Land Ownership Patterns Research Articles

Making habitat connectivity a reality.

Although a plethora of habitat-connectivity plans exists, protecting and restoring connectivity through on-the-ground action has been slow. We identified challenges to and opportunities for connectivity conservation through a literature review of project implementation, a workshop with scientists and conservation practitioners, 3 case studies of connectivity projects, and interviews with conservation professionals. Connectivity challenges and solutions tended to be context specific, dependent on land-ownership patterns, socioeconomic factors, and the policy framework. Successful connectivity implementation tended to be associated with development and promotion of a common vision among diverse sets of stakeholders, including nontraditional conservation actors, such as water districts and recreation departments, and with communication with partners and the public. Other factors that lead to successful implementation included undertaking empirical studies to prioritize and validate corridors and the identification of related co-benefits of corridor projects. Engaging partners involved in land management and planning, such as nongovernmental conservation organizations, public agencies, and private landowners, is critical to effective strategy implementation. A clear regulatory framework, including unambiguous connectivity conservation mandates, would increase public resource allocation, and incentive programs are needed to promote private sector engagement. Connectivity conservation must move more rapidly from planning to implementation. We provide an evidence-based solution composed of key elements for successful on-the-ground connectivity implementation. We identified the social processes necessary to advance habitat connectivity for biodiversity conservation and resilient landscapes under climate change.

Community resilience and narratives of community empowerment in Scotland

Abstract The concept of resilience is now routinely put forward by both policymakers and social activists as a way for communities to use and develop their resources and respond positively to change, including decarbonization to address climate change. The extent to which a community is able to utilize all its resources depends on the extent to which it feels empowered to take action and is a major determinant of its resilience. A narrative of community empowerment has recently emerged from Scottish Government, driven in part by the situation in Scotland, in which a skewed pattern of landownership and distant structure of ‘local’ democracy combine to disempower communities by disconnecting them from local resources and local representative democracy. Recent Scottish legislation appears to provide new opportunities for community groups to gain control of local assets, become more financially sustainable, undertake climate-related mitigation actions and overcome some of the current local democratic deficit. At the same time, an increasingly well-organized and networked community sector and some within the Scottish Government are actively exploring new ways to enable public participation and deliver public services. This paper analyses the current Scottish policy framework and aspirations for community empowerment and, through interviews with stakeholders, assesses the potential, this may provide for communities to become truly resilient and to actively engage with transformational change.

Pastoral Resilience among the Maasai Pastoralists of Laikipia County, Kenya

This paper addresses pastoral resilience by drawing out the coping strategies and mechanisms utilized by the Maasai Pastoralists through a food system approach, based on the study findings of an anthropological study of pastoralism as a food system in Laikipia County, Rift Valley, Kenya. The co-existence and interactions of pastoralism as a food system with other types of food systems in Laikipia, such as large-scale horticulture, justified the selection of the study site. This paper is guided by the specific objectives aimed at establishing actors and their roles, and describing the institutional settings and changes that sustain the continued practice of pastoralism. Using a new institutionalism approach, the paper focuses not only on the actors and their roles but also on how internal and external forces regulate access and use of common pool resources (CPRs) resulting in food sustainability within the food system amidst climatic challenges and cyclic humanitarian crises. We argue that this has an impact on the food system that continually defines and redefines the actors’ roles and institutional settings and changes (formal and informal rules, regulations, values and norms) that in turn affirm the value of pastoral economies and benefits accrued to a wide range of actors beyond the community and leading to pastoral resilience. Data collected through in-depth interviews amongst pastoral households identified actors and their roles in pastoralism in the household with a total of 50 households being conveniently sampled. Key informant interviews with key stakeholders in the food system described the institutional settings and changes and also identified actors and their roles in pastoralism. Three focus group discussions based on age and gender, established the actors and their roles and described institutional settings and changes to supplement data collected from interviews and unstructured observations aimed at giving a better description of the actors and their roles and also point to observable institutional settings and changes within and outside the community group ranches. The findings reveal that actors in the household, state, non-state, and service providers have developed varied coping strategies and mechanisms that sustain pastoralism. The study also identified institutional settings and changes that promote pastoral resilience, notably, private land ownership patterns, co-management of livestock markets, commercialization of herding, decentralization of livestock services, holistic management of pasture and the water-shed management plans. As a result, increased scholarship and advocacy in regards to the concept of co-management of livestock markets, are recommended as a means of understanding the pastoral resilience that the food system exhibits.

