The nature and significance of China's engagements with African agriculture continues to be hotly debated in the media, academia and policy circles around the world. Although China has been engaged in Uganda’s agriculture for more than 40 years, the recent jostle for agricultural land by private Chinese investors is dystifying and justifies the need to conduct a scientific study to provide clear evidence before the issue gets bundled into the messy anecdotal media inquiry.

Investidores agrícolas estrangeiros estão em conflitos com camponeses locais em Moçambique, num confronto sobre modelos agrícolas e desenvolvimento. Investidores estrangeiros de olho em terra aparentemente vaga, prometem lucros elevados (muitas vezes inflacionados) a investidores e parceiros locais. Alguns esperam capitalizar com créditos de carbono ou produzir biocombustíveis e alegam ser investimentos “verdes” (ecológicos). Todos prometem empregos, escolas e desenvolvimento local.

Foreign agricultural investors are clashing with local peasants in Mozambique, in a  confrontation over agricultural and development models. Foreign investors looking a apparently vacant land promise high (often inflated) profits to investors and local partners. Some hope to capitalise on carbon credits or produce biofuels, and claim to be green investments. All promise jobs, schools, and local development. Local backers support the outside investors and their plantations with terms like "progress" and "modernisation".

Date : 2017

Source : Foncier & Développement

Par : Perrine Burnod, Heriniaina Rakotomalala, Beby Seheno Andriamanalina, Hadrien Di Roberto

Mozambique is one of the countries in Africa receiving significant amounts of development assistance. It owes this privileged position to many factors. First of all, after a protracted civil war which lasted from the late seventies to the early nineties, Mozambique’s then Marxist oriented government and the “right-wing” Renamo rebels signed a peace agreement which has since held.

The main aim of this study was to assess, within the context of the Malonda Programme
in Niassa Province, the implementation of community consultations and negotiations as
well as the delimitation and demarcation of community land. These activities had been
carried out within the context of requests from several investors concerning the Right to
Use and Exploit Land (Portuguese acronym DUAT, Direito de Uso e Aproveitamento
de Terra), in order to create extensive commercial forest plantations in Niassa. The

Extension services are a keystone of information diffusion in agriculture. This paper exploits a large randomized controlled trial to track diffusion of a new technique in the classic Training and Visit (T&V) extension model, relative to a more direct training model. In both control and treatment communities, contact farmers (CFs) serve as points-of-contacts between agents and other farmers. The intervention (Treatment) aims to address two pitfalls of the T&V model: i) infrequent extension agent visits, and ii) poor quality information.

In the decade leading to the recent commodity boom, which peaked in 2007-08, several resource-rich, low-income countries displayed high rates of gross domestic product (GDP) growth while social indicators did not improve significantly. It is well known that, in itself, the widely tracked GDP may not be the most relevant summary of aggregate economic performance in all places at all times.

This Fifth Edition of the Uganda Economic Update presents evidence that if the urbanization process is well managed, it has the potential to stimulate economic growth and to provide productive jobs for a greater proportion of Uganda’s young and rapidly expanding population. In many countries across the world, the growth of cities has stimulated the establishment and expansion of productive businesses by reducing the distance between suppliers and customers. The growth of cities has also facilitated provision of social services and infrastructure through economies of scale.

In countries where a large proportion of the total land area is held customarily, reform questions around land and development often tend to focus on the customary estate. Evidence from Solomon Islands suggests that a focus on public land holdings, even when they are relatively small in land area, can yield outsized benefits. Publicly owned land regularly includes economically valuable land and urban land on which development pressure is high. In Solomon Islands, as much as 10 percent of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) may be affected by how effectively urban public land is governed.

The North Eastern Region (NER) in India is endowed with rich energy resources but faces significant bottlenecks in electricity access and availability levels. The per capita power consumption in NER is one-third of the national average. The region has a shortfall of about 500MW installed capacity against peak demand of about 1950 MW. No significant generation capacity has been added in the recent past. Therefore, inadequate power supply continues a critical constraint to sustainable growth and economic development in the NER.

Women make essential contributions to agriculture in developing countries, where they constitute approximately 43 percent of the agricultural labor force. However, female farmers typically have lower output per unit of land and are much less likely to be active in commercial farming than their male counterparts. These gender differences in land productivity and participation between male and female farmers are due to gender differences in access to inputs, resources, and services. In this paper, the authors review the evidence on productivity differences and access to resources.