This report is a follow up of a study that was carried out in the year 2001/2 commissioned by the FAO and SARPN. The main objective of the initial study was an assessment of the negative impacts of HIV/AIDS on livelihoods of the affected and infected communities through lowering their agricultural productivity.

Written by ODI's Anna Locke and Giles Henley, the guide provides a summary of the latest thinking around contemporary global land issues in developing countries. It also gives guidance on and evidence for how this thinking can be used in practice; provides signposting to reliable sources that can inform development professionals on issues not covered in the Topic Guide; and highlights where there are gaps in knowledge and evidence.

This study provides a concise overview of the information available on the land rights of indigenous peoples, with a focus on those in developing countries and countries with economies in transition. Successive chapters summarise the rights of indigenous peoples in international law and then examine how these rights are being recognised, or not, in Latin America, Africa and the Asia-Pacific.

The policy debate about the merits and demerits of biofuels is growing and changing rapidly, with concerns being voiced over their effectiveness for mitigating climate change, role in recent food price hikes and social environmental impacts. This study contributes to these debates through examining the current and likely future impacts of the increasing spread of biofuels on access to land in producer countries, particularly for poorer rural people. It draws on a literature review of evidence drawn from diverse contexts across Africa, Asia and Latin America.

This study contends that Zambia cannot develop if it neglects policy for the efficient utilization of its natural resources. One such area has been the absence of land policy for effective management of rural land.While failure in this area has been attributed to a number of factors, notably absence of credit and funding, this paper contends that the base factor is the absence of efficient land management for rural land.This paper attempts to show that rural land in Zambia remains undeveloped for a number of reasons:The absence of an institutional framework to guide land administration.

Analyses the range of institutional arrangements being used for gaining access to land and natural resources in two regions of southern Benin.

This paper is based on a series of studies conducted by the author on the settlement problems, work roles and educational experiments among nomadic Fulani in Plateau, Bauchi and Kaduna States, Nigeria, from 1982 to 1984.The first part of this paper describes the land tenure system in northern Nigeria and the way in which it affects pastoral nomads and plans for their settlement. The second part discusses the Nigerian Government;s intention to educate nomads and gives the example of special schemes which have attempted to do this.

This paper seeks to map out the historical trajectory leading to a series of migrations in and from the erstwhile princely state of Travancore during 1900-70 in order to acquire and bring land under cultivation. It argues that these migrations undertaken with a moralistic and paternal mission of reclaiming ‘empty’ spaces into productive locations were a result of a specific form of economic modernity in Kerala as beckoned by colonialism and appropriated by a resolute local agency through a process of translation.

There is an increasing global demand for oil palm, but its production provokes societal debate on the environmental and social aspects that surround it, particularly in southeast Asia. This study, at the request of request of the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature and Food Quality (LNV), ISRIC-World Soil Information, Alterra and Plant Research International, assessed the biophysical land suitability for the production of oil palm in Kalimantan, Indonesia.

Everyone agrees that logging and agriculture can cause deforestation. But does shifting cultivation, or ‘slash and burn’ farming destroy forests particularly? Are local farmers solely to blame? Recent research by Overseas Development Institute (ODI) suggests the role of shifting farming in starting forest fires has been exaggerated. It is not, in fact, a major cause of biodiversity loss. The report finds that the causes of deforestation are many and varied, and that governments and international investors are also responsible.

This paper develops a conceptual framework to holistically explore the impact of HIV/AIDS on land, particularly at the rural household level. It is intended that this framework will provide a basis for pragmatic recommendations on this issue, which the paper argues is a neglected area in all Southern Africa Development Community (SADC) countries.A broad review of the impacts of HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, economic impacts and impacts on household livelihood strategies, provides the basis for the conceptual framework.