RESEARCH BRIEFING: EU accession and the Bulgarian real estate market

Accession of Bulgaria to the European Union (EU) is expected to result in an increase in the prices of all types of real estate as changes are expected to differ across the segments of the national real-estate market. Property prices have been influenced primarily by local demand, government policies and the perception that EU accession is promoting investment. It is likely that prices of flats will further differentiate, the market for office space will stabilize, the provision of infrastructure will importantly influence prices in holiday resorts and of industrial estates, and agricultural land prices will upsurge initially.     

中国城镇土地非均衡扩张路径与治理策略研究

用经济学中的资源配置理论解释城镇土地非均衡扩张,根据城镇土地扩张的机理不同,把城镇土地分为工业用地、居住用地、基础设施用地,并分别考察了其非均衡扩张路径,在此基础上,从"制度环境-政绩目标-政策工具"三方面提出了非均衡扩张的治理策略。结果认为:招商引资过程中竞相以低地价供地导致了工业用地非均衡扩张;对土地财政的过分追逐导致了居住用地非均衡扩张;地方政府为攫取政治晋升资本,大兴城市基础设施建设导致了基础设施用地非均衡扩张;为系统控制城镇土地非均衡扩张,应在"制度环境-政绩目标-政策工具"三个层次上制定相关治理策略。     

Agricultural Investment in Ethiopia: Undermining National Sovereignty or Tool for State Building?

The media discourse on recent agricultural investments — frequently referred to as the ‘global land grab’ — has been quick to label these deals as ‘neo‐colonial’, implying that these kinds of investments undermine national sovereignty. For the most part, the emerging academic literature on the ‘land grab’ has not critically examined this assumption. This article draws on the literature on state building and agrarian relations in Africa to construct a framework that can be used to analyse the impact of agricultural investment on state–society relations and state sovereignty. The article then uses this framework to examine the case of Ethiopia, illustrating how the Ethiopian state has directed investors to peripheral lowlands and, in doing so, has enhanced, rather than diminished, state sovereignty. As such, while the erosion of sovereignty is certainly one possible outcome of agricultural investment, it is by no means the only one, and is an assumption that should be subjected to critical analysis.     

‘A good wife stays home’: gendered negotiations over state agricultural programmes,upland Vietnam

Rural and livelihood studies, alongside development organisations, are stressing the importance of gender awareness in debates over food security, food crises and land tenure. Yet, within the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, these gender dynamics are frequently disregarded. In Vietnam, rice is intimately linked to the country's food security. Over the last decade, rice export levels, production methods, and local and global market prices have remained constant preoccupations for governmental and development agencies. Steadfast official approval for agricultural technologies and intensification has seen the domestic growth and importation of hybrid varieties of rice and maize seeds. Yet, the impacts of these technologies on upland ethnic minority rice producers and consumers in Vietnam have been overlooked. For these women and men, such as Hmong and Yao farmers, food security is a daily concern for their near-subsistence livelihoods. While strongly encouraged to grow these new seeds, insufficient research has examined the social realities and experiences of these upland minority groups. Moreover, how such agrarian policies and practices are being implicated in reconfiguring gender roles, relations and identities through transformations to individual and household livelihoods has been ignored. In this article, we focus on the gendered consequences of the government's hybrid rice programme for upland farmers. We reveal recent impacts on family relations, including rising intergenerational tensions across genders, and shifting responsibilities and new negotiations between young spouses. These dynamics are further complicated by household economic status, as household members access specific opportunities available to them to improve everyday food security.     

Famine responses in the world food crisis 1972–5 and the World Food Conference of 1974

In the early 1970s, there was scarcity in the world grain market, soaring prices and famines in several countries of Asia and Africa. The commercial grain trade was expanded at the expense of food aid. After a brief look at policies addressing the situation in terms of modernised methods of agricultural production for small producers, the article sketches how such policies also affected relief efforts, from the low availability for food aid, the provision of food that was not useful and late deliveries through efforts to tie food aid to local changes in agricultural production and settlement patterns. In part, food aid thus reinforced processes of social differentiation that had contributed to causing the famines in the first place.     

International Acquisitions: Host and Home Country Explanatory Characteristics

To better understand what place-specific attributes are most important to foreign direct investors, we consider the pattern of international foreign acquisitions, for the year 1993, from a simultaneous home and host country perspective. It is shown that the world's most prominent buyer and target countries are few in number. Furthermore, with the use of a stepwise-like Poisson regression procedure, we determine that both home and host country conditions are important in explaining the spatial pattern of low-tech and high-tech international acquisitions.
Specifically, international high-tech and low-tech acquisitions are best described by country-specific variables measuring trade, investment risk assessment, patents and tourism and that low-tech acquisitions are also linked with a country's domestic economic strength and government efficiency and stability. The outliers from the Poisson regression equations provide evidence that, in particular, the United States and Canada as well as, other countries geographically adjacent are disproportionately active in this type of foreign direct investment.     

