Data and information on land are fundamental for enabling smallholder farmers to gain secure access and control over their land, which provides the basis for investing in their operations.
This briefing paper outlines the importance and benefits of increasing the availability and accessibility of land information in support of improved food security and nutrition.

Documentary by the Land Core Group Myanmar, where 70% of the Myanmar population are smallholder farmers, about the challenges faced by poor farmers from land grabbing and land dispossession in rural Myanmar...Interviews with land activists and dispossessed farmers in different parts of the country... sections on: resistance to land-grabbing; Myanmar land law and policies (where customary tenure and women's land rights are not explicitly recognised); efficiency of smallholder practice...

“I feel sad when our fields have been changed into a lake for the purpose of breeding fish. Since that happened, I became a worker in another field,” said Aye Thein. The 64-year-old was forced to abandon his eight acres of land in 1999 after it was confiscated by the Myanmar Billion Group company in Audsu village of Nyaungdon Township, Irrawaddy Division.

The World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) is a CGIAR Consortium Research Centre. ICRAF’s headquarters are in Nairobi, Kenya, with six regional offices located in Cameroon, China, India, Indonesia, Kenya and Peru.

The Centre’s vision is a rural transformation throughout the tropics as smallholder households increase their use of trees in agricultural landscapes to improve their food security, nutrition security, income, health, shelter, social cohesion, energy resources and environmental sustainability.

Land grabs demonstrate disconnect between development discourse and practice:

The Department of Land Affairs introduced the Provision of Land and Assistance Amendment Bill and explained that this Bill was intended as an administrative piece of legislation to supplement the provisions of the principal Act. Currently, in terms of that Act, the Department was authorised to acquire land, but was not authorised to acquire the immovable property essential to the proper use of that land – such as irrigation schemes, plant and equipment, farming implements or livestock. Without having those powers, the Department could not fulfil its functions properly.

The Deputy Minister of the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR), addressed the Committee on the motivation for the amendments to the Extension of security of tenure (land) Amendment Bill, saying the fundamental resolve was to overcome decades of hardship in South Africa. Its redress was not about obsolete political stories, but about the creation of just opportunities.

The Committee was briefed by the Financial and Fiscal Commission (FFC) on the expenditure trends and performance of the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR) and its entities for 2014/15 and the first quarter of the 2015/16 financial year.

The Province of Huaphan is implementing Land Use Planning (LUP) as a way to achieve national development goals such as reduction of rural poverty, investment in land and reduction of competition over land. This report covers the process of land use planning; the results of consultations with villagers and district and provincial officials; and the next steps to implement land use planning in Huaphan Province.

ACIAR funded a collaborative project between research organisations in Southeast Asia for ILRI and regional partners to explore new ways to control helminth parasites in the tropics. The project aimed to increase small ruminant production in Southeast Asia by controlling internal parasites, which are one of the major constraints to sheep and goat production in the tropics. Control of internal parasites also provides an avenue for general improvement in husbandry methods.

This interactive poster was presented at the 2013 Stockholm World Water Week. It describes the results of a 'public good game' carried out with farmers in the polder zones of coastal Bangladesh in order to understand determinants of contributions to maintain a public good.

Following the two-day WLE Ganges Regional Research Workshop on the CPWF Delta Program, a smaller meeting was held with fourteen participants. This meeting focused on providing insights from CPWF’s work in the Ganges and developing recommendations for the design team that will develop the WLE Ganges proposal. Discussions were based on the recently drafted Ganges Focal Region Development Challenge concept note following a WLE meeting in Amman, Jordan. Participants included key members of the CPWF-Ganges research team and representatives of the WLE Ganges ‘hills’ and ‘plains’ regions.