Large-scale agricultural land acquisitions might entail substantial welfare implications for the affected rural population. Whether the impacts are indeed as devastating as the popular notion of "land grabs" would suggest depends on a number of factors, including the size of compensation payments, productivity spillovers on smallholders, employment opportunities for displaced farmers, and changes in food prices.

Africa's biofuel potential over the last ten years has increasingly attracted foreign investors’ attention. We estimate the determinants of foreign investors land demand for biofuel production in SSA, using Poisson specifications of the gravity model. Our estimates suggest that land availability, abundance of water resources and weak land governance are significant determinants of large-scale land acquisitions for biofuel production.

Recent years have witnessed an increasing interest in land-based investments for food, feed, fuel and fiber, driven by volatility in commodity prices, economic growth of emerging economies, policy drivers of biofuel demand and investor strategies in the wake of the global economic crisis. This has led to a surge of foreign and local investments in developing countries, where land can be obtained at lower cost, and has led to fears of land grabbing.

Large-scale agricultural land acquisitions might entail substantial welfare implications for the affected rural population. Whether the impacts are indeed as devastating as the popular notion of land grabs would suggest depends on a number of factors, including the size of compensation payments, productivity spillovers on smallholders, employment opportunities for displaced farmers, and changes in food prices.

The attractiveness of agricultural land available in developing countries has markedly increased in the last few years. Driven by rising and highly volatile prices for agricul- tural commodities, large land acquisitions have been undertaken by foreign investors. We formalize the discussion surrounding such large scale land deals through a dynamic stochastic programming model. Within this framework, we first determine the value of a land development project under uncertainty about prices for agricultural commodi- ties, political risk and irreversible capital investment.

Agricultural land resources have been the central issue for the Chinese government in its attempts to secure food and agricultural sustainability. Yet strict land use control does not protect the agricultural land from erosion by urban expansion. Identifying the specific patterns and mechanisms of the agricultural land conversion, thus, is critical for land management and related decision making.

Agricultural development is facing two problems: insufficient grain production and low profit of farmers. There is a contradiction between the government’s goal of increasing production and the farmer’s goal of increasing profit. Exploring the appropriate management scale of farmland under different objectives is of great significance to alleviate the conflict of interests between the government and farmers.

This study set out to estimate the effects of large-scale agricultural investments (LSAIs) on household food security in one community each in Kenya, Madagascar and Mozambique. An endogenous switching regression model was adopted to control for a possible selection bias due to unobserved factors. It was found that households with members employed by large-scale agricultural investment companies were more likely larger households headed by younger migrant males holding smaller plots and fewer livestock than non-engaged households.

Suzhou city was the cultural centre of ancient south China. It continues the urban pattern of more than 800 years ago. Suzhou gardens are the essence of Chinese gardening art, as well as the valuable world cultural heritage site. This paper compared the evolution in the distribution and scale of Suzhou gardens among five historical periods, and discussed the influence of urbanization on gardening.

This paper aims to elucidate the sliding scale between usufruct and ownership by applying a property rights framework to three Swedish forms of tenure in multifamily housing. The framework deconstructs the bundles of rights of rental, tenant-ownership and ownership to highlight commonalities and differences connected to the right to use and exclude, the right to transfer and the right to the value. It is concluded that the three tenure forms have many traits in common but that there are distinct differences in some areas, most notably in connection to the right to the value.

This article introduces the Special Issue on ‘Gender and generation in agrarian and environmental transformation in Southeast Asia’. The contributions to this collection focus on the intersecting dynamics of gender, generation and class in Southeast Asian rural communities engaging with expanding capitalist relations, whether in the form of large-scale corporate land acquisition or other forms of penetration of commodity economy. Gender and especially generation are relatively neglected dimensions in the literature on agrarian and environmental transformations in Southeast Asia.

Across many parts of Indonesia, investment in oil palm has brought accelerated forms of land acquisition and market engagement for communities, signalling far-reaching implications for equity and well-being of current and future generations. This paper uses a conjunctural feminist political ecology approach to explore gendered and generational engagements with oil palm in Indonesia.