Southeast Asia at Chiang Mai University, Thailand, 5-6 June. Covers colonial and post-colonial plantations; the infrastructural violence of plantations; winners and losers – gender and generation; what then is the future for small-scale and family farmers?; state power, private capital and people’s rights; comparative thoughts

This Botswana Agriculture Public
Expenditure Review (AgPER) is one of a series of similar
studies undertaken in over a dozen countries in sub-Saharan
Africa under the framework of a program coordinated by
CAADP, supported by the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation and
the CAADP Multi-Donor Trust Fund, and implemented by the
World Bank. The AgPER presents data about actual expenditure
for the period 2000 to 2013, with an outlook on the

Since the early 2000s, Tanzania has seen
remarkable economic growth and strong resilience to external
shocks. Yet these achievements were overshadowed by the slow
response of poverty to the growing economy. Until 2007, the
poverty rate in Tanzania remained stagnant at around 34
percent despite a robust growth at an annualized rate of
approximately 7 percent. This apparent disconnect between
growth and poverty reduction has raised concerns among

In conflict-prone situations, access to
markets is necessary to restore economic growth and generate
the preconditions for peace and reconstruction. Hence, the
rehabilitation of damaged transport infrastructure has
emerged as an overarching investment priority among donors
and governments. This paper brings together two distinct
strands of literature on the effects of conflict on welfare
and on the economic impact of transport infrastructure. The

Women comprise 50 percent of the
agricultural labor force in Sub-Saharan Africa, but manage
plots that are reportedly on average 20 to 30 percent less
productive. As a source of income inequality and aggregate
productivity loss, the country-specific magnitude and
drivers of this gender gap are of great interest. Using
national data from the Uganda National Panel Survey for
2009/10 and 2010/11, the gap before controlling for

Youth is often the time when a person starts to dream of the future, think of the path to take and boldly and aggressively set his/her life in motion. In many rural villages, to be a farmer is not part of this dreamt future . Farming is a lowly job and does not earn, so better migrate to cities or abroad where there may be more opportunities and adventure. What will then be the future of agriculture and food without young farmers? No farmer, no food. No food, no life.

In Cambodia, land and natural resources occupy a central place in the production systems of peasants who represent about 80 percent of the country’s population. The development and governance of socio-ecological systems trigger considerable economic, social and environmental issues that need to be addressed urgently given the profound nature of the transformations at play in these systems across Cambodia.

The Philippines is basically an agricultural country with about 30 per cent of the total land area of the country cultivated by almost 5 million farmers. However farm area devoted to agriculture has been decreasing due to land conversion. The basic problem is that Filipino farmers do not have the ability to buy their own lands. The Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Program was implemented to address this problem of landlessness thru redistribution of land.

Since the early 2000s, Tanzania has seen
remarkable economic growth and strong resilience to external
shocks. Yet these achievements were overshadowed by the slow
response of poverty to the growing economy. Until 2007, the
poverty rate in Tanzania remained stagnant at around 34
percent despite a robust growth at an annualized rate of
approximately 7 percent. This apparent disconnect between
growth and poverty reduction has raised concerns among

In 2008, three sugar companies were awarded nearly 20,000 hectares of Economic Land Concessions (ELCs) in Oddar Meanchey province.

The new research finds that associated land grabbing totaling more than 17,000 hectares has affected more than 2,000 families. Of these, 214 families were forcibly evicted.

Meanwhile, at least 3,000 hectares of the misappropriated land has been used for logging rather than sugar plantations, according to the report, ‘Cambodia: The Bitter Taste of Sugar’, commissioned by ActionAid and Oxfam GB.

African governments and international
development groups see boosting productivity on smallholder
farms as key to reducing rural poverty and safeguarding the
food security of farming and non-farming households.
Prompting smallholder farmers to use more fertilizer has
been a key tactic. Closing the productivity gap between male
and female farmers has been another avenue toward achieving
the same goal. The results in this paper suggest the two are