Power,capital, and the poverty of farmers’ land rights in China

This article is intended to conduct a three-dimensional examination of China’s rural land rights and the complex dynamic among political power, economic capital, and farmers’ rights during the past seventy years. First, the study takes a close look at the historical changes in the nature, scope, and ownership of land property in rural China during four significant time periods from 1949 to 2019. Second, it uses Ronald Coase’s theory on property rights in dissecting the four paradoxes and dilemmas in China’s rural land ownership, including the extent of clarity and stability of land property rights, the “three rights system” (the rights to ownership, contracting and operation of land) and three stagnations in defining and exercising such three rights, the simultaneous shortage and waste of land resources, as well as the restrictions on land transactions and the requirement to protect collective property. With examples derived from selected evidence, the article documents how both political power and economic capital have worked together to deprive farmers’ land rights. It concludes with a critical analysis of the current status of China’s rural economy, the problem of applying Western economic theories to China’s reality, as well as the theoretical definition, legal protection and policy parameters of land property rights in China.     

The application of the Habitats Directive in the UK: Compliance or gold plating?

The implementation of the Birds and Habitats Directives in the UK has caused considerable unease within some parts of industry. Ports in particular have voiced concerns and have argued that the UK Government's interpretation of the Directives is more comprehensive than strictly necessary, likening it to ‘gold plating’. They have argued that this has placed the UK at a disadvantage to other European competitors. This paper explores these contentions and examines case histories to establish the veracity of the arguments.     

Sustainability and Land tenure: Who owns the floodplain in the Pantanal,Brazil?

In seeking to achieve poverty alleviation and environmental conservation, public policy has often centred on guaranteeing land titles to local peoples. However, such approaches have brought unintended outcomes, replacing small-scale economies and natural areas by intensive exploitation of resources with no clear improvement in local people’s wellbeing. To understand this, we go beyond a general political ecology framing to consider relations between sustainability and land tenure, focusing on the intersection of economics, ecology and anthropology to understand how land tenure, property and use play out on the ground. We draw together different concepts including bundle of rights, de facto and de jure resource use, property regimes, density-dependence and non-equilibrium theory. The significance of this three-discipline view is illustrated through a case study of the Pantanal wetland, Brazil, where conservationists, the government and the local population contest ownership of the Paraguay River floodplain. Government sought to address conflicts around tenure and access through a narrow view of property, which failed to encompass the overlapping layers of land tenure, property and use on the ground and only served to create further legal battles. This article concludes that a more complex view combining the three perspectives is needed in the case of the Pantanal, and in other cases of contested property rights, in order to resolve conflicting claims and foster sustainability. We dissect both the power plays involved between different groups competing for control of a valuable resource, and the legal frameworks which can and should provide checks and balances in the system. The more nuanced grasp that emerges of local systems of tenure and access, of how these diverge from western property concepts, and of their environmental implications favours a better understanding of local realities, allowing for better management policy and consequently contributing more effectively towards poverty alleviation and environmental protection.     

Economic performance in Latin America in the 2000s: recession,recovery, and resilience?

This paper examines Latin America’s economic performance in the last three decades with the objective of assessing whether it entered a new phase of strong and persistent growth with stabilization in the 2000s. Our analysis pays special attention to the changing roles of exports and investment as drivers of growth and to the region’s performance in the fiscal area, the composition and dynamics of foreign trade, investment and labour productivity. Our results indicate that, in general, the region has achieved important progress in macroeconomic matters, but it has failed to overcome major structural, long-term constraints linked to its balance of payments and to a lesser extent its fiscal performance. Unless these challenges are resolved, the region’s long-term growth will hardly be favourable.     

A model of the U.S. food system: What are the determinants of the state vulnerabilities to production shocks and supply chain disruptions?

We adapt a Ricardian general equilibrium model to the setting of U.S. domestic agri-food trade to assess states’ vulnerability to adverse production shocks and supply chain disruptions. To this end, we analyze how domestic crop supply chains depend on fundamental state-level comparative advantages—which reflect underlying differences in states’ cost-adjusted productivity levels—and thereby illustrate the capacity of states to adapt to and mitigate the impacts of such disruptions to the U.S. agricultural sector. Based on the theoretical framework and our estimates of the model's structural parameters obtained using data on U.S. production, consumption, and domestic trade in crops, we undertake simulations to characterize the welfare implications of counterfactual scenarios depicting disruptions to (1) states’ agricultural productive capacity, and (2) interstate supply linkages. Our results emphasize that the distributional impacts of domestic supply chain disruptions hinge on individual states’ agricultural productive capacities, and that the ability of states to mitigate the impacts of adverse production shocks through trade relies on the degree to which states are able to substitute local production shortfalls by sourcing crops from other states.     

