Land & Food Security

There is a common view and belief that women are the ones that do the farming in Africa while the men do not work much. This paper seeks to find explanations to why land productivity is lower on land rented out by female landlord households than on land rented out by male landlord households in the Ethiopian highlands.

Because of their lower social and economic status, as well as physiological needs, women are often more vulnerable to nutritional problems. When it comes to sharing food resources in the home, women and girls can lose out.

SUMMARY: Deforestation has become an issue of increasing concern in many tropical countries. In Vietnam, the response of policymakers has been embodied in several policies and programs, including land classification, land use rights devolution and reforestation schemes.

Slow agricultural development has restrained economic growth and poverty alleviation in Cambodia. The country’s volatile history has left a legacy of weak tenure security and large areas of underutilized land. This study estimates the impact of access to land on poverty in a logistic regression framework using household survey data.

TAKEN FROM EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: This report documents the contemporary ecological, social and economic transformations occurring in one village in Lao PDR’s central Khammouane province under multiple sources of development-induced displacement.

This paper is part of a collection of five policy briefs was commissioned by the World Bank for the 2009 World Development Report Reshaping Economic Geography.

For the last 50 years, local, state and the federal governments have expressed concerns about farmland retention. Four benefits have been used to warrant farmland preservation programs: food security and local food supply, viable local agricultural economy, environmental and rural amenities, and sound fiscal policy and orderly development.

1. The percentage of households that are headed by widows in rural Zambia increased from 9.4 % to 12.3% between 2001 and 2004.2. Within 1 to 3 years after the death of their husbands, widow-headed households, on average, controlled 35 percent less land than what they had prior to their husband’s death.3.