The absence of a clearly defined land use policy in Kenya after years of independence has resulted in a haphazard approach to managing the different land use practices and policy responses. Land use continues to be addressed through many uncoordinated legal and policy frameworks that have done little to unravel the many issues that affect land use management. The Constitution of Kenya 2010, Kenya Vision 2030 and the Sessional Paper No. 3 of 2009 on National Land Policy all call for a clear framework for effectively addressing the challenges related to land use.

In Timor-Leste, customary institutions contribute to sustainable and equitable rural development and the establishment of improved access to and management of land, water and other natural resources. Drawing on multi-sited empirical research, we argue that the recognition and valorization of custom and common property management is a prerequisite for sustainable and equitable land tenure reform in Timor-Leste.

Armed conflicts are enemies of food security. There is a well established correlation between the exposure of countries to external or internal conflicts, and the deterioration or long-term stagnation in their food security. Most conflicts, and especially the internal conflicts that have now become the dominant model of mass violence, mainly affect rural areas and their populations.

Producing adequate food to meet global demand by 2050 is widely recognized as a major challenge, particularly for Africa south of the Sahara, including Tanzania (Godfray et al. 2010; Alexandratos and Bruinsma 2012; van Ittersum et al. 2016). Increased price volatility of major food crops (Koning et al. 2008; Lagi et al. 2011) and an abrupt surge in land area devoted to crop production in recent years (Grassini et al. 2013) reflect the powerful forces underpinning this challenge.

In October 2011, the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) requested the High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) to prepare "a comparative study of constraints to smallholder investment in agriculture in different contexts with policy options for addressing these constraints, taking into consideration the work done on this topic by IFAD, and by FAO in the context of COAG, and the work of other key partners.

There are 1.4 billion poor people living on less than US$1.25 a day. One billion of them live in rural areas where agriculture is their main source of livelihood. The ‘green revolution’ in agriculture that swept large parts of the developing world during the 1960s and 1970s dramatically increased agricultural productivity and reduced poverty. Many of the productivity gains accrued to smallholder farmers, supported through research and extension services.

Given its vast land resources and favorable water supply, the Democratic Republic of Congo’s (DRC’s) natural agricultural potential is immense. However, the economic potential of the sector is handicapped by one of the most dilapidated transport systems in the developing world (World Bank 2006). Road investments are therefore a high priority in the government’s investment plans and those of its major donors.

While many people in the developing world lack secure property rights and access to adequate resources, women have less access to land than men do in all regions and in many countries (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations [FAO], 2011b). Women across the developing world are consistently less likely to own land, have fewer rights to land, and the land they do own or have access to is of lower quality in comparison to men
(FAO, 2011b).

In view of the 2012 United Nations Commission on the Status of Women’s thematic focus on rural women’s empowerment, the gender team at the Development Centre has launched an issues paper, “Do discriminatory social institutions matter for food security?”.

We use data from the 2007 Bangladesh Demographic and Health Survey to examine the relationship between women’s status and nutrition in Bangladesh using indicators of empowerment such as mobility, decisionmaking power, and attitudes toward verbal and physical abuse. We also examine the role of variables reflecting maternal education and height, in relation to child nutrition. All models control for age and sex of the child, household wealth, and region.

Women play important roles as producers of food, managers of natural resources, income earners, and caretakers of household food and nutrition security. Giving women the same access to physical and human resources as men could increase agricultural productivity, just as increases in women’s education and improvements in women’s status over the past quarter century have contributed to more than half of the reduction in the rate of child malnutrition.

The surge in food prices in the last years, following a century of decline, has been the most marked of the past century in its magnitude, duration and the number of commodity groups whose prices have increased. The ensuing crisis has resulted in a 50–200% increase in selected commodity prices, driven 110 million people into poverty and added 44 million more to the undernourished.