Describes a long-standing grazing dispute in northern Namibia that provides critical lessons on the challenges that people living in communal areas face to secure their land rights. Several large livestock owners illegally enclosed community rangelands to secure grazing for their own commercial cattle herds. The communities used legislation to defend their land rights: they mobilised relevant government and traditional authorities to intervene, resulting in a court order for the removal of most of the illegal cattle owners.

This paper uses a stochastic dynamic
programming model to characterize the optimal
savings-consumption decisions and the role of livestock
inventories as a buffer stock in rural Ethiopia. The results
show that relatively land-rich households use accumulation
and liquidation of cattle and other animal inventories for
partial consumption smoothing, while low-income households
appear not to do so. The results highlight the need for

Inorganic fertilizer use across
Sub-Saharan Africa is generally considered to be low. Yet,
this belief is predicated on the assumption that it is
profitable to use rates higher than currently observed.
However, there is little rigorous empirical evidence to
support this notion. Using a nationally representative panel
data set, and with due recognition of the role of risk and
uncertainty, this paper empirically estimates the

In early 2015, Maasai and Datoga citizens living in the Morogoro region of Tanzania were victims of deadly, ethnic violence. According to reports from local media, the assaults were instigated by public figures interested in acquiring land, and state authorities have not intervened to protect Maasai citizens. Police protection has instead been given to others who are illegally cultivating officially registered Maasai land. 

Why produce a policy note on
horticulture in Uzbekistan? There are several answers to
this existential question, although they are not necessarily
obvious ones. Agriculture, taken as a whole, constitutes a
small and declining share of Uzbekistan s national income,
and horticulture is a small share of agricultural income.
Even so, it is an important source of income for the 4.7
million households that operate dehkan farms in rural and

El objetivo de este trabajo fue evaluar la emergencia de Eryngium horridum Malme (caraguatá), a partir de las semillas presentes en el banco de suelo de un pastizal templado de la Argentina, en el partido de Magdalena. Se seleccionó un sitio con alta densidad de la maleza, antes de que comenzara la diseminación natural de las semillas de E. horridum (principios de febrero), y se armaron seis parcelas de 50 cm de ancho y 150 cm de largo, una al lado de la otra; en tres parcelas se realizaron las mediciones de otoño y en las otras tres, en primavera.

El pastoreo o su exclusión, altera el banco de semillas en pastizales. Se analizó el efecto del pastoreo sobre el banco de semillas de la estepa de halófitas de un pastizal de la Pampa Deprimida. Los tratamientos fueron: 1) Pastoreo continuo con alta intensidad (C); 2) Pastoreo rotativo por 3 años con intensidad moderada (con historia de pastoreo continuo) (PR); y 3) Clausurado al pastoreo por 12 años (Cl), en Vieytes, Buenos Aires. Los muestreos se realizaron en febrero (Banco de Semillas Invernal: BSI) y en junio (Banco de Semillas Estival: BSE).

The status of grazinglands in the USA is increasingly dynamic with large areas being converted to cropland in response to demands for increased crop production. Here we focus on two types of grazinglands: rangelands and pasturelands. Rangelands are usually defined as natural ecosystems in which the native vegetation is predominantly grasses, grass-like plants or shrubs, and are generally used for grazing livestock and wildlife. Pasturelands are areas specifically managed for the production of forage (native or introduced) for grazing livestock.

Tree and shrub abundance has increased in many grasslands, causing changes in ecosystem carbon and nitrogen pools that are related to patterns of woody plant distribution. However, with regard to spatial patterns, little is known about (i) how they develop; (ii) how they are influenced by grazing; or (iii) the extent to which intraspecific interactions dictate them. We addressed these questions by quantifying changes in the spatial distribution of Prosopis velutina (mesquite) shrubs over 74 years on grazed and protected grasslands.

AIM: Improving our understanding of the drivers of forest fragmentation is fundamental to mitigating the consequences of anthropogenic fragmentation for biodiversity. Moreover, the impacts of fragmentation on biodiversity depend on the spatial scale at which fragmentation occurs. Therefore, understanding how the effect of land use on fragmentation patterns varies across scales is critical to ensure that fragmentation is managed at scales relevant to the ecology of target species or to land management.