Search

This article examines why land reform beneficiaries maintain linkages with their communal areas of origin two decades after Zimbabwe's Fast Track Land Reform programme (FTLRP). This is done by investigating the extent to which and the ways in which beneficiaries of the FTLRP are connected to their communal areas of origin, as well as the implications of maintaining their belonging. Studies of the FTLRP have paid insufficient attention to the importance of understanding linkages with places of origin. Thus, using empirical qualitative insights from Zvimba district, Mashonaland West province, I argue that belonging, even in the case of land reform, links people despite their physical relocation. The findings illustrate that the need to belong makes people maintain their links with their place of origin. The article concludes that land reform programmes should consider social elements such as belonging which are embedded in the social fabric of people's lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the Zimbabwean State's narrative and discourse that in fast track land reform areas 'land leasing is illegal', there is a surge in land leasing. This article focuses on how land leasing unfolds in the post-fast track land reform Zimbabwe, paying particular attention to state's role in land leasing, the forms of land leasing and the forms of conflicts that emerge. The study draws from a qualitative research conducted on 90 purposively selected households resettled on three farms and 15 key informants in Marondera district. Primary data was collected through semi-structured interviews, and analyzed through thematic coding and descriptive statistics. SPSS version 23 and Microsoft Excel were used to perform the statistical analysis. Findings show that land leasing is still ongoing informally and that various actors participate in it. The land reform beneficiaries leased out land due to livelihood precarity, as a means of safeguarding land by absentee land owners, labor shortages and tenure insecurity. The results revealed that 94% of the land is leased out to large-scale tenants and 6% to small-scale tenants. The study also noted that 100% of the land leasing occurred in the study area informally. Furthermore, 90% of these agreements are verbal and only 10% are written. The informal land leasing practice is also fraught with conflicts, such as struggles over plot boundaries, non-rent payments and crop theft. The State's ambiguity in this matter has not helped, it merely drives land leasing 'underground' but does not halt it. Therefore, a 'new normal' land leasing system that strives outside the confines of the law has emerged. In terms of policy implications, the study calls for the State and stakeholders to re-examine land leasing, and consider a modest tax on it, and establish village based simplification and regularization of land leasing procedures.. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to document the experiences of and challenges experienced by farmers resettled according to the communal/villagised model of resettlement in Upper Guruve district in Zimbabwe. The paper is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted from 2009 to 2017. Almost two decades have passed since Zimbabwe's popular and yet controversial Fast Track Land Reform Programme was introduced in 2000. An analysis of the experiences of resettled farmers reveals challenges borne out of unresolved tenurial rights, unforeseen generational population pressures and conflict erupting between resettled farmers and existing residents from nearby communal areas. This has birthed competition over resources, boundary conflicts and contestations over authority, ultimately leading to livelihood fragility. Compounding the resettled farmers' predicament is the recent discovery of minerals, the mining of which destroys their farms. The paper addresses the three interrelated issues of tenurial conflicts, challenges faced by resettled farmers, and the major contributors of livelihoods fragility in order to examine the causes, context and implications of livelihood fragility on resettled farmers in Upper Guruve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine the complex interplay between authority, land rights and belonging in new resettlement areas as revealed through relationships between 'landed' beneficiaries and 'landless' farm workers living on farms a decade after Zimbabwe's land reform programme. Land beneficiaries and farm workers shared ambiguous moral bonds: land beneficiaries relied on farm workers to make their land productive, but the two groups were also closely connected socially and shared complex relations of dependency. However, in moments of conflict, land beneficiaries reconfigured farm workers not only as 'ethnic others' but as unrighteous beings, lacking in moral substance. Working through a land-cum-labour dispute between a small-scale land beneficiary and a group of farm workers that was taken to a local chief's court, I argue that such discourses of moral lack can be read as attempts by land beneficiaries to assert and naturalise their authority over farm workers. Despite having been largely excluded from state land allocations, farm workers maintained a sense of entitlement to live on farms and own land left to them by their previous white employers. Land beneficiaries' distancing of farm workers was used to try and delegitimise this sense of entitlement, contributing to the production and reproduction of a rural underclass of farm workers excluded not only from land, but also from basic citizenship rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within a liberal, 'law of things' understanding of property, the donative trust is seen as a species of