Promises and perils of collective land tenure in promoting urban resilience: Learning from China's urban villages

New frameworks for “urban resilience” frequently overlook the role of property rights and tenure security in shaping vulnerability, as well as how different property rights regimes shape societal capacity to adapt to environmental and developmental disruptions. We contribute to these discussions by examining how collective urban land tenure affects community-scale resilience, defined as environmental wellbeing, productive livelihoods, and empowered governance. We use urban villages in Shenzhen to study how this widespread phenomenon of collective land ownership in Chinese cities allowed rural villagers to adapt as cities spread around them over time. Drawing on a literature review, interviews, and a field visit to Shenzhen, we find that collective tenure in Shenzhen’s urban villages has helped them avoid some of the limitations seen in household-level tenure formalization efforts elsewhere. Collective tenure enabled rural villages to create self-governance mechanisms that allowed them to transform individual and collective assets into vibrant, well-serviced, and mixed-use neighborhoods. Urban villages house most of Shenzhen’s residents and have helped underwrite the region’s industrialization process. However, collective tenure also has hindered integration with Shenzhen’s urban infrastructure, governance, and taxation systems, resulted in astronomical profits for village elites, and repeated historic patterns of unequal land ownership in China. The promises and perils of collective urban property rights seen in Shenzhen call for research on other such models around the world to further inform whether and how such property rights regimes can support equitable and holistic notions of urban resilience.

METODYKA OCENY I LIKWIDACJI ZEWNĘTRZNEJ SZACHOWNICY GRUNTÓW ROLNYCH NA POTRZEBY ZWIĘKSZENIA EFEKTYWNOŚCI PROCESU SCALENIA I WYMIANY

W przeprowadzonych w Polsce wieloletnich badaniach wykazano, że jednym z istotnych czynników wpływających na brak racjonalnego gospodarowania ziemią są wady struktury przestrzennej gruntów rolnych. Obszary wiejskie charakteryzują się wadliwą zewnętrzną szachownicą gruntów (rozproszeniem gruntów) wynikającą z powszechnie występującego zjawiska rozdrobnienia gruntów. Skala tego zjawiska stanowi istotny element ograniczający możliwe do osiągnięcia efekty scaleniowe gruntów rolnych. W prezentowanej publikacji autor przedstawia metodykę oceny skali zewnętrznej szachownicy gruntów rolnych na potrzeby zwiększenia efektywności procesu scalenia i wymiany. Analiza zjawiska pozwoliła na opracowanie podstaw matematycznych, których wykorzystanie może znacząco wpłynąć na usprawnienie kompleksowego programowania prac scalenia i wymiany gruntów dużych obszarów. Metodyka ta polega na doborze parametrów odpowiednio wagowanych, opartych na macierzy zależności i diagramie Czekanowskiego. Pozwala określić nasilenie badanego zjawiska. Interpretacja uporządkowanego diagramu umożliwia wytypowanie grup wsi, w których wskazane jest przeprowadzanie prac wymiany gruntów lub objęcie ich wspólnym postępowaniem scaleniowym. Otrzymane w ten sposób wyniki stanowią istotne uzupełnienie rankingów pierwszeństwa prac scaleniowych o informację dotyczącą rozproszenia gruntów badanego obszaru. Metodyka ta jest w pełni możliwa do zastosowania w praktyce w Polsce. Gwarancją jej wiarygodności jest wykorzystanie informacji pochodzących z baz danych katastru nieruchomości, służących do pozyskania pełnego obrazu struktury przestrzennej oraz własnościowej analizowanych obszarów.
 Zastosowanie zaprezentowanej metodyki pozwoli na uzyskanie lepszych efektów scaleniowych poprzez likwidację szachownicy gruntów i tym samym na efektywniejsze wydatkowanie funduszy przeznaczonych na scalenia.

Revisiting Senapur: Reflections on Agrarian Changes in North India

Through a revisit study in 2013, this article attempts to explore agrarian relations in Senapur, a village located in eastern Uttar Pradesh. Research reveals that landlessness remains concentrated amongst dalits as does the continuing hold of ‘upper castes’ on land. When inheritance acts as the primary mode of transfer of landed property in the absence of market-mediated and state-mediated transactions, two results are evident: a decrease in the size of holdings due to the subdivision of property and simultaneously the land remains with the original group of land owners resulting in continuing group inequalities. Given this skewed landownership pattern, one-fifth of the total input cost in cultivation by the landless class is usurped by the landed class in the form of land rent. Another interesting feature of agrarian relations that is observed is the occasional rise in cash agricultural wages which accompany falling incomes from agricultural labour wages. The study also reveals that the ‘eradication of the small farmers’ is not a perceptible phenomenon in Senapur with farming families augmenting their income from other sources to keep their small farms going. The biggest change appears in the composition of the labour force marked by a massive movement from agriculture to construction in the last one decade.