Who owns the land owns the wind? Land and citizenship in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec,Mexico

Wind energy expansion across rural areas interacts with various interests at the local level, generating multiple reactions within communities. The Eólica del Sur wind farm implementation pathway in Mexico is a paragon of different positions vis-à-vis this industry after trying to install 132 wind turbines in other towns since 2006. This paper argues that there is a bias in studies of the politics of wind energy development in favour of oppositional voices, as opposed to groups that endorse wind energy expansion or that have stakes in the sector but neither support nor oppose wind projects per se. Based on fieldwork conducted over three years and semi-structured interviews with Eólica del Sur stakeholders, the paper argues that different responses to wind energy are linked to contrasting ownership claims over land in the region and competing notions of the institutions that should legitimize these claims.     

Can we avoid overdevelopment of river floodplains by economic policies?: A case study of the Ouse catchment (Yorkshire) in the UK

River floodplains are significant environmental resources in that they provide multiple ecosystem services. However, river floodplains are/tend to be overdeveloped because indirect-use values linked with ecosystem services are overlooked by private landowners. In a case study of the Ouse catchment, it turns out that river floodplains tend to be overdeveloped in upstream areas because of a unidirectional spatial externality. We set a simple model that considers both direct- and indirect-use values to analyse the social optimisation. The essential point is that we must consider two types of environmental externalities related to the ecosystem services of river floodplains to make decisions on floodplain development. First, the development of river floodplains has opportunity costs in terms of lost ecosystem services. Second, the development of floodplains increases flood risks to people downstream (imposes a unidirectional spatial external costs). Theoretically, we can easily deal with the problem by zonal economic policies: zonal taxes or subsidies (price policies) and zonal marketable permits or transferable development rights (quantity policies). On the practical side, however, there are so many problems. Then, such approaches are too complex to use. First of all, we have to specify real complicated economic and physical systems which show non-linearity, irreversibility, site-specific relationships, and inter-dependency between systems and sites. Secondly such policies should be ‘zonal’, which might impose substantial transaction costs. In order to apply them to real situations, we have to determine the appropriate number of zones, their sizes and geographical shapes, and then set appropriate rates or amounts of permits in each zone. Furthermore, the determination of zones is difficult because of the trade-off between the internalisation of externalities and implementation costs of policies, which are also related to political frictions and market failure.     

Defining and delivering ‘sustainable’ agriculture in the UK after Brexit: interdisciplinary lessons from experiences of agricultural reform

Defining and achieving sustainability in the context of complex, multi-scale, and constantly changing agricultural systems is a challenge for research and policy. In UK agriculture, the European Union and its Common Agricultural Policy has been a key source of funding for and approaches to sustainability in the agriculture and rural development sectors. The decision to leave the European Union represents a significant moment in UK agriculture and rural development policy, and both an opportunity and responsibility for the UK government to set out and commit towards achieving sustainability goals for the sector. In this study, a combination of ethnographic case study research, focusing on the case of upland farmers in the Yorkshire Dales, policy analysis and national agricultural sector data is referred to in describing experiences of agricultural policy reform over recent decades. From these experiences, lessons for the design and delivery of future agriculture and rural development are drawn out. It is argued that the integrated assessment of multiple sources of knowledge can provide a means to critically reflecting on evidence about sustainability in complex systems, better understanding trade-offs, and creating a more complete and inclusive knowledge base from which to define sustainable agriculture.     

