Land tenure and farm management efficiency: the case of paddy and cinnamon production in customary land areas of Sumatra

This study attempts to identify the impacts of land tenure institutions on the efficiency of farm management based on a case study of lowland paddy (rice) and upland cinnamon production in customary land areas of Sumatra. While the traditional joint-family ownership system is found to exist in paddy land, more individualised ownership systems are widely observed in upland areas. Yet, we found no statistical evidence that residual profit per unit of land is affected by land tenure institutions in either the lowlands or uplands, indicating that the prevailing land tenure institutions are equally conducive to efficient farm management.     

青藏高原史前农业起源与发展研究

辽阔的青藏高原作为一个独特的地理单元,对远古时期这一地区的人类活动产生了深远的影响,是藏民族的发祥地和主要聚居区。史前考古遗址表明,早在四五千年前,青藏高原的先民们已经逐渐脱离了渔猎采集活动,从事作物种植、家畜饲养和渔业活动。畜牧业是青藏高原地区最古老的农业生产部门,家畜以牦牛和猪为主;这一地区的种植业与北方黄土高原相似,是以旱地作物为主,作物主要有青稞、小麦、粟、豌豆等,起初可能受到起源于中原的粟作农业文化的影响,随后也可能受到西亚麦作文化的影响。     

Barriers and requirements to climate change adaptation of mountainous rural communities in developing countries: The case of the eastern Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau of China

Systematically identifying the barriers and requirements to adaptation is critical to the successful implementation of climate adaptation planning and policies at the local level, especially in the mountainous rural communities of developing countries with limited resources and technology. We conducted an empirical study of the barriers and requirements to adapting to climate change of 539 peasant households in an ecologically vulnerable area of China to enhance their resilience to climate change by improving our understanding of adaptation process and decision-making. Our findings indicated that farmers in the Gannan Plateau face multiple adaptation barriers, of which normative, information and technology barriers were more serious, such as lack of meteorological information service, infrastructure and technology extension in agriculture or animal husbandry. Adaptation requirements are an important way to effectively reduce or eliminate obstacles and improve farmers' adaptive capacity to climate change. The survey found that local households have an urgent requirement for infrastructure, information and production technologies, such as water, electricity, transportation facilities, disaster warning information, employment information and farming or breeding techniques. In addition, due to the influence of economic level, education level, years of farming, gender and other factors, differences exist in the adaptation barriers and requirements faced by farmers in different regions. These findings extend empirical evidence in favor of formulating a reasonable adaptation framework and choosing optimal adaptation strategies, which are essential for enacting well-targeted regional adaptation policies.     

Effect of intergenerational asset transfers on land distribution in rural Cambodia: case studies of three rice‐growing villages

After land reallocation in the early 1980s, inequality in landholdings has re‐emerged in rural Cambodia. Besides land sales and purchases, intergenerational transfers of assets may foster inequality in landholdings among “second generation” (2G) couples who, having wed after the 1980s reallocation, received no land from the government. Data analysis of three rice‐growing villages reveals that land received directly from parents accounts for 18–41% of inequality in landholdings among sample 2G couples. Although net land gain after marriage, primarily through purchases, is the largest contributor to the inequality, nonland assets received from parents positively affect the net gain. Direct and indirect effects combined, assets received from parents account for 35–57% of inequality in landholdings. The effect of assortative matching of the acreage received from parents has hitherto been small.     