Factors Influencing the Success of a Market Based Conservation Initiative to Promote Rural Land-use Compatibility

Encroachment of incompatible land uses increasingly threatens military training across the country. In many states, military training grounds are part of the rural landscape resulting in significant interest from military leadership in the maintenance and enhancement of land uses that are compatible with training operations. In the southeast, a vast majority of the rural landscape is under private ownership increasing the needs for policies that address the interests of landowners and provide meaningful incentives for maintaining land-use compatibility. Market-based conservation strategies have the potential to provide an effective means for conserving large landscapes used for military training. This issue is particularly salient in North Carolina that has an extensive military training footprint. We conducted a case study to evaluate a cross-sector partnership in the state that collaboratively developed a Market-Based Conservation Initiative Pilot to promote land use compatibility by engaging private landowners in performance-based contracts. This study determined the factors that influenced pilot project outcomes and lessons learned when developing market-based strategies that integrate military interests. Data analysis identifies five key factors that are 1) military funding authority to establish agreements, 2) development of landowner trust and program credibility, 3) military understanding the purpose and associated risks of a pilot program, 4) military perception of rural landownership patterns, and 5) institutional mandates of the Navy.

Treating the Blue Rash: Win-Win Solutions and Improving the Land Exchange Process

The history of public land laws from disposal to retention has created a fragmented ownership in the West. The school land grants led to a spotty pattern of state trust land ownership. This in turn creates conflict between the mandates of federal agencies—whose mandate is to protect environmentally sensitive areas—and state trust land authorities—whose mandate is to generate revenues for their beneficiaries. Both mandates promote important public interests. Legislative land exchanges present potential win-win solutions for extricating state trust lands from within federal conservation areas, but they require a process that is too long and onerous. However, by improving the process for administrative exchanges Congress could promote more efficient exchanges and increase cooperation between federal and state trust land managers. Thus, Congress should provide funding for land exchanges involving environmentally sensitive areas. Additionally, Congress should amend FLPMA’s public interest and equal value requirements to incentivize cooperation in the administrative land exchange process.

The size of the external patchwork of fields as an indicator of the need for land consolidation and exchange in the villages of the commune of Drzewica

Abstract Land consolidation and exchange have a significant impact on improving the spatial structure of rural areas in Poland. Given the fact that agricultural areas in different regions of Poland are characterized by different spatial and technical parameters and different legal and land-ownership-related conditions, it is necessary to conduct investigations and analyses focused on selecting the optimum features describing a given area. As demonstrated by previous studies, the areas located in central Poland are characterized by a defective land ownership pattern with an external patchwork of fields. Therefore, it is necessary to carry out studies to determine the size of that external patchwork of land ownership and to propose solutions for its liquidation. The analyses reported in this article clearly show that in the area studied, priority should be given to land exchange followed by land consolidation.

Women’s land ownership and participation in decision-making about reproductive health in Malawi

Given the centrality of land to rural livelihoods and the high rates of fertility in Africa, there is a need for more research that explores the intersection between gendered patterns of land ownership and reproductive health outcomes. Drawing on a household bargaining framework, I hypothesize that women’s land ownership should be associated with increases in women’s decision-making in multiple domains in the household including financial decision-making (the focus of bargaining literature), but also decision-making about reproductive health. Using the 2010 Malawi Demographic Health Survey (DHS), I find women’s ownership of land (sole or joint) is associated with increases in women’s participation in financial decision-making in the household and women’s sole ownership of land is associated with increases in women’s participation in reproductive health decision-making. However, women’s joint ownership of land with spouses is negatively associated with participation in reproductive health decision-making, perhaps because of backlash or intra-household conflict.

Socio-economic Factors of Dropout Situation in Rural Primary Education: A Study of Two Villages in Rajshahi District

Dropout from school impedes development as it imposes human creativity and potentiality. It is the root of all backwardness. Rural communities are more backward particularly in Bangladesh, where the dropout rate is high. Parental decision to drop out their child from primary education does not depend upon gender but depend upon their economic status. Poverty influences the parents to withdraw their children from school. Studies on dropout in primary level, particularly Bangladesh, are inadequate however. The results of the study further suggest that girls were more likely to be out of school compared to their peer boys counterparts, indicating gender disparity in formal education. Results of the multivariate analysis reveal that individual as well as household level attributes are important determinants of school dropout. Age, sex, parent`s education and occupation, residence and land ownership pattern were found to be highly significant predictors in determining dropping out from school among the rural children of Bangladesh.

