An index of environmental and cultural suitability for the cultivation of climate-resilient castor bean in rainfed low-productivity common lands in Mexico

An index of environmental and cultural suitability for the cultivation of climateresilient castor bean in rainfed low-productivity common lands in Mexico

Under certain circumstances, land titling, property regime changes, and land‐use conversions yield substantial profits. Yet few people possess the wealth, knowledge, and networks to benefit from these procedures. In the Yucatán Peninsula, a region recently targeted as a prominent investment location by the Mexican national government (mainly with the “Tren Maya” megaproject) and the private capital, forestlands collectively owned as ejidos by Mayan peasants are on the trend to complete privatization. Against the arguments of neo‐institutional economists that in the 1990s promoted legal reforms and justified land‐titling programmes worldwide to make available credit for uncapitalized peasants, individual land titling of commonly held lands in Mexico increased the overall economic value of the land, but not the investment in economic activities related to farmland and indigenous communities. Instead, those policies enabled land grabbing, dispossession, and urbanization. In this article, I describe recent private‐led initiatives of ejido land titling that have redefined agricultural land's uses, meanings, and values for capitalist accumulation. In doing so, I explain how and why Mayan ejidatarios have been excluded from the monetary benefits of land titling, a top‐bottom dispossession process only accomplished through shadow procedures and former privatization of ejidos' common lands.

In the 1920s some 3,800 Mennonites who had settled in Manitoba in the 1870s left their farms to migrate to the Bustillos Valley of northern Mexico. While conflict over education was the main stimulus for the move, this paper argues that the migration also offered an opportunity to restore the system of land tenure Mennonites had practiced in Imperial Russia. Conservative Mennonites had reified a tsarist-imposed system of semi-communal land tenure, making it a requirement of faithful religious and social practice. These sensibilities were, however, incompatible with the land tenure system of the new Dominion of Canada giving rise to tension and conflict. When migration became a reality, conservative Mennonites sought to reestablish the colony and village tenure system by seeking a block sale of their individual lands in Manitoba and by purchasing land in Mexico under colony title, thereby restoring semi-communal land tenure.

The election of Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1988 initiated a process of privatization in Mexico's financial and industrial sectors. Banks, state-controlled during most of the 1980s, were reprivatized by reducing the controlling interest of the central government and encouraging recapitalization by the private sector. State-owned industries such as airlines and mines were sold to private investors in an effort to improve efficiency and reduce demands on the public treasury. Also, an increased inflow of foreign investment capital, to be stimulated by legal changes allowing increased foreign private ownership, is now viewed by the Salinas de Gortari administration as a necessary condition for Mexico's future economic growth and stability. In January of 1992, Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution was amended to facilitate the modernization of Mexican agriculture. Two economic conditions help explain this action. First, Mexico is a net importer of agricultural commodities. In some years beans and corn, staples in the Mexican diet, must be imported to meet the demands of a burgeoning population. Second, 50% of the agricultural land in Mexico is controlled by organized community groups: comunidades and ejidos. Ejidos, groups that hold property in common, control approximately 40% of the agricultural land. On average, these lands are 30%50% less productive than comparable private farms and represent, according to some Mexican analysts, an opportunity for increased productivity through privatization.1 The ejido is an important component in Mexico's culture and historical heritage. Its revolutionary past, deeply rooted in the Mexican Revolution of 1910-15, should give pause to the reformer who argues for privatizing these common property land holdings. Questions should

D ISCUSSIONS of the efficiency of various systems of land tenure are marred by all sorts of imprecision in analysis. Economists have developed a clear notion of economic efficiency but discussions of land tenure invariably bring in some sociological and wealth-distribution constraints when discussing the efficiency aspects of tenure systems. Social anthropologists and others stress that certain tenure systems are integral parts of social systems involving such things as insurance for old and young, with the implication that even though these tenure systems might not facilitate (pecuniary) wealthmaximization, yet the non-pecuniary wealth facilitated provides "enough" compensation in some general welfare sense. I shall discard such sociological arguments because I believe that there is no reason why the sociological benefits of particular tenure systems cannot be obtained by some alternative arrangement while creating a tenure system that is designed to facilitate wealth maximization and wealth increases.

