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'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]

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]

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.

The economist and the planner in Latin America are repeatedly confronted with problems related to land-use planning in peasant cultures. This paper is a partial response to some of them. In particular, however, the paper is concerned with a few of the more important aspects of land-use planning for agrarian reforms and colonization projects in Latin America in which forestry is one of the viable alternatives. Even in the most favorable cases, the odds working against the sustained and long-run success of agrarian reform and colonization projects are formidable. With a few notable exceptions, the record to date is not overly encouraging and the tragic remnants of projects that once offered hope to the rural dispossessed and impoverished are found throughout the world. Much more thought and planning in dealing with the long-run consequences of policy alternatives, as well at the introduction of new and bold ideas, is necessary in this area. It is hoped that the concepts discussed in this paper will contribute to this end.