gift. Control over trust property passes from the hands of settlors to beneficiaries, from owners to owners. Trust property, like all other property, is silent and passive, its fate determined by its owners. This article questions this understanding of the trust by showing how beneath the facade of ownership, the trust inverts the relation between owner and owned, person and thing. It analyses the relation that trustees, beneficiaries and settlors have to the trust property and argues that the role of each of these parties can be shown to consist in furthering the interests of the trust property rather than their own. It claims that this protects things from their owners at the same time as it ensures these owners' ongoing care towards the things they own. This raises questions about the trust's status within the institution of private property, justified as it is by the human autonomy it is said to enable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The land reform process in Zimbabwe gave birth to a new type of school known as a satellite school, which emerged due to community requests (in areas populated by land reform beneficiaries) and an inability by government to adequately fund new schools that communities required. Various studies on the emergence of satellite schools have mainly focused on the challenges faced by satellite schools. This article explores nhimbe ("work party") and allied reasons specifically amongst the land reform beneficiaries who provide a supporting role to a satellite school in their community. This paper offers a different perspective on satellite schools from the vantage point of the land reform beneficiaries who are choosing to fill an educational gap and simultaneously nurture the development of an educational asset which they built--the satellite school. Theoretically, social capital frameworks by James Coleman (1988) and Robert Putnam (2000) are utilised to understand the relationships forged and maintained between groups of people for a greater good, in this case the land reform beneficiaries' construction and ongoing support of one selected satellite school. Although the study's research design adopted a multiple case study approach, we use the case of a group of land reform beneficiaries in one district for this paper. The data were elicited through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions held at one satellite school in the Masvingo district of Zimbabwe. The purposively selected participants comprised six land reform beneficiaries, two village heads and one satellite school head, making a total sample of nine participants. The study revealed that the land reform beneficiaries played a central role in the development and support of the satellite school in their community because of a marriage of interrelated reasons. These included the close proximity of their homesteads to each other which generated nhimbe, which further developed their relationships, their social networks, a sense of homage coupled with an indebtedness to the Mugabe government, shared community goals and social norms and the existing resource base (that they could access in their community). The study revealed that all these reasons for the land reform beneficiaries developing and supporting the satellite school feed off each other--they are not independent of each other. We conclude that the land reform beneficiaries have a sense of ownership of the satellite school in their community in Masvingo and they resultantly strive to use the available resources they are able to muster to develop the school so that it can be a valued asset to their community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the dominant challenges facing the South African forestry sector is the issue of land restitution. The aim of this study was, therefore, to assess the perception of beneficiaries of benefit-sharing modalities for forest-based land reform initiatives in their locality. A random sampling technique selected 140 and 175 households in Amabomvini and Cata communities in KwaZulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces, respectively. The household beneficiaries showed a lack of knowledge of the criteria used for the disbursement of the benefits. In addition, over 70.0% of household beneficiaries in Amabomvini, compared with far less than 70.0% in Cata, preferred using rental income for infrastructure development in their respective communities. The results further showed that the relationship between the responses of the respondents from both Amabomvini and Cata communities regarding their perception on the existence of the criteria established to share the benefits, was statistically significant (χ2 = 34.452, df = 4, p < 0.005). However, a lack of transparency, trust and greed were among the factors that household beneficiaries identified as the root causes to the poor benefit-sharing mechanisms. Therefore, it is recommended that there should be political will and commitment from government in order to ensure the development and strengthening of existing benefit- sharing policies for the improvement of livelihoods of the land beneficiaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the disjuncture between women's formal land rights and their attaining these in practice, examining the four agrarian reforms carried out by progressive governments after 2000 in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela. It finds that while all four strengthened women's formal land rights, only the reforms in Bolivia and Brazil resulted in a significant share and number of female beneficiaries. In both countries, strong national-level rural women's movements were the main advocates behind women's land rights in a context in which they formed part