Karst rocky desertification (KRD) is a type of land degradation especially prominent in southwest China. This article analyzes the anthropogenic driving forces of KRD at two scales: rural locality and its macro socio‐economic circumstances. At the rural locality scale, the intensive human pressure on land because of a large and fast growing population and unsustainable land use are identified to be the reason for KRD. However, more radical driving forces lie in the farmers' disadvantages in social‐economic circumstances, which compel them to overuse rural land.

Vegetable farming systems (VFSs) in Indonesia have a long tradition in the upland areas and were characterised by high productivity and competitiveness. However, in the last decade, the profitability of VFSs has been challenged by several issues including lower productivity, higher domestic prices, various export barriers, an increase in the volume of imported vegetables and environmental deterioration.

The Socio Bosque program is a national conservation agreement scheme of the government of Ecuador. Socio Bosque consists of the transfer of a direct monetary incentive per hectare of native forest and other native ecosystems to individual landowners and local and indigenous communities who protect these ecosystems, through voluntary conservation agreements that are monitored on a regular basis for compliance. Two years after its creation, the program now includes more than half a million hectares of natural ecosystems and has over 60,000 beneficiaries.

This study used linear programming (LP) to analyse land-use alternatives in the traditional Umbundu farming system in the Angolan central highlands. Farmers of the region have traditionally produced maize and pulses for subsistence and vegetables and timber as cash crops. Different pasture and forest fallow rotations are used along catena production sites. The system is labour-intensive and uses animal traction. LP problems were formulated and solved for a baseline land-use alternative, improved diet alternative and maximal timber production alternative.

The need for climate change mitigation has led to a recent upsurge in policies aimed to deliver re-afforestation across the globe, but with mixed successes observed depending upon the levels of private land ownership and ability of governments to engage land managers. This paper evaluates a new government-led scheme in Wales, which is intended to increase woodland cover from 14% to 20% by 2030 to offset the greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.

The South African government has endeavoured to strengthen property rights in communal areas and develop civil society institutions for community-led development and natural resource management. However, the effectiveness of this remains unclear as the emergence and operation of civil society institutions in these areas is potentially constrained by the persistence of traditional authorities. Focusing on the former Transkei region of Eastern Cape Province, three case study communities are used examine the extent to which local institutions overlap in issues of land access and control.

Land ownership does not prevent vulnerability in less developed countries' agriculture and it is demonstrated that land assets do not necessarily imply livelihoods security in areas where irrigation water is scarce and in irregular supply. To capture both the vulnerability and risks that farmers are involuntarily taking in farming, irrigation deficits applied in cash crops cultivation in an irrigation system in the south of India are calculated.

Agrarian reform has been a key theme on the development agenda of many countries in the Global South for decades. Whilst such interventions are often pursued for political goals and in the interests of empowerment, there is often a mismatch between these goals and the actual outcomes achieved. Within this context, this study investigates the impacts of agrarian reform in Del Rosario, a former coconut hacienda in the Philippines.

Farmers' access to and rights over seeds are the very pillars of agriculture, and thus represent an essential component of food sovereignty. Three decades after the term farmers' rights was first coined, there now exists a broad consensus that this new category of rights is historically grounded and imperative in the current context of the expansion of intellectual property rights (IPRs) over plant varieties.

Mono-cropping is the most common farming practice followed in the North Eastern Hilly Region (NEHR) of India and farmers leave the land fallow after harvesting the main crop. The identification of suitable sequential crops is essential to increase the cropping intensity, land-use efficiency and overall productivity of the land. Therefore, a study was carried out during 2008–09, 2009–10 and 2010–11 on maize (rainy season) followed by table pea, mustard, French bean and groundnut (post rainy season). Sequence crops were imposed with paddy straw mulch at 5.0 t ha⁻¹ and without mulch.

In this article we investigate if qualitative soil fertility datasets derived during participatory processes can be combined with a corresponding land use change model (i) to improve the understanding of the social-ecological complexity of land use change and (ii) to allow testing of alternative scenarios even in data-poor environments. To test this hypothesis, a participatory assessment approach was combined with the spatially explicit, soil fertility driven FALLOW (Forest, Agroforest, Low-value Landscape Or Wasteland?) model.