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The objective of this chapter is to provide an approach to the farmland abandonment problem in Galicia, the Spain’s north-western region. We describe the land use pattern that characterized the traditional agricultural system, and analyze the process of structural adjustment and changes in land use recorded in the last 50 years. The empirical basis is provided mainly by an original elaboration of agricultural census data for the period 1982–2009. The results show that in the last five decades the area devoted to crops and pastures was constrained to a small portion of the territory (just over 20%), while the agro-livestock uses of hill land which were very important up to the mid-twentieth century disappeared. All this led to a remarkable expansion of abandoned land, which currently occupies at least 20% of the regional area. The drivers of this farmland abandonment are diverse and vary from one zone to another. But among them the conditioners derived from the structure of land ownership must be emphasized, coupled with the poor functioning of the land market and leasing. Land abandonment has had a major impact on the dynamics of the agricultural sector, limiting the size of farms and causing an increasing intensification in a small portion of the territory. This has also led to severe environmental problems, especially forest fires. Consequently, improving mobility and land use should be a priority of agricultural and rural development policies in this region.

This chapter examines how Maragoli women farmers’ plot-level crop control, individual, and household variables affect yields. This chapter contributes to a holistic understanding of the ramifications of quantitative and qualitative factors informing women farmers’ plot-level undertakings and yields as well as their innovative and creative strategies for optimizing output. It broadens the existing debate in the sub-Saharan African agricultural production literature by suggesting a composite measure of plot-level crop control as one factor influencing women farmers’ yields even in situations where land is owned by someone else. It also provides a rich discussion of the various and interlocking qualitative factors distorting women farmers’ incentive structures, efforts to increase plot-level yields and their strategies for minimizing the detrimental effects of the same.

A multimethod quantitative and qualitative ethnographic case study approach was used in this study.

This chapter demonstrates that women strategically bargained and invested more of their productive resources on the plots where they anticipated the greatest individual gains.

This chapter underscores women farmers’ ability to boost agricultural output when there are appropriate incentives for them to do so and suggests the theoretical and practical relevance of secure control and property rights over the products of the land not for the household (head), but for the cultivator. The chapter demonstrates and reaffirms that Africa women farmers respond appropriately to incentives and suggests that there is need for a customized, renewed, and sustained emphasis on women farmers’ empowerment and inclusion in all levels in the agricultural sector in order to actualize increased yields. Investing in women farmers and implementing policies that narrow existing gender disparities in African agricultural production systems is holistically beneficial.

This chapter appraised customary tenancy and Post COVID-19 agricultural development in Nigeria. In doing this, it discussed customary tenancy as an incident of customary tenure and the impact of Land Use Act 1978 in its evolutionary trend as a sustainable means of accessing land for long term agricultural business in Nigeria. The study made use of socio-legal research methodology involving doctrinal research method and an analysis of social context for information gathering. The primary source of law included the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria (as altered); the Land Use Act 1978 and related statutes as well as judicial precedents. The secondary sources included books, journal articles, conference proceedings, magazines, newspapers and the internet. The outcome of the study indicated that customary tenancy was a recognized method of accessing land for agriculture on long term basis among many ethnic groups in Nigeria, including but are not limited to Yoruba of Southwest and the Igbo of Southwest, Nigeria. That the method was predominantly used for agricultural purposes, and in agricultural communities. Third, that the Land Use Act 1978 did not stop the customary land practice, but rather recognized and encouraged its use through customary right of occupancy. Fourth, customary tenancy was found to have promoted access to land resources and reduction of tension and bitter acrimonies which could have been attendant to request for land resources in rural communities. It was recommended that efforts should be made by Governors who are trustees under the LUA to use their powers in the interest of the people and that reforms be undertaken to resolve latent contradictions in the Act. It was concluded that customary tenancy should be harnessed for sustainable Post COVID – 19 land use in Nigeria.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyze the impact of public agricultural Research and Development (R&D) investments on agricultural productivity and long-term food security to derive policy recommendations. The methodological approach is based on the application of the state-of-the art Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model to R&D. By endogenizing R&D in global CGE models, it is possible to assess the impact of different public R&D policies on the food availability and food access of food security. This study found that R&D investments bring positive effects on the food access dimension of food security, particularly in places such as Sub-Saharan Africa where prices are expected to grow significantly by 2050, as agricultural land becomes scarcer and more expensive. Doubling the R&D intensity would soften the land constraints and substantially decelerate food prices, thus preventing the deterioration of living standards of rural households and leading to a gain in daily caloric consumption. The impact of alternative agricultural R&D policies on the various dimensions of food security has not been analyzed using a CGE framework, which enables capturing both the benefits and costs from R&D investments. Modeling the dynamic accumulation of R&D stocks makes it possible to analyze the effects of R&D on food security over time.

The chapter seeks to reflect on the dynamics of the reconstruction of family farming and peasant agriculture in agrarian reform settlements (“assentamentos”) in Brazil, exploring the limits and potential of government food purchases from family farming, particularly the Food Acquisition Program (Programa de Aquisição de Alimentos – PAA), in the creation of alternative paths of rural development. The work analyzes the different strategies through which farmers and their organizations mobilize public policy instruments and market connections, expanding their room for maneuver and agency capacity. Research was conducted in the Baixo Sul Territory of the state of Bahia, focusing the heterogeneous web of social organizations involved in the implementation of the Food Acquisition Program in this setting.

Since 1969, the Moroccan government has worked to convert irrigated collective land in the Gharb region into individual freehold tenure through cadastral, registration, and titling processes. The first titles were issued in 2017, the same year that a new compact between the Government of Morocco and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a US foreign aid agency, entered into force to develop a streamlined privatization process for collective lands. In this chapter, I adopt the analytic of assemblage to investigate the historical construction of administrative frameworks, material landscapes, and systems of practice governing access to collective land. I assert that the shifting arrangements of sociomaterial relations related to collective land access in the Gharb have continuously assembled new practices of land access legible to state and market actors at a wider scale. This legibility was produced by administrative reforms and the deployment of new forms of knowledge production in the form of cadastral maps and titles deeds, which have worked to formalize and individualize access to collective land in the Gharb. The logic of legibility smooths the contradictions between the diverse objectives of state actors, including rural development to improve economic livelihoods, pursuit of a neoliberal development strategy focused on commodification and marketization of land, and the evolution of a patronage system that exchanges economic gain for political support.

This chapter describes a method to analyse agricultural land use in terms of net value added and employment (working time requirement) in the agricultural sector as well as a corresponding ecological indicator: the nitrogen-leaching-rate. Watershed management demands a basic approach, which deals with common statistics and spatial information from digital maps. This causes a range of uncertainties, which are calculated in relation to the data input. A metamodel derived from a process model calculates the most probable value of the ecological indicator, whereas the economic indicators are estimated by the cumulative numbers of primary production. The uncertainties are expressed as the standard deviation of all impacts as percentages. The method described is applied to a rural district in the Elbe river basin.