Increased levels and volatility of food
prices has led to a surge of interest in large-scale
agriculture and land acquisition. This creates challenges
for policy makers aiming to establish a policy environment
conducive to an agrarian structure to contribute to
broad-based development in the long term. Based on a
historical review of episodes of growth of large farms and
their impact, this paper identifies factors underlying the

This report is about integrated land
policy reform in context of rapid urbanization in China.
Over the past thirty years, China has undergone a profound
economic and social transformation as it moves towards a
market-oriented economy. Land issues are implicated in this
ongoing transformation in numerous ways. The allocation and
security of land rights are key factors in China's
quest for economic growth and social stability. Land use

The rural economy in Bangladesh has been
a powerful source of economic growth and has substantially
reduced poverty, especially since 2000, but the remarkable
transformation and unprecedented dynamism in rural
Bangladesh are an underexplored, underappreciated, and
largely untold story. The analysis identifies the key
changes occurring in the rural economy, the principal
drivers of rural incomes, the implications for policy, and

Stakeholders' perceptions of
opportunities and constraints to sustainable land management
in Ethiopia was assessed through interviews and a review of
secondary data. Stakeholders included farmers as well as
representatives of development agencies, agricultural
organizations, donors, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs),
and agricultural research systems. Stakeholders generally
perceive that the numerous, well-intentioned but piecemeal

The authors examine the impact of land
reform in Vietnam which gives households the power to
exchange, transfer, lease, inherit, and mortgage their
land-use rights. The authors expect this change to increase
the incentives as well as the ability to undertake long-term
investments on the part of households. Their
difference-in-differences estimation strategy takes
advantage of the variation across provinces in the issuance

Although increased global demand for
land has led to renewed interest in African land tenure, few
models to address these issues quickly and at the required
scale have been identified or evaluated. The case of
Rwanda's nation-wide and relatively low-cost land
tenure regularization program is thus of great interest.
This paper evaluates the short-term impact (some 2.5 years
after completion) of the pilots undertaken to fine-tune the

The Land-Based Poverty Alleviation
Project of Brazil is addressing one of the major factors
underlying poverty in the countryside: inadequate access to
land by the rural poor. Preceded by two highly successful
Bank-financed pilots, the project demonstrates the
large-scale viability of a community-based approach to land
reform. In the project beneficiary groups negotiate directly
with willing sellers for the purchase of suitable

Improving the productivity of
smallholder farms in Sub-Saharan Africa offers the best
chance to reduce poverty among this generation of rural
poor, by building on the limited resources farming
households already possess. It is also the best and shortest
path to meet rising food needs. Using examples from
farmers' maize and rice fields, and comparisons with
Asia, this paper examines why the set of technologies

This report summarizes the findings of
the Uganda Sustainable Land Management Public Expenditure
Review (SLM PER). The SLM PER was undertaken to achieve six
main objectives: (i) establish a robust data base on
SLM-related public expenditure that can support credible
empirical analysis; (ii) develop a sound methodology for
conducting SLM PERs, which could guide similar work in the
future; (iii) analyze the level and composition of SLM

There is enough land in the Amazon
region to satisfy Brazilian society's demands for
economic development, environmental management of a resource
base of global importance and the challenges of agrarian
reform. Yet Brazil has been unable to create a fully
coherent and manageable land policy and administration
system for the region which permits sustainable development
goals to be achieved while reconciling special interests and

The authors use evidence from a survey of about 1200 beneficiaries of South African land reform to assess the performance of the initial phase of the land reform program. They find that the program has not lived up to the quantitative goals set, but did successfully target the poor. It has led to a significant number of economically successful projects that already generate sustainable revenues.

In India, as in many developing
countries, land continues to have enormous economic, social,
and symbolic relevance. How access to land can be obtained,
and how ownership of land can be documented, are questions
essential to the livelihoods of the large majority of the
poor, especially in rural and tribal areas. Answers to these
questions will determine to what extent India's
increasingly scarce natural resources are managed. Moreover,