of the coalition that brought these regimes to power. In Bolivia, women have benefited principally through joint titling of land to couples in the country's massive land regularization programme. Brazil's reform has been the most redistributionary, and women have benefited through the priority given to female household heads as well as the mandatory joint allocation of land to couples in the agrarian reform settlements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The promotion of intensive farming through organic and fair trade certification appears contradictory to the increasing significance of non-farm income sources in rural Asia as well as in many other parts of the rural South. By observing a sugarcane producer co-operative comprising land reform beneficiaries in the Philippines, this paper explores the reality of livelihood diversification as practised by member households of the certified co-operative, focusing on the compatibility of certification-supported farming with diversified activities. In this case, diversification at the household level progressed both away from farming and into farming. Behind the long-term use of agricultural certification, there are compelling reasons for continuing both certification-supported farming and diversified activities, and for employing mechanisms that further the compatibility at all phases between the former and the latter, and maximising income-generating opportunities. The operation of communal land with agricultural certification may be an effective form of assistance to land reform beneficiaries who share a strong desire to be landowners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are errors, attributable to various reasons, in the land registry and cadastre data of Turkey. A great majority of such errors originates from the facility cadastre system. In addition, there are also errors in the transactions made based on request following the facility cadastre. The beneficiaries and deed holders suffer from the fact that most of the cadastral plots become unusable and errors in the land registry. Therefore, a countrywide second-cycle cadastral studies and surveys should be conducted in order to solve the technical and legal problems. However, it is obvious that this procedure will take long time and be costly. Hence, it is aimed that these problems be solved by alternative methods. The foremost among these methods are zoning application in settlement areas and land consolidation in rural areas. Under these applications, the land registry and cadastral information of all parcels in the application site are renewed and thus recognized as second-cycle cadastre. This study gives solution recommendations for some of the errors resulting from land registry and cadastre made during and after facility cadastre in the parcels within the application site of land consolidation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Input subsidy programs have once again become a major plank of agricultural development strategies in Africa. Ten African governments spend roughly US$1 billion annually on input subsidy programs (ISPs), amounting to 28.6% of their public expenditures on agriculture. This article reviews the microlevel evidence on ISPs undertaken since the mid 2000s. We examine the characteristics of subsidy beneficiaries, crop response rates to fertilizer application and their influence on the performance of subsidy programs, the impacts of subsidy programs on national fertilizer use and the development of commercial input distribution systems, and finally the impact of ISPs on food price levels and poverty rates. The weight of the evidence indicates that the costs of the programs generally outweigh their benefits. Findings from other developing areas with a higher proportion of crop area under irrigation and with lower fertilizer prices-factors that should provide higher returns to fertilizer subsidies than in Africa-indicate that at least a partial reallocation of expenditures from fertilizer subsidies to R&D and infrastructure would provide higher returns to agricultural growth and poverty reduction. However, because ISPs enable governments to demonstrate tangible support to constituents, they are likely to remain on the African landscape for the foreseeable future. Hence, the study identifies ways in which benefits can be enhanced through changes in implementation modalities and complementary investments within a holistic agricultural intensification strategy. Among the most important of these are efforts to reduce the crowding out of commercial fertilizer distribution systems and programs to improve soil fertility to enable farmers to use fertilizer more efficiently. The challenges associated with achieving these gains are likely to be formidable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Land grab' has become a catch-all phrase to refer to the current explosion of (trans)national commercial land transactions mainly revolving around the production and export of food, animal feed, biofuels, timber and minerals. Two key dimensions of the current land grab - namely, the politics of changes in land use and property relations change (and the links between them) - are not sufficiently explored in the current literature. We attempt to address this gap by offering a preliminary analysis through an analytical approach that suggests some typologies as a step towards a fuller and better understanding of the politics of global land grabbing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editors discuss articles published within the issue on the 2000 Zimbabwe land reforms focusing on land reform beneficiary selection, changes in land use and agrarian structure, and women's relationships to land reform.