传统平原农区人口非农化对耕地利用方式的影响

传统平原农区是我国重要的粮食产区和人口集聚区,也将是我国未来人口城镇化的快速发展区。本文基于农村劳动力就业转移与农户家庭总收入之间的数量关系,提出农区发展演化三阶段的理论,并选取不同发展阶段的河南省吴庄村和山东省东店村进行验证。结果表明:微观层面的人口非农化特征与农户家庭总收入存在相关性,宏观层面的县域经济发展能力是农户兼业行为特征的重要外因;兼业农户通过土地流转,种植结构调整改变传统耕作方式,优化了农业与非农业收入结构,并推动农区进一步的发展演变。通过分析传统平原农区人口非农化对耕地利用方式的影响机理,对于保障粮食安全、推进该类型区的社会经济转型具有一定的现实意义。     

LAND USE POLICY AS AN INTERNATIONAL ISSUE

Land use is not an end in itself; it is a means to the realization of a broad range of human objectives – social, economic and political. Few public issues appear to be more strictly national. In environment-related United Nations conferences, Third World representatives in particular have asserted the absolute control of nations over their land and natural resources. Nevertheless, international concern over land use has been growing. This concern is both scientific and political and derives from the perception that use and misuse of land may have international repercussions. Developing countries facing disastrous consequences of unwise land use practices (e.g., soil erosion, desertification, water logging and salinization, laterization, and loss of agricultural land to urbanization) have appealed to international organizations for aid. FAO, UNEP, IUCN, ICSU, and the UN Economic Commissions have undertaken land-use related research and assistance programs. Political sensitivities preclude external involvement in national land use policy except in dire circumstances as, for example, in the drought-stricken African Sahel. Thus legitimate international concerns must find indirect strategies to influence governments from among their own national constituents. The IUCN World Conservation Strategy suggests a route that might lead toward concerted action among nations in the formulation of genuine international land use policy.     

Governing a Liminal Land Deal: The Biopolitics and Necropolitics of Gender

Over the past decade, there has been a surge in large-scale land acquisitions around the world. Yet, increasing evidence suggests that many of the prominent land deals signed during the global land rush are struggling to materialise. This emergent pattern of liminality has important implications for understanding the everyday, contingent, and gendered processes of land deal governance and subject formation. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article examines the gendered governance of a “liminal” land deal in coastal Tanzania, through a case of the EcoEnergy Sugar Project. It shows how the project's prolonged delay has given rise, over time, to two contradistinctive sets of actors and mechanisms of control: biopolitical interventions of international development consultants focused on livelihood improvements, and necropolitical interventions of district paramilitary forces focused on surveillance and violence. While seemingly contradictory, I argue that both enactments of power fundamentally relied on and reproduced normative gender in rural Tanzania.     

Unpacking Land Grabs: Subjects,Performances and the State in Ghana's ‘Small‐scale’ Gold Mining Sector

During the 2008 global financial crisis, gold‐backed reserves became a ‘safe haven’ for capital investment, causing gold prices to hit historic highs. Globally, small‐scale gold mining activities proliferated as prices climbed. Along the banks of Ghana's Offin River, abandoned, waterlogged mining pits now stretch for kilometres where agricultural and other land uses recently existed. While small‐scale mining is a right reserved for Ghanaian citizens, many mining sites are foreign‐operated and almost all go unremediated. There is thus a stark tension between Ghanaian minerals laws and environmental regulations and the ongoing transformation of rural landscapes. Based on 112 interviews and long‐term observation in Ghana since 2010, this article untangles the relationships and practices mediating ‘illegal’ foreign mining operations. Shifting subjectivities, performances and practices bring land grabbing into being as state actors weave together legal and extra‐legal domains to facilitate, and profit from, foreign mining. Other officials experience fear and frustration in the face of powerful mining interests, demonstrating the complex workings and conflicts between government actors and agencies. Detailing co‐productions between ‘legal’ and ‘illegal’ domains in official licensing procedures complicates understandings of the state and its role in foreign land grabbing, breaking down the ontological binaries — rational/irrational, official/unofficial — used to uphold an image of state legitimacy and cohesion. Finally, given the spatial extent of small‐scale mining deals and ensuing social and environmental transformations, the authors urge land‐grab scholars not to dismiss the importance of small‐scale deals alongside larger transactions.     