Growing struggle over rising demand: How land use change and complex farmer-grazier conflicts impact grazing management in the Western Highlands of Cameroon

Continuous population growth and rapid urbanization rates in West and Central Africa are associated with rising demand for fresh vegetables and animal-based products, providing market opportunities for local producers from the surrounding areas. However, in regions such as northwestern Cameroon where pastoral cattle breeding remains an important part of the local livestock sector, competition over dwindling resources with local crop farmers are increasing due to progressive land-use change from natural and traditional grazing areas into agricultural land.In order to determine the main areas of conflict and their interdependencies, we used a multi-temporal land-use classification and a multi-dimensional participatory approach of collecting spatial data from six representative Mbororo cattle herds, equipped with GPS collars. We combined this with 162 map-based interviews with randomly sampled pastoralists on seasonal grazing areas, grazing management, land ownership, and major constraints to herding. This data set was complemented by the perspectives of 40 randomly sampled crop farmers from four major transhumance zones.Both parties identified farmer-grazier conflicts as a serious constraint for their activities in the rainy season (graziers: 23.9 %; farmers: 22.5 %) and particularly in the dry season (36.3 %; 47.2 %). Land tenure issues will be of critical importance in the future as only very few respondents held an official land title, and pastoralists appeared less prepared for land disputes than crop farmers, who more often claimed land ownership through fencing. Therefore, there is an urgent need for developing and implementing alliance farming strategies that are based on dialogue between both interest groups to avoid further escalation within a region already in a conflict-ridden political environment.     

Modeling the effects of tourism and land regulation on land-use change in tourist regions: A case study of the Lijiang River Basin in Guilin,China

To a large extent, tourism development triggers an economic boost in certain regions. However, given its complex and dynamic forms of land use, tourism development also causes changes to land-use demands and patterns in tourist regions, which directly and indirectly interfere with local environments. The development of tourist regions must achieve a series of trade-offs to meet sustainability goals. This paper discusses the effects of tourism on land-use change and how land regulation policies integrate tourism development with land use. We employed a system dynamic-cellular automata hybrid model using the Lijiang River Basin as an example to translate tourism-affected land dynamics into spatial distributions and project their likely future changes under various development scenarios. We determined three major outcomes. (1) Tourism development causes a quantitatively increasing demand for construction land. With effective spatial regulations, the expansion of construction land does not necessarily suggest the loss of eco-land; rather, land-use pressures accordingly shift to cropland. Under these circumstances, land regulation policies help to balance land demand and optimize land-use patterns. (2) Tourism development causes a continuous spatial interference with landscapes. Land regulation policies have the positive and active effect of ignoring this interference rather than counteracting it. (3) The strict implementation of land regulation policies does not necessarily improve land-use patterns. Flexible policies achieve a better balanced land-use pattern than a combination of individual strict policies. However, the former cannot reduce as much vulnerability as the latter. Hence, policy assembly represents a trade-off with regards to balancing land demands, and it should vary based on regional land-use patterns and targets.     

The identification and assessment of ecological risks for land consolidation based on the anticipation of ecosystem stabilization: A case study in Hubei Province,China

The purpose of this study is to identify and classify the ecological risks in land consolidation, and to develop a framework of the theory and method to assess the change of ecological risk degree before and after land consolidation. Environmental impacts and ecological risks of land consolidation have recently drawn much attention, and there are two opposing viewpoints to assess these impacts and risks in the academia of China. Both viewpoints result from the bias of assessment anticipation. Land consolidation includes four main engineering aspects in China, and ecological succession from start of land consolidation to ecosystem stabilization should pass three phases. Different ecological impacts and risks of land consolidation rise from different phases of ecological successions. According to the climax theory of ecology, we developed a framework of the ecological risk assessment based on the anticipation of ecosystem stabilization (ERABAES) for land consolidation. We applied analytical hierarchical processing (AHP) method to the data resources from the land consolidation project in Southern China to allocate weightings to the indices of ecological risk (ER), and to set up an integrated index system for the ecological risk identification. This integrated index system encompasses the ecological risks with three factors (water, soil and biology) and 14 indices. The results of the project show: (1) The ER is reduced from 58.02 to 28.8 after land consolidation and the degree of ecological risk is down from Degree III to Degree IV. (2) According to the element analysis, the water ER is reduced from 21.53 to 6.16, its contribution to reduce the ecological risk is 53%; the reduced ERs of soil and biology are respectively 12.79 and 1.06, their contribution of ecological risk reduce is lower than water.