This paper re‐interrogates the positions on the agrarian question in India, to reach fresh conclusions about important agrarian policies of the Left, including that of land reforms. Internationally, the classical political economy approach to agrarian transitions has been challenged by positions arguing (a) that neoliberalism and the international corporate food regime have led to a new dominant contradiction between the peasantry and multinational agribusiness or (b) that the agrarian question for capital has been bypassed.

Urban land use has been a major driving force behind land use change in Estonia since regaining independence and land reform process in the 1990s. The study summarizes land use change, land management and planning practices in the urban fringe over a period of 20 years with the aim of introducing a sustainable land use policy in highly fragmented suburban land. The processes and dynamics of land use change are explored using cartographic and landscape metrics analysis.

Through an examination of interventions in the agrarian structures and rural society of the Ecuadorian Andes over the past 40 years, this article explores the gradual imposition of a particular line of action that separates rural development from the unresolved question of the concentration of land ownership and wealth among the very few. This imposition has been the consequence, it is argued, of the new development paradigms implemented in Andean peasant communities since the end of land reform in the 1970s.

This article examines Finnish consumer ethoses and the moral rules that include them. We argue that Finnish consumers legitimize their consumer and spending practices, and constitute themselves as moral agents through three culturally dominant and historically constructed consumer ethoses: agrarianism, economism and green consumerism. The material of the study consists of 53 consumer life stories collected between September 2006 and May 2007 using a writing competition.

Upon request this paper is available from the author.

Ownership of agricultural land is very fragmented in Turkey, as is the case in countries within central Europe. This prevents agricultural efficiency from reaching desired levels. Land consolidation involves redistributing land ownership so that individual farmers own fewer, larger, more compact and more contiguous land parcels. In Turkey, generally voluntary land consolidation projects are performed, while some financial limitations and political conditions prevent land consolidation reach to its desired level.

This article argues that the logic of territory is particularly important for understanding the processes of capital accumulation and resistance in Latin America. The analysis focuses on Argentina, but draws on examples from throughout Latin America for a regional perspective and from the provinces of Jujuy, Cordoba and Santiago del Estero for subnational views. Section one describes the territorial restructuring of meaning, physical ‘places’ and politico-legal ‘spaces', as it plays out at multiple scales to facilitate the investment in and sale and export of natural resource commodities.

This article explores the development of the social metabolism of Czech agriculture over the past 80 years and aims to describe the complex agricultural system from a biophysical perspective. As a Central European country, the Czech Republic's political system has experienced a number of turning points and changes in its history. Using the social metabolism concept and the material and energy flow method of analysis this article looks at the system from a biophysical perspective and explores the interactions between the economic system and nature.

In 2005 the Uzbek government accelerated the dissolution process of collective farms through full-scale land reform. As the central production unit, the collective enterprise was supplanted by a private, family-based enterprise. Simultaneously Water Users Associations (WUAs) were established that operate and maintain the irrigation and drainage infrastructure of the former collective farms. Though these land-cum-water reforms could in principle initiate enormous changes, there is still a strong continuity due to the state-regulated agricultural system.

This contribution draws on Nancy Fraser's concept of ‘participatory parity’ to analyze the reproduction and contestation of inequalities internal to land reform settlements affiliated with the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) located in the cacao lands of southern Bahia, Brazil. These inequalities are variously manifest in unequal control over land and legal documents, disparities in status and what Fraser calls ‘voice'.

The Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Terra (MST) is one of the best-known and most prominent rural social movements. The unequal distribution of land in Brazil, and the neglect of this problem by successive Brazilian governments contributed greatly to the organisation of rural movements striving for the implementation of land reform in the country. The struggle for land therefore frames the MST collective action and legitimates its raison d'être as a social movement.

Contemporary discourse on land in Africa is polarized between advocates of tenure reform through state registration of individual titles to land and others who claim that customary or 'communal' tenure is the only check against landlessness among the poor in the African countryside, and that 'pro-poor' land policy should therefore strengthen customary rights to land.