The Aral Sea Basin Crisis: Transition and Environment in Former Soviet Central Asia

The haunting picture of a disappearing Aral Sea is just part of an overall environmental crisis in the Aral Sea Basin, where millions of people are dependent on agricultural production around the flows of two main rivers, the Amu Darya and Syr Darya. Forced cotton cultivation in the former Soviet Union, in the context of inefficient agricultural organization and production, caused water mismanagement, salinization, water and soil contamination, erosion and the desiccation of the Aral Sea. In the post-Soviet era of ‘transition’, the governments of the Central Asian states and international donors have tried to mitigate the impact of the crisis and contain its scope. Resource-based tensions in the region reflect national (and sometimes ethnic) interests vested in the crucial agricultural sectors that provide foreign exchange and food. Although the Central Asian governments are gradually formulating regional water, land and salt management strategies, the room for manoeuvre that exists to implement policies which would immediately improve the environment, such as efficient water management and sustainable land use, is not being sufficiently utilized.     

Financialization and Global Commodity Chains: Distributional Implications for Cotton in Sub‐Saharan Africa

Restructuring of global and local markets has led to an increased influence of commodity derivatives markets on commodity price setting. This has critical implications for price risks experienced by actors along commodity chains. Commodity derivatives markets have undergone significant changes that have been referred to as the ‘financialization of commodities’, which we define as an increase in trading activity by financial investors and the reorientation of business strategies by commodity trading houses towards risk management and financial activities. This article assesses how these global financialization processes affect commodity producers in low‐income countries via the operational dynamics of global commodity chains and national market structures. It investigates how prices are set and transmitted and how risks are distributed and managed in the cotton sectors in Burkina Faso, Mozambique and Tanzania. It concludes that uneven exposure to price instability and access to price risk management have important distributional implications. Whilst international traders have the capacity to deal with price risks through hedging, in addition to expanding their profit possibilities through financial activities on derivatives markets, local actors in producing countries face the challenge of increased short‐termism — albeit to different extents depending on national market structures — with limited access to risk management.     

World Food and Agriculture Elements of the System to the Year 2000

Abstract

The predominating characteristic in world food and agriculture is a high degree of national self-sufficiency. Divergencies in national situations are, however, so great that accurate aggregate statement are difficult to make. The domestic food problems of OECD countries are and should remain relatively minor; those of the USSR and East Europe are more severe but they too should be fully manageable in the medium to longer run. China is likely to remain basically self-sufficient but could become one of the world's greatest importers. The food problem is most critical in low income countries. A continuation of the trends of the last two decades would worsen some aspect of their situation. Such an outcome is not inevitable. A just-completed 90-country study by FAO assessed that developing country food output could grow at around 3.7% over the years 1980–2000 compared with a trend of just under 3%. If this is accompanied by some redistribution of purchasing power and improvements in the international policy framework, including larger food stocks, by the year 2000 their food problems could be largely solved. The inescapable modernization of developing country agriculture will be difficult and very expensive. Developing countries must receive at least one dollar in six of their agricultural investment requirements as external assistance.     

‘The Law is to Blame’: The Vulnerable Status of Common Property Rights in Sub‐Saharan Africa

The context of this article is the surge in large‐scale land acquisitions of African lands by local and foreign investors for commercial food, livestock, oil palm and carbon trading purposes. Involuntary loss of rural lands at scale is not new to Africa's majority rural poor, nor is it driven by a single factor. Historically inequitable land relations within communities, compounded by a century of capitalist transformation, take their toll. This study argues, however, that the weak legal status of communal rights is the most pernicious enabler in their demise, allowing governments to take undue liberties with their citizens’ lands, and particularly those which are unfarmed and by tradition held in common. While international acquiescence to abusive domestic law helps entrench the diminishment of majority land rights, the domestic laws themselves are principally at fault and necessarily the target for change. This legal vulnerability is explored here through an examination of more than twenty African land laws.     

Carbon Sequestration in Community Forests: Trade‐offs,Multiple Outcomes and Institutional Diversity in the Bolivian Amazon

Carbon sequestration in community forests presents a major challenge for the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) programme. This article uses a comparative analysis of the agricultural and forestry practices of indigenous peoples and settlers in the Bolivian Amazon to show how community‐level institutions regulate the trade‐offs between community livelihoods, forest species diversity, and carbon sequestration. The authors argue that REDD+ implementation in such areas runs the risk of: 1) reinforcing economic inequalities based on previous and potential land use impacts on ecosystems (baseline), depending on the socio‐cultural groups targeted; 2) increasing pressure on land used for food production, possibly reducing food security and redirecting labour towards scarce off‐farm income opportunities; 3) increasing dependence on external funding and carbon market fluctuations instead of local production strategies; and 4) further incentivising the privatization and commodification of land to avoid transaction costs associated with collective property rights. The article also advises against taking a strictly economic, market‐based approach to carbon sequestration, arguing that such an approach could endanger fragile socio‐ecological systems. REDD+ schemes should directly support existing efforts towards forest sustainability rather than simply compensating local land users for avoiding deforestation and forest degradation.     