Africa's changing farm size distribution patterns: the rise of medium‐scale farms

AbstractThis study assesses changes over the past decade in the farm size distributions of Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, and Zambia, drawing on two or more waves of nationally representative population‐based and/or area‐based surveys. Analysis indicates that much of Sub‐Saharan Africa is experiencing major changes in farm land ownership patterns. Among all farms below 100 hectares in size, the share of land on small‐scale holdings under five hectares has declined except in Kenya. Medium‐scale farms (defined here as farm holdings between 5 and 100 hectares) account for a rising share of total farmland, especially in the 10–100 hectare range where the number of these farms is growing especially rapidly. Medium‐scale farms control roughly 20% of total farmland in Kenya, 32% in Ghana, 39% in Tanzania, and over 50% in Zambia. The numbers of such farms are also growing very rapidly, except in Kenya. We also conducted detailed life history surveys of medium‐scale farmers in each of these four countries and found that the rapid rise of medium‐scale holdings in most cases reflects increased interest in land by urban‐based professionals or influential rural people. About half of these farmers obtained their land later in life, financed by nonfarm income. The rise of medium‐scale farms is affecting the region in diverse ways that are difficult to generalize. Many such farms are a source of dynamism, technical change, and commercialization of African agriculture. However, medium‐scale land acquisitions may exacerbate land scarcity in rural areas and constrain the rate of growth in the number of small‐scale farm holdings. Medium‐scale farmers tend to dominate farm lobby groups and influence agricultural policies and public expenditures to agriculture in their favor. Nationally representative Demographic and Health Survey (DHS) data from six countries (Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Zambia) show that urban households own 5–35% of total agricultural land and that this share is rising in all countries where DHS surveys were repeated. This suggests a new and hitherto unrecognized channel by which medium‐scale farmers may be altering the strength and location of agricultural growth and employment multipliers between rural and urban areas. Given current trends, medium‐scale farms are likely to soon become the dominant scale of farming in many African countries.

From food security to food wellbeing: examining food security through the lens of food wellbeing in Nepal\u2019s rapidly changing agrarian landscape

This paper argues that existing food security and food sovereignty approaches are inadequate to fully understand contradictory human development, nutrition, and productivity trends in Nepalese small-scale agriculture. In an attempt to bridge this gap, we developed a new food wellbeing approach that combines insights from food security, food sovereignty, and social wellbeing perspectives. We used the approach to frame 65 semi-structured interviews in a cluster of villages in Kaski district in the mid-hills of Nepal on various aspects of food security, agriculture, off-farm livelihood opportunities, and women’s wellbeing. Our results indicate that context-specific subjective and social relational factors highlighted by the food wellbeing approach are key to understanding a paradox of increased food security, yet decreasing sustainability of small-scale agriculture. Increased levels of male out-migration and opportunities for local off-farm work have increased local capacity to purchase food. The positive consequences for food security are indicated by evidence that households with non-farm income sources had better food sufficiency, absorption capacity, nutritional quality, and stability of food supply. These off-farm employment opportunities have also led to the greater involvement of low caste groups and women in small-scale agriculture. This has been empowering for both groups and led to an increase in wellbeing, particularly for those women who have become de facto heads of household. Yet, small landholdings, persistent patterns of unequal and absentee land ownership, sharecropping, women’s overwork, and the aspirations of low caste farmers and women away from agriculture are simultaneously driving the erosion of local small-scale agricultural productivity and ecological sustainability.

A New Approach to Weed Management to Mitigate Herbicide Resistance in Argentina

The evolution of herbicide-resistant weeds is a major concern in the corn- and soybean-producing Pampas region of Argentina, where growers predominantly plant glyphosate-resistant crop varieties and depend heavily on glyphosate for weed control. Currently, 16 weed species in Argentina are resistant to one or more of three different herbicide mechanisms of action, and resistant weed populations continue to increase, posing a serious threat to agricultural production. Implementation of integrated weed management to address herbicide resistance faces significant barriers in Argentina, especially current land ownership and rental patterns in the Pampas. More than 60% of Pampas cropland is rented to tenants for periods that rarely exceed 1 yr, resulting in crop rotation being largely abandoned, and crop export taxes and quotas have further discouraged wheat and corn production in favor of continuous soybean production. In this paper we discuss ways to facilitate new approaches to weed management in Argentina, including legal and economic reforms and the formation of a national committee of stakeholders from public and private agricultural sectors.

