This guide on Land tenure and rural development has been prepared to familiarize readers with key issues in land tenure, especially as they relate to food insecurity and rural development situations. Land tenure issues are frequently ignored in rural evelopment interventions, with often long-lasting, negative results. Analysis of how land tenure works in practice – as evidenced by who has what type of access to land and under what conditions – is essential.

This training package examines conflict within forest resource use and community-based forest management and offers strategies for managing it. It aims to support diverse and multiple forest user groups to manage conflicts that inevitably arise in the protection, use and control of forest resources. It has been prepared primarily for trainers who help people and organizations that work collaboratively in community forestry.

This guide on Gender and access to land has been prepared to support land administrators in governments and their counterparts in civil society who are involved in land access and land administration questions in rural development. It is frequently the case that gender issues are left out or misunderstood in such situations, often with negative results. This guide is designed to show where and why gender inclusion is important in projects and programmes that aim at improving land tenure and land administration arrangements.

Land and land reform cover a great range, both in terms of the geographical and development status of the countries considered, and of the variety of perspectives on the issues. The articles in this issue of Land Reform, Land Resettlement and Cooperatives reflect this breadth in a variety of ways. The articles range geographically from the paper addressing land and agrarian reform in Colombia, by Professor Darío Fajardo, to a consideration of the land reforms currently under way in Scotland, by Douglas Macmillan, Ken Thomson and Bill Slee.

In Indonesia, rapid deforestation is affecting local populations’ access to forest, yet little information is available about the impacts of deforestation on highly forest-dependent populations. To better understand these potential impacts, this document reports on economic and cultural uses of the forest for three villages in the Sub-District of Pujungan in East Kalimantan, using data from household suveys conducted in 1996.

Issues relating to land and land reform have been moving up the agenda of rural poverty and food security in recent years with the increasing acceptance that the prerequisites for broad-based and equitable development include the essential need for people to have access to land and other natural resources. Access needs to be on an equitable basis allowing the poor and the disadvantaged, including women, to secure the assets needed for them and their families to generate sustainable livelihoods.

Meeting symbol/code: SDW-801 3

Meeting symbol/code: SDW-801 3

The range of efforts required to develop the full potential of NWFPs is wide indeed. Land-use and forest policies need to be evaluated and where necessary adapted to ensure that potential impacts on non-wood forest resources and products are taken into consideration. Increased research on the abundance, distribution, biology and ecology of non-wood forest resources is essential. Of particular importance are investigations into ways to improve the employment- and income-generating potential of NWFPs through better harvesting, storage, transport, processing, manufacturing and marketing.