Why is There a Biodiversity Convention? The International Interest in Centralized Development Planning

The Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) is an unusual international environment agreement in that it does not concern an international or global resource. Most of the resources whose regulation is implicit in the CBD are in fact domestic terrestrial species, everything from elephants to medicinal plants. The rationale for international intervention in the sphere of national land use planning lies in the recurring themes of underprovided diversity: underfunded, underappreciated, undermanaged species. In many different areas of international affairs–ranging from the trade in endangered species to the management of agricultural gene banks–these same problems arise. How is it possible to induce countries hosting diverse biological resources to expend theresources necessary to maintain them? The CBD represents the confluenceof all these various movements, and it constitutes the recognition of the importance of a global perspective regarding national land use decision-making.     

石河子市土地利用变化及主要地类驱动力研究

通过分析石河子市土地利用的变化,探讨了其土地利用总体变化和各主要地类的驱动机制。社会经济因素是该区域土地利用总体变化的主导性驱动因素。而人口和经济增长是石河子市土地利用总体变化的首要社会经济类驱动因子,其次农业是技术发展。农业结构调整、产业结构转移是耕地利用变化的主导性驱动因素,而城镇化和工业化发展则是引起建设用地变化的主导性驱动因素。     

Food Dependency in Sub-Saharan Africa: Simply a Matter of ‘Vulnerability’, or Missed Development Opportunity?

This article seeks to refocus some of the attention devoted in the past several decades to the issue of food security in sub-Saharan Africa to the broader context of food dependency. Using panel data for 44 countries over a period of 51 years (1961–2011), the article tests several hypotheses drawn from Lewis's classical model of development characterized by ‘unlimited supplies of labour’. The model requires either rising agricultural productivity (the closed model) or imports of global market foodstuffs (the open model) to ensure the low food prices and wages required for capital accumulation. Empirical results reject a positive association between food dependency, as represented by five decades of increasing per capita grain imports, and any measurable level of economic modernization with sufficient forward momentum to spur or justify such dependency. Results suggest instead a significant correlation between increasing food dependency and separate panel time periods associated with differing trade and policy regimes. More importantly, empirical results call for a re-evaluation of Lewis's original development model, focusing on the pivotal role of a supported food subsistence sector in creating economic possibilities for development.     

Regoverning markets: a place for small-scale producers in modern agrifood chains? * B. Vorley, A. Fearne and D. Ray (Eds)

The international expansion of supermarkets and concomitanttransformation of food production and distribution systems hasemerged as an issue of global importance during the past decade.As such, the purported globalization of food retailing has drawnincreasing attention from geographers and economists alike,who have identified a host of profound implications for producers,consumers, suppliers, domestic competitors and workers in bothdeveloped and developing countries. The salience of the ‘supermarketrevolution’ within developing countries is further highlightedby the World Bank's 2008 World Development Report Agriculturefor Development that focuses specifically on the barriers impedingparticipation of small-scale agricultural producers in globalcommodity chains and potential opportunities for improving rurallivelihoods. Like the 2008 World Development Report, Regoverning Markets:A Place for Small-scale Producers in Modern Agrifood Chains?attempts to understand how     

‘The Constructive Use of Abundance’: the UN World Food Programme and the Evolution of the International Food-Aid System during the Post-War Decades

This article studies the expansion of multilateral economic development aid in the early 1960s by exploring the history of the United Nations (UN) World Food Program. It analyses the pivotal role played by key development economists within the UN Secretariat, such as Hans Singer, alongside US policy-makers in the Kennedy administration in framing and directing the debate on multilateral food aid. It specifically argues that this period marked a shift in how food aid was perceived and utilised by donor and recipient countries - as well as international organisations like the UN and Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). Ultimately, what began in the 1950s as a bilateral method to feed the hungry through the disposal of surplus agricultural commodities evolved into an international food-aid system by the 1960s centred on the utilisation of surplus agriculture for economic development. This change showcased both the common goals and competing interests of US and UN policy-makers as food aid now joined the wider debate on various doctrines of development.