Integrated decision-making about housing, energy and wellbeing: a qualitative system dynamics model.

BackgroundThe UK government has an ambitious goal to reduce carbon emissions from the housing stock through energy efficiency improvements. This single policy goal is a strong driver for change in the housing system, but comes with positive and negative “unintended consequences” across a broad range of outcomes for health, equity and environmental sustainability. The resulting policies are also already experiencing under-performance through a failure to consider housing as a complex system.This research aimed to move from considering disparate objectives of housing policies in isolation to mapping the links between environmental, economic, social and health outcomes as a complex system. We aimed to support a broad range of housing policy stakeholders to improve their understanding of housing as a complex system through a collaborative learning process.MethodsWe used participatory system dynamics modelling to develop a qualitative causal theory linking housing, energy and wellbeing. Qualitative interviews were followed by two interactive workshops to develop the model, involving representatives from national and local government, housing industries, non-government organisations, communities and academia.ResultsMore than 50 stakeholders from 37 organisations participated. The process resulted in a shared understanding of wellbeing as it relates to housing; an agreed set of criteria against which to assess to future policy options; and a comprehensive set of causal loop diagrams describing the housing, energy and wellbeing system. The causal loop diagrams cover seven interconnected themes: community connection and quality of neighbourhoods; energy efficiency and climate change; fuel poverty and indoor temperature; household crowding; housing affordability; land ownership, value and development patterns; and ventilation and indoor air pollution.ConclusionsThe collaborative learning process and the model have been useful for shifting the thinking of a wide range of housing stakeholders towards a more integrated approach to housing. The qualitative model has begun to improve the assessment of future policy options across a broad range of outcomes. Future work is needed to validate the model and increase its utility through computer simulation incorporating best quality data and evidence. Combining system dynamics modelling with other methods for weighing up policy options, as well as methods to support shifts in the conceptual frameworks underpinning policy, will be necessary to achieve shared housing goals across physical, mental, environmental, economic and social wellbeing.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12940-016-0098-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Exploring the relationship between parcelization metrics and natural resource managers’ perceptions of forest land parcelization intensity

A major challenge associated with forest land parcelization, defined as the subdivision of forest land holdings into smaller ownership parcels, is that little information exists on how to measure its severity and judge its impacts across forest landscapes. To address this information gap, an on-line survey presented field-based public natural resource managers in the Lake States of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan with four private forest ownership patterns, each containing the same total forest area, number of parcels, and average parcel size. Survey respondents ranked each landscape from most to least parcelized based on the degree to which each ownership pattern was perceived to adversely impact three forest-based goods and services: timber production, recreational access, and wildlife habitat. Using an exploded logit model, respondents’ rankings of parcelization impact were found to be consistent, regardless of the forest good or service evaluated. Rankings were also not influenced by the respondent’s professional discipline, location, length of professional experience, or employer. Of the four parcelization metrics evaluated, the Gini Coefficient and Adjusted Mean metrics appear to best capture the forest land ownership patterns that natural resource professionals are most concerned about, suggesting those metrics may be useful indicators by which to assess parcelization impact.

The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America by James L. Huston