Conflicts as enhancers or barriers to the management of privately owned common land: A method to analyze the role of conflicts on a regional basis

The insecurity of farmers’ land tenure rights are thought to bring about resource degradation and low crop productivity in tropical areas. Private property rights are therefore expected to optimize farmers’ land use by allowing the usage of perennial crops that will increase land privatization for longer growing periods. This article discusses the effects of community property regimes on land use by examining a case study from West Sumatra, Indonesia. Farmers of the study area grow rice, non-rice food crops, and tree crops on community, lineage, family, and private land. Family and private land are dominant nowadays, while community or lineage land control is declining. Despite their preference for new, private land in forested areas, however, local Minangkabau farmers maintain joint ownership of their ancestral land through matrilineal inheritance as is the custom instead of privatizing it. Community leaders allow farmers who have familial inheritance rights to plant trees and other crops on every tenure type of land, because there is a separation of crop tenure and cultivation rights from land ownership rights. Crop productivity is similar between private land and common land in rice fields and dry-land farms, given similar biophysical and socio-economic conditions. Tree crops and idle bushy land occur on both land tenure types. Private land ownership rights do not always lead to more investment in sustainable and efficient resource utilization in the study area. Local institutions also manage common resource pools to sustain the whole kinship group, including the poor. The principle problem is the continued degradation of natural resources caused by the decline in local institutional capability and the lack of technical innovation. Institutional restructuring of common forest resource management and technical interventions for agricultural intensification, not the privatization of the indigenous common property which will weaken communities’ control of land and resources, are crucial for the improvement of farmers’ land use.

Urban land tenure and property rights in developing countries: A review: Geoffrey Payne Intermediate Technology Publications, London, 1997, 73 pp, £12.95

The Effects of Ejido Reform on Common Lands in Mexico

administration but informal common property arrangements among pastoralists have also emerged. There is the common perception among government officials and researchers that the significant increase in livestock numbers since the privatisation of herds in 1985 has considerably exacerbated pastoral land degradation problems. The situation is widely interpreted by them, as well as foreign consultants, as a classical 'tragedy of the commons' problem, an invariable outcome of having privately owned livestock grazing on common lands. The policy of individualising land tenure is predicated on the assumption that it will improve pastoralists' land tenure security and create the incentives for them to adopt more sustainable resource management strategies. However, this paper argues that if the nature of the existing resource configuration and cultural endowments in the Xinjiang pastoral sector are taken into account, it becomes less obvious that an individualised land tenure system will necessarily result in improved efficiency and resource management. The observed persistence of forms of group farming is explained in new institutional economics terms. It is argued that group farming may represent a lower cost institutional arrangement than individualised tenure and thus should be perceived more as a potential remedy for, rather than the cause of, resource management problems. This paper is based on four weeks' fieldwork undertaken in northern Xinjiang, specifically Altay Prefecture and two counties within this prefecture, Altay and

This article is based on a review of the governance of land tenure in 18 countries – 16 in Africa and two in Asia - carried out from 2021 to 2023. It uses international guidelines on land policy and tenure governance as benchmarks to assess progress in each country through reviewing policy documents and literature, and getting inputs from key informants. There has been significant progress on land tenure policies that have improved the recognition of customary and other communal land rights and improved women’s land rights. The formal registration of individual communal land rights has now been done cost effectively, and with more rights going to women in a number of settings, and it has not led to widespread commoditisation or land dispossession. There is a mixed picture with countries trying different ways to grapple with common challenges such as securing customary tenure rights, unlocking development potential, improving women’s land rights, and managing the contesting interests in land. There are important examples of best practices in some countries that can be learnt from, such as the legislation of FPIC requirements and fit for purpose land rights certification. Despite progress, too many people are not enjoying the benefits of improved land tenure security with some countries still needing to bring in new legislation and others needing to improve implementation. More needs to be learnt from the range of different approaches to dealing with land tenure as national governments attempt to find solutions that accommodate contesting interests. The lessons and trends identified will be of value to country level and international work on improving land tenure governance.

A long-term study of land tenure, land transfer, and succession in one subclan of the Chimbu in the Papua New Guinea highlands takes up the relations between the agricultural cycle, family, and population growth in a period of rapid commercialization and cash cropping. Over a generation, land was held and allocated within families, among families within the subclan, and to kin and affines in neighboring groups. The land tenure, ownership, and use system allows for a very great deal of individual movement and land gifts, temporary or long-term, by land owner to kin and friends. Despite an agnatic ideology, individuals and local groups opportunistically accommodate to land needs. As cultivation becomes more intensive and semi-permanent, there appears to be a progression from fluidity of land rights in the clan or subclan to anchoring of rights and boundaries to individuals and families. It is suggested that this characterizes Chimbu land tenure; it is not a postcolonial phenomenon.

