Lance Robinson, Governance and Resilience Scientist, ILRI, at the side event, “Measuring and Evaluating Resilience in Drylands of East Africa.”; IFPRI 2020 conference on Building Resilience for Food and Nutrition Security, May 15-17, 2014, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. More information at http://www.2020resilience.ifpri.info

Land degradation is a great threat for the future and it requires great effort and resources to ameliorate. The major causes of land degradation in Ethiopia are the rapid population increase, severe soil loss, deforestation, low vegetative cover and unbalanced crop and livestock production. Inappropriate land-use systems and land-tenure policies enhance desertification and loss of agrobiodiversity. Utilization of dung and crop residues for fuel and other uses disturbs the sustainability of land resources. The supply of inputs such as fertilizer, farm machinery and credits are very low.

Summarises the literature on the alleged defects of traditional systems of land tenure in Nigeria. Reviews the provisions of the land use decree and their implications for rural land tenure.

Frontier areas in Latin America have been characterized by land speculation, abandonment and exploitation. This paper analyzes a frontier cattle ranching area in the savanna where intensification has occurred in spite of land speculation. A whole farm livestock production model is used to quantify the determinants of intensification. Results show that land speculation has simultaneously increased the profitability of cattle ranching while slowing down intensification and impeding the adoption of sustainable practices.

This research is being undertaken as an ILCA project with support from the Rockefeller Post-Doctoral Fellowship Programme. There are three objectives. One objective is very similar to that of the World Bank and Niger studies: to determine the effects of land tenure on investment, productivity and efficiency in crop-livestock systems in the Ethiopian highlands.

The spatial distribution of crops and farming systems in Africa is determined by the duration of the period during which crop and livestock water requirements are met. The length of growing period (LGP) is normally assessed from weather station data—scarce in large parts of Africa—or coarse-resolution rainfall estimates derived from weather satellites. In this study, we analyzed LGP and its variability based on the 1981–2011 GIMMS NDVI3g dataset. We applied a variable threshold method in combination with a searching algorithm to determine start- and end-of-season.