Reviewed by: The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America by James L. Huston Adam W. Dean The British Gentry, the Southern Planter, and the Northern Family Farmer: Agriculture and Sectional Antagonism in North America. By James L. Huston. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. xviii, 345. $47.50, ISBN 978-0-8071-5918-7.) James L. Huston’s most recent work is an excellent study that addresses a similar topic as my own book, An Agrarian Republic: Farming, Antislavery [End Page 933] Politics, and Nature Parks in the Civil War Era (Chapel Hill, 2015). Together, both works evidence a historiographical turn emphasizing the importance of the northern family farm in shaping Civil War politics. Huston’s witty and iconoclastic writing style, earlier on display in Calculating the Value of the Union: Slavery, Property Rights, and the Economic Origins of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, 2003) and in a political biography of Stephen A. Douglas, is engaging and refreshing. The argument is convincing, rigorously documented, and overdue in Civil War historiography. In the last decade, both Huston and I put our fingers on a problem in the study of nineteenth-century America. The explosion of industry and corporate America after the American Civil War had seduced historians to look at the past with this future in mind. Ever since Charles A. and Mary R. Beard advanced the notion, scholars have wanted to believe that the war pitted an agrarian South against an emerging industrial juggernaut. Even the main philosophy associated with the Republican Party of the 1850s—free labor—has been interpreted as an urban ideology. Yet such claims run into some intractable problems. As Huston pointedly notes, “What connection did [Abraham] Lincoln have with urban industrialization? Answer: none” (p. 188). A bigger problem with the Beard thesis and its derivatives is “that some 70 percent of the northern population” was engaged in small farming (p. 77). The reality of northern landownership suggests a much different picture of Civil War politics than has been told. The Union that went to war in 1861 was a nation of small farmers, owning or seeking to acquire 80 to 120 acres of land. These landownership patterns created an egalitarian ethos that prized manual labor and the ability of the poor to rise in material prosperity. The Confederacy represented large plantations where a “slaveholding elite presid[ed] over an impoverished mass of slaves and whites” (p. 223). These landownership regimes came into conflict during westward territorial expansion, instigating the war. The origins of Huston’s story begin in Great Britain and the English Civil War. New England Puritans, supporters of the parliamentary side, identified land distribution patterns as the key flaw in English society during the seventeenth century. Concentrated landholdings created a leisure class that mocked manual labor and ran roughshod over those deemed inferior in social standing. The English yeomanry struggled to gain freedom from wealthy landlords and from tenancy. Thus, in the colonies, New Englanders enacted land policies that promoted smallholders. In the American South, however, the landed gentry proved victorious. Huston theorizes that large plantations derived economic advantages over smaller enterprises from “specialization of labor, economies of scale, and [the] ability to allocate labor as needed” (p. 168). Yet he ultimately maintains that planters decided to engage in slave agriculture because they wanted the lifestyle of the British gentry. By contrast, Huston marvels at the small towns and regional cities of the rural North. Smaller farms required hard work and mutual dependence. Free men and women engaged in “bending, lifting, hoeing, shoveling, mending, and stitching . . . all done by hand and with primitive tools” (p. 116). In return for this labor, as Huston shows, farmworkers were able to save their wages [End Page 934] and purchase their own land, acquiring economic independence and prosperity. They also lived where they could trade with others for goods not produced on the farm. Thus, unlike An Agrarian Republic, Huston places the origins of landownership differences squarely on human choice and British customs, not soil or climate. This is an important and needed revision of my work. While Huston would not be so crass...

Optimizing regulatory requirements to aid in the implementation of compensatory mitigation

Optimizing regulatory requirements to aid in the implementation of compensatory mitigation

Farmers’ Perceptions of Agricultural Land Values in Rural Pakistan

Pakistan’s agriculture sector is crucial because it is responsible for providing food, shelter, and clothing to a massive population of 180 million people which is growing at a rate of 2 percent per annum. Land is a valuable asset and a symbol of prestige for the rural population in Pakistan. According to the recent Pakistan Economic Survey of 2013- 14, the agriculture sector contributes around 21 percent to GDP and provides employment for around 45 percent of the work force, who are primarily based in rural areas. The total geographic area of Pakistan is approximately 79.6 million hectares. Around 27.7 percent of Pakistan’s land is currently under cultivation and the cultivatable waste lands offer good possibilities for crop production. The total cropped area of Pakistan increased from 21.82 million hectares in 1990-91 to 22.72 million hectares in 2010-11 [Agricultural Statistics of Pakistan (2010-11)] and the total population of Pakistan increased from 118 million to 175 million during the same time period. Similarly the tenancy status of land management and land ownership pattern has changed over time. For example, large landowners are shifting their preferences from managing their land on their own towards leasing or sharecropping the land to be managed by others [Agricultural Census (2010)].

Landscape, Agriculture and the Rural Economy of Hockley, Essex, 1840–1916

Abstract:This article examines the local economy of a parish in south-east Essex during a period when economic, social and technological factors were transforming rural Britain. Record linkages are used to construct a microhistory of Hockley to analyse the exploitation of the landscape and rural livelihoods. Agricultural and occupational change reflected many national economic and social influences, but there are also counter examples to regional patterns of farming practice and large scale agrarian capitalist landownership. The agricultural depression of c.1875–96 effected a shift from arable to livestock farming and the development of market gardening facilitated by the railway. A reduction in agricultural employment opportunities, and the absence of a cottage industry for women, led to a significant out-migration of working-age people. The microhistory demonstrates that local factors, such as access to a tidal river, the timing of the arrival of the railway, the availability of brick-making clay and new trades provided livelihood opportunities and influenced the structure and operation of the rural economy.