Collective landholdings (often referred to as ‘common land’) are ancestral land tenure systems that, although little recognised, have endured as institutions in upland areas in France. They play an important role in stimulating rural life, and many of the inhabitants in these areas retain a strong attachment to them. In both the Alps and the Massif Central, these very old systems are of interest today for the various functions they perform, in a not always highly visible but nonetheless very real way. Situated at the intersection of the issues of social cohesion, quality of life, a sensory relationship with the land and intergenerational solidarity, common land contributes to varying degrees, in various forms and under different names, to involving its members in the collective management of local resources. The ageing of common land rights holders is a significant phenomenon that forms part of a fundamental demographic shift. In rural areas, particularly those furthest from urban centres, there is a marked increase in the number of older adults, who make up an ever greater proportion of the general population. These areas are also characterised by the increasing scarcity of certain services and by signs of declining social ties, which often cause consternation and concern among older residents. The virtues of these systems continue to be widely recognised: they provide non-financial benefits that have proven to be useful in a period of inflation; they establish a longer temporal perspective that stands in sharp contrast to the modern culture of immediacy; and they foster relationships with others and with the group that counteract certain effects of isolation and the decline of solidarity and rural amenities. In this article, we aim to understand this attachment to collective landholdings by taking a genuine interest in the words of those who remain involved in passing on these land tenure systems. We explore how common land contributes to the social dynamic of rural areas in France, in particular by enabling older people to retain an active role as part of local life.

Mexico’s ejidos are shifting away from community-managed, and toward individually managed lands. Shifting land tenure is a mechanism for modern agricultural development that drives changes to landscape patterns, and loss of mature forestland. Such forest conversion is conspicuous across Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. Thus, Mexico’s federal government recently identified the peninsula as a high priority region for landscape conservation. However, few studies have examined the link between changes in ejido land tenure and changes in landscape patterns. We examined spatial-temporal relationships between shifting ejido land tenure and subsequent changes to landscape patterns among 710 ejidos (2.5 million ha) across the State of Yucatan. Our analysis focused on a series of years preceding and a series of years following the changes to Mexico’s constitution that legalized parcelization of ejido lands. Our research questions were (1) how have land cover patterns changed over time and (2) after two decades of legal parcelization, did land cover patterns differ between individually managed and community-managed ejido lands? To investigate these questions, we used recent and historic remotely sensed satellite images to map and analyze changes to land cover patterns over 30 years, and related them to changes in land tenure arrangement, particularly among ejidos pre- and post-parcelization. We show that changes in ejido land tenure contributed to changes in land cover patterns, and that individually managed areas and highly parcelized ejidos exhibited a much greater increase in crop and grassland cover, and therefore a much greater increase in deforested lands, than common areas and community-managed ejidos. Moreover, we show that individually managed areas and highly parcelized ejidos exhibited higher annual deforestation rates than common areas and community-managed ejidos. Therefore, our research demonstrates that even in dry tropical forested regions, common property protects forests. We conclude that individually managed and privatized lands, especially for agricultural development, can threaten the conservation potential of community-managed landscapes in Yucatan and beyond.

The ejido system, based on communal land in Mexico, was transformed to private ownership due to neoliberal trends in the 1990s. Based on the theory of stakeholders being agents of change, this study aimed to describe the land policies that changed the ejido system into private development to show how land tenure change is shaping urban growth. To demonstrate this, municipalities of San Andrés Cholula and Santa Clara Ocoyucan were selected as case studies. Within this context, we evaluated how much ejido land is being urbanized due to real estate market forces and what type of urbanization model has been created. These two areas represent different development scales with different stakeholders—San Andrés Cholula, where ejidos were expropriated as part of a regional urban development plan and Santa Clara Ocoyucan, where ejidos and rural land were reached by private developers without local planning. To analyze both municipalities, historical satellite images from Google Earth were used with GRASS GIS 7.4 (Bonn, Germany) and corrected with QGIS 2.18 (Boston, MA, US). We found that privatization of ejidos fragmented and segregated the rural world for the construction of massive gated communities as an effect of a disturbing land tenure change that has occurred over the last 30 years. Hence, this research questions the roles of local authorities in permitting land use changes with no regulations or local planning. The resulting urbanization model is a private sector development that isolates rural communities in their own territories, for which we provide recommendations.