Climate Change,Uncertainty, and Adaptation: The Case of Irrigated Agriculture in the Murray–Darling Basin in Australia

Climate change is likely to have substantial effects on irrigated agriculture. Extreme climate events, such as droughts, are likely to become more common. These patterns are evident in median projections of climate change for the Murray–Darling Basin in Australia. Understanding climate change effects on returns from irrigation involves explicit representation of spatial changes in natural stocks (i.e., water supply) and their temporal variability (i.e., frequency of drought states of nature) and the active management responses to capital stocks represented by mitigation and alternative adaptation strategies by state of nature. A change in the frequency of drought will induce a change in the allocation of land and water between productive activities. In this paper, a simulation model of state-contingent production is used to analyze the effects of climate change adaptation and mitigation. In the absence of mitigation, climate change will have severe adverse effects on irrigated agriculture in the Basin. However, a combination of climate mitigation and adaptation through changes in land and water use will allow the maintenance of agricultural water use and environmental flows. Le changement climatique risque d’avoir des répercussions considérables sur l’agriculture irriguée. Les phénomènes climatiques extrêmes, tels que les sécheresses, risquent de devenir plus fréquents. Ces phénomènes sont mis en évidence dans les projections médianes du changement climatique établies pour le bassin de Murray–Darling, en Australie. Pour comprendre les répercussions du changement climatique sur le rendement des cultures irriguées, il faut disposer d’une représentation explicite des changements spatiaux qui touchent les stocks naturels (c.-à-d. l’approvisionnement en eau) et de leur variabilité temporelle (c.-à-d. les états de la nature de la fréquence de la sécheresse) et assurer une gestion active des stocks de capital grâce à des stratégies d’atténuation et d’adaptation selon l’état de la nature. Une variation de la fréquence des sécheresses entraînera une modification de l’allocation des terres et de l’eau entre les activités de production. Dans le présent article, nous avons utilisé un modèle de simulation états-contingences pour analyser les répercussions des stratégies d’atténuation du changement climatique et d’adaptation à ce changement. En l’absence de stratégies d’atténuation, le changement climatique aura des répercussions défavorables sur l’agriculture irriguée dans le Bassin. Toutefois, des stratégies d’atténuation combinées à des stratégies d’adaptation comprenant des changements dans l’utilisation des terres et de l’eau permettront de maintenir l’utilisation de l’eau à des fins agricoles et les débits environnementaux.     

Technology adoption,impact, and extension in developing countries’ agriculture: A review of the recent literature

Given the stagnant agricultural productivity and persistent food insecurity in low-income countries—notably in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)—there has been continued interest in the adoption of new technology and its impact on productivity in these regions. To increase crop yields and sustain yield gains, recent case studies of technology adoption unanimously recommend the adoption of integrated farm management systems, particularly in SSA. On the other hand, there have been increasing numbers of studies on social network or farmer-to-farmer technology extension. These studies explore more efficient extension systems than traditional public-sector extension approaches. This article reviews both recent case studies of technology adoption and its productivity impacts as well as studies on agricultural extension to identify common findings, shortcomings, and major remaining issues.     

Gender and inorganic nitrogen: what are the implications of moving towards a more balanced use of nitrogen fertilizer in the tropics?

For agriculture to play a role in climate change mitigation strategies to reduce emissions from inorganic nitrogen (N) fertilizer through a more balanced and efficient use are necessary. Such strategies should align with the overarching principle of sustainable intensification and will need to consider the economic, environmental and social trade-offs of reduced fertilizer-related emissions. However, the gender equity dimensions of such strategies are rarely considered. The case studies cited in this paper, from India, Lake Victoria in East Africa and more broadly from sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), show that the negative externalities of imbalanced inorganic N use in high- and low-use scenarios impact more strongly on women and children. We examine, through a literature review of recent work in SSA, the relative jointness of intra-household bargaining processes in low N use scenarios to assess the degree to which they impact upon N use. We suggest that gender-equitable strategies for achieving more balanced use of N will increase the likelihood of attaining macro-level reductions in GHG emissions provided that they secure equity in intra-household decision-making and address food security. Gender-equitable N use efficiency strategies will help to integrate and assure gender and social equity co-benefits at local scales.     

