The IMF’s April 2025 Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa presents a clear warning: regional growth is slowing, debt pressures are mounting, and donor assistance is declining. Yet the report outlines critical opportunities particularly in domestic revenue mobilization, structural reform, and private sector activation that can shape a more resilient …
This research analyzed the changing pattern of land market under a land decreasing condition in rural Bangladesh. The data was collected from a village-level agricultural officer and all households of a sample clan originated from one very large farmer in 1900. The changes in land ownership and land market during …
The widely accepted view that emphasises the negative impact of the decline in common property resources on the village poor generally presumes that village common lands would have been used by all villagers inclusive of the poor without serious differences in the right to access them. Mainly based on historical …
The persistence of colonial patterns of ownership of plantations in Kerala remains one of the enduring weaknesses of the land reforms programme of the 1970s in the state. The case of Chengara
V.K. Ramachandran New data show that, even over the last three years, the extent of land acquired by the State government for industrial and infrastructural purposes was a fraction of the agricultural land distributed under land reform. The primary point of distinction between Left-led and all other State governments in …
This UNDP study focuses on the situation of land rights and ownership in Orissa. Provides concrete suggestions to improve access of the poor to land and highlights the need to arrest processes that are promoting land alienation. Access to land is acutely important in rural India, where the incidence of …
The Comprehensive Agrarian Reform Programme in the Philippines has made substantial progress in dealing with land reform. Much more remains to be done and Filipino society is actively engaged in critically discussing the past and the future of CARP. There are lessons here for India where policymaking circles remain obsessed …
Landscape connectivity that allows for wildlife mobility requires governance across a tenurial mosaic of managerial units based on reconciliation of social, economic, and ecological objectives. The proposed Kavango-Zambezi (KAZA) Transfrontier Conservation Area (TFCA), which includes Angola, Botswana, Namibia, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, features a spectacular display of mega fauna and a …
Land reforms in Kerala, far from being a remarkable success, have been a major failure. They were meant to redistribute land and not to improve productivity. It is time the state government considered ordering that redistributed land should be returned if the beneficiaries do not cultivate it and also reversing …
This is the first Human Development Report of Andhra Pradesh. The state has several unique features-development of participatory institutions, innovative poverty alleviation programs, spectacular demographic transition, pursuit of state level economic reforms, etc. The report reviews states
The Zimbabwean government has reclaimed about 1,450 farms from resettled farmers, also known as A2 farmers, after a recent land audit revealed that the new farmers were not using their farms productively. Talking to the state-owned newspaper Herald, the land reform and resettlement minister, Didymus Mutasa, said "his ministry is …
India's states have employed several land reform measures, including reforming tenancy, imposing land ceilings, distributing government wasteland, and allocating house sites and homestead plots. With relatively modest revisions, some of the existing laws and policies can further their original intent of increasing the poor's access to rural land and providing …
The national economy is growing at near double-digit rates but neither industry nor non-agricultural activities in rural India have been able to provide livelihoods for millions of rural workers. It is this failure that underlies the spurt in rural violence that has highlighted once again the issue of the poor's …
This article outlines some key elements of a human-rights based approach to the compulsory acquisition of land. It shows that the compulsory acquisition of land often proceeds rapidly where the political, economic and legal power of those affected directly is weakest. While expropriation should be a powerful and beneficial tool …
Faced with 25,000 landless people from across the country marching up to parliament on October 29 to register their protest, the United Progressive Alliance (upa) government announced the creation of a committee on "State Agrarian Relations and the Unfinished Task in Land Reforms'. The union minister of rural development, Raghuvansh …
A little over a year before the Janadesh march, a working group appointed by the Planning Commission had termed land reforms in India a "forgotten agenda'. It minced no words in explaining why. "Policy makers are finding existing land reforms enacted on the basis of central guidelines of early seventies …
On August 28, senior police officers and forest department personnel of two contiguous districts in Tamil Nadu and Karnataka held a joint meeting to combat the growing Naxal presence in forest areas. Erode in Tamil Nadu, one of the two districts in question, had not far back been the hunting …
If the Doha Round of negotiations of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) is stalemated, a great part of it is because of the resistance of small farmers, including those in Asia. One of the terrible truths of the 20th century is that it was a blight on small farmers or …