Questions of who was allocated land under Zimbabwe's Fast Track land reform programme and how productive the beneficiaries have been are highly controversial. This article presents detailed empirical data on beneficiaries who were small and medium-sized commercial farms (the A2 model) in Goromonzi district, land allocation processes, and land use. Goromonzi District is one of the four districts that share a boundary with Harare, the capital city of Zimbabwe. A questionnaire survey targeting 65 A2 beneficiaries was implemented in 2003, while key informant interviews were done in 2006. Drawing on both primary and official data, the article shows that official criteria for selecting beneficiaries for A2 farms that emphasized the potential to use the land productively were ignored in practice. The institutions responsible for land allocation were captured by members of the ruling party and by representatives of the state security apparatus, and most beneficiaries were drawn from the governing or the local elite. Many lacked sufficient capital to invest meaningfully in commercial agriculture, did not have relevant farming experience, and were unable to put the bulk of their land into production for several years. As a result, in Goromonzi District the impact of Fast Track land reform on commercial agriculture has been negative. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The popular term 'land grabbing', while effective as activist terminology, obscures vast differences in the legality, structure and outcomes of commercial land deals and deflects attention from the roles of domestic elites and governments as partners, intermediaries and beneficiaries. This paper summarises initial evidence of the characteristics of recent acquisitions of public lands and land held under customary tenure in Southern Africa, and their distribution across the region. It draws attention to their diverse manifestations - to questions of size, duration and source of the investments; the commodities and business models through which they are implemented; the tenure arrangements and resources accessed; the terms of leases and compensation; the degree of displacement; labour regimes and employment creation; and changes in settlement and infrastructure. The article proposes a schematic analytical framework for distinguishing between different types of land deals and considers the implications for unfolding and future trajectories of agrarian change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1980, when Zimbabwe attained political independence, and 2003 the government has implemented two phases of land redistribution programmes, designed to transfer land from large-scale commercial white farmers to black farmers. However, the state has paid scant attention to rural women's access to land. Studies documenting women's exclusion from Phase I land reform have tended to rely on the operation of customary law to explain why women have missed out. I question these liberal accounts and argue that a comprehensive understanding of the way rural women access land, or fail to access land, can only be gained by examining gender and power relations that operate in the villages. Phase II land reform has seen a complex intersection of criteria based on gender and political affiliation used to deny potential beneficiaries access to land, as patronage politics became the dominant means of achieving access to land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Rwandan Constitution of 2003, the National Land Policy of 2004 and the Organic Land Law of 2005 all contain clear provisions which add up to a mandate for gender equality in land rights and set out a context in which all land shall be registered and rights gained under different means of access to land shall be considered equal. The Rwandan Succession Law of 1999 had already established the principle of equal inheritance rights to land for men and women. Articles from these four core documents together comprise the new body of land policy and law in Rwanda which is currently in the process of being implemented. This paper argues that an iterative approach to planning for the implementation of land tenure reform in Rwanda over a long period of research and consultations, including field consultations and subsequent “trial interventions”, and involving both government and civil society, has enabled the issue of how to secure women's land rights to be more fully considered within the overall land tenure reform process. This comes in a country with particular and unique post-Genocide circumstances that enabled women to gain their new land inheritance rights on paper early on. Evidence gathered by the authors suggests that these paper rights are already beginning to affect social relations and land inheritance patterns in practice. Moreover, women's land rights retain a prominence on the political agenda in Rwanda, positing an “enabling” environment for some crucial articles in the secondary legislation required for implementation to be drafted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Textual is the property of Universidad Autonoma Chapingo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Agricultural cooperatives are often viewed as appropriate vehicles to facilitate vertical coordination with, or horizontal integration between, small farmers who would otherwise be excluded from value-adding opportunities and discerning markets. In South Africa, renewed interest in development-oriented cooperatives saw the introduction of a new Cooperatives Act in 2005, along will support measures dedicated to 'emerging' cooperatives. This paper contends that the architects of the new Act discounted important trends in international legislation that would have made development-oriented cooperatives more versatile and given their members better access to capital and expertise through equity partnerships with private agribusiness firms. It is concluded that the new Act should be amended to admit non-patron investors as members, and to allow for nonredeemable and hence appreciable and tradable shares. Such innovations are emerging internationally, usually with a cap on non-patron voting power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Every state entering the Union since 1803 received land grants from the federal government for the support of their respective public school systems. Inherent