An Econometric Analysis of Two Possible Land Reform Strategies in Nigeria

This paper argues that for the agricultural sector to be developed, there would be need for a detailed research to determine a possible land reform strategy suitable particularly, to sub-regions – North/South - and their social and cultural relations to land

Alienating customary land : people of the land and people of property in Vanuatu

The extensive land alienation on some islands in Vanuatu appears to contravene both the national constitution and desires of local people. The constitution states that all land is held in customary tenure; the Ni-Vanuatu indigenous majority (about 95% of the population) find alienation severely encroaches on their land entitlements. Given this strong opposition, the thesis asks how alienation occurs. It concludes that alienation results from the operation of key state-level forces of the recent period, inherently in tension. The interplay of indigenous self-determination and national development imperatives, mediated by elites, construes land as property and a marketable commodity. First, indigenous self-determination, for ni-Vanuatu, requires state recognition of customary forms of relations to land. Recognition, though, entails acceptance of state control over relations to land, effected through institutional arrangements that define land as property. This process of propertisation is a precondition for alienation. It allows legal ownership of land to be vested in customary groups, but also creates property rights that may be sold. Second, propertisation is central to national development and relates closely to colonisation and its aftermath. Shortly after independence in 1980 legal property rights were offered to former colonial occupiers. These rights still obtain and effectively allow foreign investors to own land. Third, the thesis focuses on the situation and role of elites around Port Vila, the national capital. These people embody the conflict between customary and property forms of relations to land, mediating ni-Vanuatu and foreign interests in ways that further propertisation and land alienation

Seasonal soil carbon fluxes in transitioning agricultural soils in Central Washington State: Relations to land-use, environmental factors and soil carbon-nitrogen characteristics

Changing agricultural land-use practices to increase soil carbon sequestration contributes to climate change mitigation and improved food security by moving CO2 from the atmosphere into soil as soil organic carbon (SOC). In 2016, a farm in Thorp, Washington, Spoon Full Farm, began converting land historically farmed using conventional methods of tillage and synthetic fertilizers to conservation farming methods with direct seeding and organic soil amendments with a goal of sequestering carbon in the soil. This project evaluates relationships of soil CO2 respiration and net ecological exchange (NEE) with land-use types, seasonal environmental factors (air temperature, relative humidity, soil temperature and soil moisture) and soil carbon and nitrogen properties (SOC, SON, δ13C, and δ15N) on that farm in order to inform land management decisions affecting soil carbon sequestration. Three farm land-use areas studied were: 1) no-till vegetable garden with regular organic matter amendments; 2) no-till hay fields; and 3) historically unfarmed areas. Soil CO2 fluxes were measured on these three land-use areas in spring after snowmelt; summer, when garden and hay fields are irrigated and unfarmed areas are dry; and fall when soil and air temperatures are lower and moisture has returned to soils. Continuous soil CO2 flux measurements of garden soils indicate primary environmental factors influencing soil CO2 flux during summer are air and soil temperature, and during fall are soil temperature and moisture. Garden beds have positive NEE during summer and spring days indicating net CO2 losses from soil. Garden bed respiration is likely dominated by microbial decomposition of compost. Summer period soil CO2 flux correlates with SOC for all land-use types individually, while vegetable garden SOC and SON correlate with CO2 flux annually. This suggests SOC influences summer soil CO2 flux regardless of land-use type, while annual CO2 flux from composted garden soil depends on overall organic content from compost inputs. Hay field CO2 flux during summer shows strong correlation with elevated surface SOC within the crop root zone

America\u27s Best Idea: Settler Colonialism and Recognition In The United States National Park Service Website

By examining closely how the National Park Service misrepresents their history and current relationships with Indigenous communities I work to demonstrate the depths of this misrepresentation and the impacts it has on various Indigenous communities and nations. In the first chapter, I explain how the history of national parks is founded on fundamentally opposed conceptions of land between Indigenous people and settlers and how this difference was used as justification for settler violence. In chapter two I explore the ways in which the National Park Service uses cultural collaboration to further tourist experience at the expense of respecting and properly representing local Indigenous communities. Finally, in chapter three I explore how projects of ecological conservation by the National Park Service further misrepresentation through the way they operate as unequal collaborative projects and how different conceptions and relations to land create differing goals between the National Park Service and Indigenous communities that leads to very different types of conservation efforts

Nature, Bodies, and Land: Reframing Ownership and Property in Early Modern Spanish America

Rooted in medieval juridical thinking, early modern legal culture saw commu- nity’s law as the expression of an underlying order of things, something defined not by the willing agreement of the parts that constituted the community, but rather by nature and nurture. For the Iberian world, this belief was expressed in the idea of the ‘señorío natural’, which according to legal doctrine was a bond that linked subjects to the land where they were born and subjected them to a common jurisdiction (Hespanha, Uncommon Laws ). Communities and all kinds of corpo- rate bodies thus also had a natural origin, which points to an intertwinement, and not a contradiction, between nature and different kinds of collective bodies. These bodies—corporations, guilds, communities, families, and so on—were the basis for the assignment of rights, obligations, privileges, and duties, but also for the dis- tribution of access to land. This article seeks to reframe ownership and property within this framework as a way of rethinking the ways in which communities defined their relations to land

Environmental ethics in a New Zealand context

Environmental ethics has many strands and roots but there is increasing for a holistic approach. Such an approach, which is consistent with te ao Maori and tikanga Maori, is especially appropriate for New Zealand

