Land reform in South Africa intends to redress racial imbalances with regard to ownership and access to land. On the surface, the various strategy documents also talk to transferring land to black women, the youth and the disabled. This article examines interesting patterns that are emerging with respect to gender relations and land ownership driven by land reform including mounting evidence of exclusive female ownership and co-ownership of land among land reform recipient households.

GOOD PRACTICES AND LESSONS LEARNED FROM SIX GLOBAL CASE STUDIES

Many studies have shown the benefits to women of secure rights to land: when their rights are secure, their status in the community and within the household can increase, their income can increase, and they and their families are less likely to be underweight or malnourished.

In Afghanistan, insecurity over land and water rights hampers investments in food production and irrigation. In rural areas, customary tenure systems, partly based on religious law, are the most relevant but suffer from weak recognition and offer little protection to rights holders. The land policy reform is on-going but remains slow. Moreover, land administration capacity is weak and improvements mostly take place in urban areas. In this context, land disputes are common and often violent.

Tajikistan’s population is predominantly rural and largely dependent on agriculture. Agriculture accounts for a quarter of Tajikistan’s gross domestic product and export revenues, 39% of tax revenues, and half of total employment. Given the widespread migration of male Tajik workers overseas, women constitute the majority of employees (accounting for 53% of the economically active population in agriculture). Arable land is in short supply at 0.15 hectares (ha) per capita (rising to 0.20 ha per capita for the rural population).

In the mid-1960s 26 percent of the single-family homes in Honolulu were on leased land. Dissatisfaction with leasehold led to reform legislation in 1967, allowing lessees to buy leased land. By 1991 only 3.6 percent of the homes were on leased land. We examine why landowners elected to lease rather than sell land and attribute the rise of leasehold to legal constraints on land sales by large estates and the federal tax code. Ideological forces initiated land reform in 1967, but rent-seeking forces captured the process in the mid-1970s.

The adoption of Agenda 2063 at the continental level, and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development at the global level, requires a high level of collection and collation of quality, timely, reliable and dis-aggregated data at all levels of the development process, including land, to inform decisions, enable all stakeholders to track progress and make the necessary adjustments to ensure transparency and mutual accountability in the continent and globally.

Land reform, equitable distribution, economic development, environmental quality, land reform strategies, Brazil, Landless Workers’ Movement, East Asia, rural poverty, land productivity, sustainable agriculture, comparative advantage, small farms. Land reform, equitable distribution, economic development, environmental quality, land reform strategies, Brazil, Landless Workers’ Movement, East Asia, rural poverty, land productivity, sustainable agriculture, comparative advantage, small farms.

A recent literature in development economics has focused renewed attention on land redistribution. Driven in part by political events in countries like Zimbabwe, the literature has sought to understand the economic implications of land reform. Much of this literature focuses on credit market imperfections and the role of land as collateral. Redistribution of land allows poor farmers to borrow, invest, and thus escape poverty. But in terms of aggregate production, redistributing land may have positive, negative, or neutral effects on output.

El presente material es un breve compendio de las leyes y normativas vigentes, que regulan el acceso a la tierra por parte de la población, con particular detalle en el caso de los campesinos y campesinas. En el caso de las comunidades indígenas, se hará una breve mención a la legislación correspondiente.