Farmers in the northern avocado cultivation areas of South Africa were interviewed concerning their experience and perceptions of biological control. Factors affecting their decision to use biological control programmes as a disease control strategy, were also investigated. Results indicate that educational level, age and land owner status reflect the farmer's decision making ability and the level of commitment to adopt the new technology.

This study develops and uses a programming model for farm-level resource use and output supply response to estimate the effects of agricultural land tax in South Africa: A case study of Free State, a region of extremely large commercial farms that gainedtheir size and economic heft during the apartheid years of aggressive subsidies, favorable tax treatment, lucrative state grants and gifts, and all manner of financial assistance. The resultsindicate that changes in land use and output supply are marginal. The highest effects areobserved on irrigated farming.

The Grain for Green Programme (GGP) was launched in China in 1999 to control erosion and increase vegetation cover. Budgeted at USD 40 billion, GGP has converted over 20 million hectares of cropland and barren land into primarily tree-based plantations. Although GGP includes energy forests, only a negligible part (0.6%) is planted as such, most of the land (78%) being converted for protection. Future use of these plantations is unclear and an energy substitution hypothesis is valid.

Scholars today are divided on the motivation behind what is often called Jefferson’s “moral agrarianism”. On the one hand, some scholars take Jefferson at his word when he mentions that agrarianism is a moral vision. For these individuals, Jefferson’s agrarianism is a moral vision and an indispensible part of the good life. On the other hand, other scholars maintain that Jefferson’s moral agrarianism is merely a bit of propaganda that insidiously sheaths a political or economic ideal.

O tema da reforma agrária é examinado por três ângulos: a ação do Estado, a demanda existente e o debate acadêmico. A partir da análise de diferentes perspectivas em jogo, indica-se como possível resposta ao título do texto, que sejam concentrados recursos humanos, financeiros e logísticos numa região que cubra a metade norte de Minas Gerais e se estenda até o Maranhão. Os mecanismos de desapropriação e aquisição ali ainda são possíveis por serem mais baratas as terras do Nordeste, levando em conta a escassez de recursos e a necessidade de maximizar a eficácia governamental.

Property rights over natural resources became a distinct area of inquiry in environmental economics and policy in the last decades, but their role has not yet been investigated thoroughly. Transition countries represent an excellent material of analysis of various policies and institutional developments concerning the regime of use and management of natural resources. The processes of societal transformation had deep impacts on the forestry sector, entailing land reforms and subsequent changes to its institutional and organisational framework.

150 years ago in Russia bodies of local self-government named zemstvoes were formed. The special feature of the Russian zemstvo consisted in dual, dissimilar coexistence and comparison of crown (governmental) and zemstvo (public) bases, as some kind of unity and struggle of opposites, with in advance expected positive result for local governments owing to their greater identity to interests of the managing population. At the same time, the zemstvo idea had "an ethics-social" orientation, it was much wider than the service economic function, which was defined by authorities of zemstvoes.

The implementation of land reform has influenced the formation of property structure. The main procedures of land reform activities are stated in Estonian legislation. However, the provisions for determining the area and the boundaries for properties to be formed in the course of land reform are stated in legal acts in an unsystematic way. The aim of this study is to systematize the parcel area and the boundaries determination procedures that are used in the course of land reform for property formation.

New land reforms are again high on the policy agenda and low-cost, propoor reforms are being tested in poor countries. This article assesses the investment and productivity impacts of the recent low-cost land certification implemented in the Tigray region of Ethiopia, using a unique household and farm-plot-level panel data set, with data from before and up to eight years after the reform. Alternative econometric methods were used to test and control for endogeneity of certification and for unobserved household heterogeneity.

In this paper I explore a land grabbing resistance movement composed of unemployed coffee workers in Central Nicaragua. Between 1996 and 2000, a private agro-export conglomerate appropriated worker-owned coffee estates previously designated as the Area Propiedad del Los Trabajadores (APT), or the Worker's Property. Following mass protests between 2001 and 2004, worker representatives from the Asociación de Trabajadores del Campo (ATC) and government officials negotiated and signed the Las Tunas Accords which provided redistributed land from 18 of those coffee estates to 2500 families.