in this federal grant is the fiduciary duty to prudently and effectively manage these assets for the beneficiary, their school systems. We develop a framework that measures the present value of the beneficiary’s economic benefits to assist managers of school trust lands in determining future management policy. Using this framework, we assess whether managers of state school trust lands are currently meeting their fiduciary responsibilities of “maximum economic benefit” for their beneficiaries or whether changes in management policy are needed. The present value of realized economic returns from grazing lease revenues and capital appreciation are compared with the present value of income streams that may be generated from alternative investments available to the land trustees if the land were sold and the proceeds reinvested in U.S. Treasury securities. Market values and capital appreciation for school trust lands in Wyoming are estimated using hedonic models formulated from ranch sales data. Because we are comparing a risky return on land investments with a riskless return on Treasury bonds, we observe, in most cases, that the sale of land andreinvestment of proceeds will increase economic benefits on school trust lands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on data from several recent surveys in Moldova to examine the question of land consolidation within the process of agrarian reform. It suggests that larger individually owned farms produce higher family incomes than smaller ones and thus farm augmentation makes a positive contribution to the well being of the rural population. Also, for farms of a given size, productivity increases as the number of parcels decreases. The article then proceeds to discuss the actual use of various market mechanisms for land consolidation, including leasing as well as buying and selling of land. According to various surveys, farms with leased land are in fact larger than farms that rely on owned land only. The article argues that land consolidation leads to better economic performance, while land leasing is actually used as a market mechanism for consolidation, which benefits both lessees, through increased farm incomes, and lessors, through income from lease payments for their land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite progressive policies and guidelines to ensure gender equity in the South African land reform programme, the achievement to date is less impressive. In agreement with others we view gender related challenges in the land reform programme as the result of (1) inconsistent interpretations of gender equity and (2) uncertainty on how women specifically should be targeted in the land reform programme. The paper proposes to promote gender equity by introducing of a supply-led strategy with class sensitive gender targets within the land redistribution component of the land reform programme. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an article published in June 1999 in the Journal of Southern African Studies by one of us (Kinsey), evidence using a unique 17-year panel data set was presented in support of the idea that – contrary to much popular thinking – the experience of land reform in Zimbabwe has been generally positive. We revisit some of the key parameters employed in that article using data collected in the 1999 round of the same panel. We expand the analysis with expenditure information, and deal with the sampling bias in favour of land reform that affected the previous analysis. The evidence shows that eliminating the bias reduces the previously noted superior performance of resettlement but leaves unchanged the conclusion that land reform beneficiaries are successful in agriculture. A consideration of the available expenditure outcomes in per capita terms shows that land reform beneficiaries may not be necessarily better off and that they remain vulnerable to drought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the economic impact from the surrender of land rights by Aboriginal people living in three different areas of the Canadian North over a ten-year period. Assistance of the Aborigines in land management; Importance of community-based accountability and voluntarism; Comparison of the socio-economic status of the communities prior to the land claim agreements.

The ability of farmers to operate redistributed farms in a profitable and sustainable manner is crucial for both successful integration into agricultural value chains and sustainable production systems. The performance of redistributed farms is becoming increasingly important as the number of redistributed farms increases in light of correcting previous anomalies in land ownership in South Africa while ensuring continued food security. Although much has been done to assess the impact of land reform on macro variables, little has been done to unpack factors associated with the success of redistributed farms. Using a sample of 1956 redistributed farms across the nine provinces of South Africa, the current study employs an ordinary least square regression as well as a generalised logistic regression model to identify factors associated with the success (measured by net farm income and probability to operate at commercially viable scale) of the sampled farms. The results show that infrastructure, support (both technical and financial), and type of market used are significantly associated with the performance of redistributed farms. In addition, the results reveal disparities in performance across provinces and across gender categories. The study provides valuable insight to programme managers on the factors that needs to be enhanced in order to increase the odds of success for redistributed farms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the impact of the Agrarian Reform in the Bolivian peasantry. It also discusses the implications of the reform in the process of class formation. It examines several issues: distribution of land, income of peasant families and the importance of wages, degree of peasant integration into the market system, and proletarianization and migration of the peasantry to solve the process of dissolution of the country's peasantry. It concludes the possibility that the peasantry in Bolivia might well be slowly emerging from the constraints of Agrarian Reform consciousness and breaking new ground for more radical forms of consciousness.