Large scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) impact women: loss of rights and access to land, water resources, fuel wood, adequate shelter, compensation and livelihood. The study looks at three sub-Saharan African countries (Cameroon, Ghana and Uganda) each having different land tenure regimes. Since land is vital for the survival of rural dwellers especially women, the study recommends that laws and policies governing the process of LSLA stress a mandatory participatory approach that includes women. There is urgent need to revalorize national laws to mainstream women’s land rights.

This Handbook provides a comprehensive and systematic overview of the role that Parliamentarians and Parliamentary Advisors can play in the creation of reliable, coherent, and transparent “enabling environments” in the range of areas related to investment in agriculture and food systems. It does so through guidance notes, examples of good practices, and very practical indications, and sets out key stages of processes and mechanisms for MPs and advisors to consider while promoting responsible investment in agriculture and food systems.

The issue of food security has been widely studied by the international community. To reveal the research situation as it pertains to food security objectively, this paper comprehensively utilizes bibliometrics techniques (i.e., Bibliometrix, VOSviewer, and CiteSpace) to explore the research status and development trends in the area of food security. The results show that: (1) food security research has shown an increasing trend during the past 30 years.

Farmland fragmentation and farmland consolidation are two sides of the same coin paradoxically viewed as farmland management tools. While there is a vast body of literature addressing the connections between farmland fragmentation and farmland consolidation on the one hand and agriculture production and crops diversification on the other hand, their relationship with variations in food security is still under-explored. This challenges policy makers about whether and how to devise policies in favor of fragmentation conservation or defragmentation.

markdownabstractThe aim of the thesis is to understand the impact of large-scale foreign land acquisitions on rural households. The rapid expansion of large-scale land acquisition (LSLA) by foreign investors in developing countries over the past 10 years has precipitated a heated debate over the impacts on rural households in the recipient regions. LSLA brings often much-needed investment to agriculture in developing countries, potentially raising productivity, and creating rental and labour opportunities from which rural households can benefit.

The demand for agricultural products (food, feed, fibre, and biomass for other purposes) produced in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) will increase for the coming decades. In addition, the global climate change will largely impact on the agricultural sector in Sub-Saharan Africa. Major challenges for the agricultural sector in SSA are that agricultural production systems depend on resources that are for a large part non-renewable, and that the current agricultural practices in SSA are major contributors to environmental degradation.

Land is serving as a basis for the production of food, feed, fibres, wood, bio-energy, for biodiversity, recreation and many other goods and services ecosystems provide. Additional to that, land can also be used for infrastructure, houses etc., making no direct use of natural resources, but of the physical land structure. While some resources and ecosystem services can be delivered simultaneously, others are mutually exclusive, and therefore tend to compete for land. Competing claims is a notion that different and/or excessive claims are made on land that may jeopardize its sustained use.

Sustainable economic development is essential for hundreds of millions of poor households in rural areas. This book represents a merger of environmental science and rural development economics. It elucidates the linkage between rational choice theory and theories on land use change. It builds a quantitative framework to connect the environmental method of Material Flow Analysis to basic issues of rural development such as agricultural intensification and food security.

Few longitudinal studies link agricultural biodiversity, land use and food access in rural landscapes. In this paper, we test the hypothesis that, in a context of economic change, cash crop expansion is associated with deforestation, reduced agrobiodiversity and changes in food access. For this purpose, we analysed data collected from the same 53 upland and floodplain mestizo households in Ucayali, Peru, in 2000 and 2015. We found an emerging transition towards less diversified food access coupled with loss of forest cover and reduced agricultural biodiversity.

Changes in the amount and location of cropland areas may affect the potential crop production at different spatial scales. However, most studies ignore the impacts of cropland displacement on potential crop production. In many countries, cropland protection policies mainly aim for no loss in cropland area, while there is no restriction on change of cropland location. Taking China as the study area, we analyze the impacts of cropland displacement on potential crop production at four administrative levels during the period 2000 and 2018.