This paper was prepared within the “Cooperatives and their alternatives” component of the Agrarian Structures Initiative (ASI) which a regional program of FAO in Europe and Central Asia. This paper outlines some of the main issues influencing the development (or not) of farmer and rural organisations and presents in further detail the specific situation in Armenia, Georgia and Moldova. All three countries returned ownership of the majority of land to the rural population.

The focus of development actors working
in the area of disaster management has shifted substantially
from disaster recovery to disaster risk reduction over the
past decade, coinciding with the decade of the Hyogo
Framework for Action (HFA) 2005-2015. Amidst this strategic
shift, there is now the need to work towards ensuring that
investments made to reduce disaster risks are cost-effective
and that the benefits reach all members of the population

This report provides estimates of social
and financial costs of environmental damage in India from
three pollution damage categories: (i) urban air pollution,
including particulate matter and lead; (ii) inadequate water
supply, poor sanitation, and hygiene; (iii) indoor air
pollution; and four natural resource damage categories: (a)
agricultural damage from soil salinity, water logging, and
soil erosion; (b) rangeland degradation; (c) deforestation;

This essay reviews the approaches taken by the Japanese agricultural economists on farmland concentration and consolidation. We critically discuss how scholars saw and understood the 'land market' and evaluate the achievement and limitations of empirical studies. We suggest sharing a more realistic image of land markets, evaluation of policies and programs, and designing institutions to facilitate farmland consolidations as important directions for further research. Close collaboration between case-studies and quantitative approaches would be fruitful.

A literature review about the farmland accumulation and the farmland market problem in Marxian economics was performed. Analysis of farmland accumulation and the farmland market has been conducted by relating to agricultural capitalization. In other words, research was advanced as a differentiation of the farmer class theory, and competition between the large-scale farm and small-scale farm has attracted attention.

Resumo Observa-se atualmente o revigoramento dos deba­tes sobre o Estatuto da Cidade, questionando sua efetividade, a baixa participação popular e sua uti­lização para legitimação de políticas engendradas por interesses particulares. Nesse contexto, este artigo investiga as Operações Urbanas Consorcia­das (OU) enquanto mecanismo de recuperação de mais-valias fundiárias. Partindo de um estudo so­bre a OU Faria Lima (São Paulo-SP), discute-se de forma prospectiva a OU Linha Verde (Curitiba-PR), em fase inicial de implantação.

Este trabajo aborda la necesidad de mostrar de una manera integral y crítica el derecho a la vivienda en Colombia, su marco normativo, su creación en la Constitución de 1991, la protección internacional de los Derechos Humanos y de los diferentes puntos de vista adoptados por la jurisprudencia de la Corte Constitucional, corporación que le otorgó el rango de derecho fundamental.

The transition economies of Central and
Eastern Europe, through the reform process of
decentralization, are now seeking the devolution of fiscal
powers, and responsibilities from central, to local
governments, within financially sustainable environments. To
this end, a system of local budgets, and taxes needs to be
devised, over which local governments may have control.
Thus, this report focuses on the tax on immovable real

A development policy opting exclusively for value chain development and the integration of producers in modern markets overlooks the reality for the majority of smallholders, our author maintains. Policy should pay greater attention to addressing the area most small-scale producers are active in: the informal sector.

Electricity infrastructure is one of the
most important development challenges in Africa. While more
resources are clearly needed to invest in new capacities, it
is also important to promote energy efficiency and manage
the increasing demand for power. This paper evaluates one of
the recent energy-efficiency programs in Ethiopia, which
distributed 350,000 compact fluorescent lamp bulbs free of
charge. The impact related to this first phase is estimated

The spatial distribution of vegetation trends identified by time series analysis of the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) for the Mongolian grasslands was cross-referenced with the recently obtained land use/cover data and socioeconomic information in the geographic domain. Global Inventory Modeling and Mapping Studies (GIMMS) dataset with an 8-km resolution provided by the Global Land Cover Facility (GLCF) of the United States were used to compute the vegetation trends.