“The man,the administration and the counter-discourse”: An analysis of the sudden turn in Dutch nature conservation policy

The Netherlands were at the forefront of European nature conservation policy until recently. For years, a stable ‘social contract’ around Dutch nature conservation existed. To the surprise of many, this stability suddenly disappeared and Dutch nature policy has taken a dramatic shift with changing discourses on nature conservation, the halting of implementation of several key-policies and budget cuts up to 70%. This paper engages with discursive-institutionalism to understand such abrupt institutional changes through emerging ideas and discourses that reshape and undermine existing institutional arrangements. We show how the institutionalization of policy not only engendered but also restricted the impact of critical discourses in the 1990s and 2000s. However, critical discourses eventually played an important role in the sudden turn in nature conservation policy. The rise of a general populist discourse and the economic crisis contributed to the credibility of critical discourses and their translation into popular frames and storylines. Authoritative actors such as a new State Secretary opened up popular media for the critical discourses and contributed to their resonance among larger audiences. As such, the man and his new administration successfully used already existing counter-discourses to de-legitimise nature policy and break down important institutional arrangements at a pace unseen in Dutch politics. Adding a discursive element to institutionalism provides for analytical tools to understand change from both external as well as internal forces. In turn, enriching discourse theory with insights from neo-institutionalism helps to evaluate which ideas and discourses become materialized in policy and practice.     

Drivers of land change: Human-environment interactions and the Atlantic forest transition in the Paraíba Valley,Brazil

Human societies constantly interact with the environment through mutual feedbacks and adaptations. The aim of this research was to analyze human and environmental dimensions so as to understand how the dynamic processes of land use and land cover change are contributing to the increase of forest cover observed between 1985 and 2011 in the Paraíba Valley, Brazil. The forestry sector, based on eucalyptus plantations, is given particular attention due to its role in these change processes. Multi-layer perception neural network (MPNN) models were adopted to evaluate the influence of independent variables in the process of the forest transition. Based on the model's results, we conclude that the process is conditioned by a set of biophysical and socioeconomic variables that operate during different historical periods and in different landscape settings. The proximity of Atlantic forest remnants was influential in the forest transition for the three periods analyzed: 1985–1995, 1995–2005, and 2005–2011. In the first period of change (1985–1995), topography was most influential. Between the periods of 1995–2005 and 2005–2011, the proximity to eucalyptus plantations was an important factor, indicating a high probability of native forest recovery occurring in the vicinity of these monocultural areas. The forest transition tends to occur in areas less suitable for agriculture at the outset, but as these areas are replaced by forest cover, socioeconomic drivers such as farm credit and economic development play important roles in forest recovery.     

Assessment of land use and land cover changes and valuation of carbon stocks in the Sergipe semiarid region,Brazil: 1992–2030

The semiarid region in the state of Sergipe, Brazil, approximately 11,000 km², has experienced high deforestation rates in the last decades, which ultimately contribute to global climatic changes. The valuation of ecosystem services of CO₂ sequestration can support definition of environmental policies to decrease deforestation in that region. This study aimed to assess land use and land cover changes in the Sergipe semiarid region between 1992 and 2017 by applying remotely sensed data and technics; simulate the land use and land cover changes between 2017 and 2030 by applying a cellular automaton model, by assuming current land use trends (Business as Usual – BAU) as a reference scenario, and a more conservative scenario (Protected Forest – PF), in which was assumed an effective enforcement of the Brazilian Forest Code established in 2012; simulate the carbon stocks by 2017 assuming the BAU and PF scenarios by 2030, and estimate the Carbon balance between the 2030 and 2017 scenarios; and estimate the economic valuation of carbon emission and sequestration by using the InVEST software. The results showed that agriculture (cropped lands) was main driver of the landscape changes in the study area, which increased 14% by 2017, a net increase of 1494.45 km². The results showed that the total Carbon emissions would reach 736,900 Mg CO₂-eq by assuming the BAU scenario, which would increase the cost of opportunity up to US$ 17.7 million and a social carbon cost varying between US$ 10.3 and US$ 30.2 million. The restoration of the permanent preservation areas could contribute to increase Carbon sequestration up to 481,900 Mg CO₂-eq by 2030, which is equivalent cost of US$ 11.6 million. The natural landscape in the Sergipe semiarid region was strongly affected by deforestation activities occurred between 1992 and 2017. It requires, therefore, effective actions to support and promote restoration of degraded areas. The forested areas within the Sergipe semiarid region were the most affected type of vegetation because of expansion of agricultural fields soil exposures (Exposed Land). Environmental assessments based on scenarios and economic valuations can provide crucial information to support policy and decision makers to improve strategies for environmental management and conservation.