COMMON AGRICULTURAL POLICY FROM HEALTH CHECK DECISIONS TO THE POST-2013 REFORM

The paper proposed for being presented belongs to the field research "International Affairs and European Integration". The paper entitled "Common Agricultural Policy from Health Check decisions to the post-2013 reform" aims to analyze the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) from the Health Check adoption in November 2008 to a new reform post-2013. The objectives of the paper are the presentation of the Health Check with its advantages and disadvantages as well as the analysis of the opportunity of a new European policy and its reforming having in view that the analysis of Health Check condition was considered a compromise. The paper is related to the internal and international research consisting in several books, studies, documents that analyze the particularities of the most debated, controversial and reformed EU policy. A personal study is represented by the first report within the PhD paper called "The reform of CAP and its implications for Romania's agriculture"(coordinator prof. Gheorghe Hurduzeu PhD, Academy of Economic Studies Bucharest, Faculty of International Business, research studies in the period 2009-2012). The research methodology used consists in collecting and analysis data from national and international publications, their validation, followed by a dissemination of the results in order to express a personal opinion regarding CAP and its reform. The results of the research consist in proving the opportunity of a new reform due to the fact that Health Check belongs already to the past. The paper belongs to the field research mentioned, in the attempt to prove the opportunity of building a new EU agricultural policy. The challenges CAP is facing are: food safety, environmental and climate changes, territorial balance as well as new challenges-improving sustainable management of natural resources, maintaining competitiveness in the context of globalization growth, strengthening EU cohesion in rural areas, increasing the support of CAP for member states, farmers and active farmers-, sign in outlining the CAP contribution to the "EU 2020 Strategy". This paper aims to prove that the future CAP should become a more sustainable, balanced, better focused, simpler and more efficient, more responsible to the needs and expectations of EU citizens.Common Agricultural Policy, reform, rural development, Health Check, EU 2020 Strategy

‘Enacted in the destiny of sedentary peoples’: racism, discovery and the grounds of law

Whilst the racial, and racist, basis of the doctrine of discovery is a modern innovation, the doctrine owes much to its pre-modern forms and ethos. The finding and settlement of putatively unknown lands has long been attended with mythic and religious justification and with rituals of appropriation all of which strikingly resemble modern practice. Similarity in this case, however, serves to dramatize difference. What marks modern discovery of the occidental variety is the displacement of the mythic and religious by a combination of racism and legalism. The story of that displacement is told here along with an analysis of the poverty, not to say vacuity, of the doctrine of discovery as a justification for imperial appropriation. Since the story is told in broadly historical terms, its conception of the modern relies on the temporal ‘depth’ which historians usually attribute to this term, the discoveries of Columbus here providing something of a benchmark. But this account of the doctrine of discovery is not an antiquarian exercise, not a tale told in a now entirely discovered world, the unfolding of which may have had its reasons for regret but is now decidedly done with. Rather, this account is modern also in the sense of having current significance, of discovery’s still being an impelling force in the treatment of peoples supposedly once discovered and in the self-identity of those who would claim to have once discovered them, an identity which extends to the grounding of the discoverer’s law. Following the preponderant legal authority on discovery, my ‘case’ study here will come from the history of the United States. The parallels with the Australian situation are, it would seem, close

Factors affecting nitrate distribution in shallow groundwater under a beef farm in South Eastern Ireland

peer-reviewedGroundwater contamination was characterised using a methodology which combines shallow groundwater geochemistry data from 17 piezometers over a 2 yr period in a statistical framework and hydrogeological techniques. Nitrate–N (NO3-N) contaminant mass flux was calculated across three control planes (rows of piezometers) in six isolated plots. Results showed natural attenuation occurs on site although the method does not directly differentiate between dilution and denitrification. It was further investigated whether NO3-N concentration in shallow groundwater (<5 m below ground level) generated from an agricultural point source on a 4.2 ha site on a beef farm in SE Ireland could be predicted from saturated hydraulic conductivity (Ksat) measurements, ground elevation (m Above Ordnance Datum), elevation of groundwater sampling (screen opening interval) (m AOD) and distance from a dirty water point pollution source. Tobit regression, using a background concentration threshold of 2.6 mg NO3-N L−1 showed, when assessed individually in a step wise procedure, Ksat was significantly related to groundwater NO3-N concentration. Distance of the point dirty water pollution source becomes significant when included with Ksat in the model. The model relationships show areas with higher Ksat values have less time for denitrification to occur, whereas lower Ksat values allow denitrification to occur. Areas with higher permeability transport greater NO3-N fluxes to ground and surface waters. When the distribution of Cl− was examined by the model, Ksat and ground elevation had the most explanatory power but Ksat was not significant pointing to dilution having an effect. Areas with low NO3 concentration and unaffected Cl− concentration points to denitrification, low NO3 concentration and low Cl− chloride concentration points to dilution and combining these findings allows areas of denitrification and dilution to be inferred. The effect of denitrification is further supported as mean groundwater NO3-N was significantly (P < 0.05) related to groundwater N2/Ar ratio, redox potential (Eh), dissolved O2 and N2 and was close to being significant with N2O (P = 0.08). Calculating contaminant mass flux across more than one control plane is a useful tool to monitor natural attenuation. This tool allows the identification of hot spot areas where intervention other than natural attenuation may be needed to protect receptors.Research Stimulus Fund, Department of Agriculture Fisheries and Food (Ireland