Formation of land market institutions and their impacts on agricultural activity

The process of transformation of Bulgarian agriculture from a centrally controlled economy to a market-oriented economy is resulting in land reform, which will necessitate the immediate development and operation of land markets. On the one hand, the land reform is restoring land to those who owned it in the year 1947, or their heirs, who not only have very small and scattered holdings, but who often live in urban areas far from the claimed land and do not practice farming. On the other hand, farming is being changed by the liquidation of the former collective farms and the emergence of privately managed farms and new forms of co-operatives. These new operating units may or may not have their own land claims, but in most cases, do not have immediate access to sufficient land for adequately sized operations. Without land market institutions for information, contracting land use, and enforcement of contractual rights, the transaction costs of bringing the suppliers of land together with those demanding land will result in unused land and distorted agricultural activity. The paper explores both the formation of institutions and the evidence of transactions, as well as the possible impacts on farming.     

Life and death in Australian ‘heartlands’: pastoralism,ecology and rethinking the outback

Australian outback mythology is frequently invoked in attempts to unify Australians and smooth over differences. This is accomplished by appeals to shared heritage and shared cultural and economic interests. To a significant extent outback mythology is associated with the extensive grazing industries of the inland and north of Australia. Through association with a mythology of national origins, pastoral land use has been important in both national building in Australia and in generating a sense of settler belonging. The positive cultural association of pastoralism, however, have come under intensifying criticism since the 1980s from environmentalists and others. Drawing on ecologically based nationalism, critics of pastoralism draw on outback mythology to emphasise a geography of death in the inland caused by grazing and to articulate alternative inland geographies grounded in ecological thinking. These politics of nation building highlight new forms of long standing tensions between the outback as both rural heartland and wilderness in national origin stories, the role of land use practices in struggles over who and what ‘belongs’, and the roles of mythology in struggles over resources. These visions of the inland are however limited by frontier thinking and the boundaries and disjunctures this creates. The variety of connections between land and peoples are not part of these visions. In Sack's terms (Homo Geographicus: A Framework for Action, Awareness and Moral Concern, John Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 1997) the morality of these geographies of the inland is questionable as they render the inland opaque and prevent ‘seeing through to the real’. Protagonists in these debates and researchers must grapple with the reality and diversity of connections and disconnections between land and people to create moral geographies of the inland and grounded conversations beyond mythology.     

Protected areas in the periphery: Conservation and controversy in northern Scotland

Controversies arising from the notification of large areas of land as Sites of Special Scientific Interest in northern Scotland are reviewed against the background of surveys of land occupiers' experiences on the one hand, and of trends in conservation thinking in the wider world on the other. Most of the protected area is of low capability for productive land use, and there is little evidence of adverse trends in labour and employment on SSSIs compared with similar, non-SSSI land. Site designation has in practice impeded land management in the cases of relatively few land occupiers, but rather more have negative attitudes towards it. It is concluded that some elements of the ‘scientific colonialism’ model of protected areas can be detected.     

Taking Things Personally,and Publicising the Private: Encountering Erasure on the Frontlines of Academia

To understand the purpose of the Kunene hydro‐electic schemes in Angola one must examine the pattern of land settlement in Namibia established during the Herero‐German war of 1904–1908. At that time the White groups settled on the rich central pastoral land and also controlled the coast line. However the White south has three missing commodities which must be imported from the north: water, electricity, and labour. Thus it is the White groups who benefit most from the Kunene schemes. The profits from mining are accumulated in Johannesburg, New York, and London, while White mine workers receive high returns and Black workers receive low returns. The White farmers no longer face competition from the mines for water. The fishing and secondary industries receive relatively cheap power and water. Black farmers and herdsmen receive water, but the problem of irrigated farming in the ‘home‐lands’ has still to be solved.     

Social work and pastoral counseling: Empowering each other

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the divergent outcomes which can result from counseling services offered pastorally versus clinically. As faith leaders often have greater direct access than social workers to supporting religious populations, it is important to explore the intersection between religious pastoral support and clinical social work. Presenting six scenarios from the author’s own experiences as both a rabbi and social worker, this article processes each scenario first through the pastoral lens of an Orthodox rabbi, followed by the clinical lens of a social worker or other mental health professional. The client outcomes which are produced from each modality are radically different. This contrast demonstrates the distinction between the goals, values, and training of each profession, and highlights importance for future work to be done in linking religious and pastoral training to mental health services, as well as broadening the scope of cultural competence for social workers and therapists who may engage with tight-knit religious populations.     

Flex crops neverland: finding access to large-scale land investments?

This paper explores a neglected aspect of the financialization of land grabbing. Whereas financialization is a multifaceted phenomenon, a straightforward link has been established between financialization and land grabbing. On the one hand, market-oriented views claim that large-scale land investments benefit both the agrifood industry and small-scale farmers. On the other hand, structuralist scholarship explains how financialization creates new ways to accumulate profits by dispossessing small-scale farmers. We build on the call for a more nuanced account of large-scale land investments’ impact on land access by considering the crops involved. While finance’s attraction for flex crops has already been touched upon, we reverse the perspective by exploring whether flex crops influence the way financialization in agriculture unfolds in three areas: megamergers, contract farming, and land commodification. Building on Allaire’s concept of quality, we argue that flex crops can exacerbate unequal power relations and limit access to land for small-scale farmers.     

Effect of urbanization on the dynamics of ecosystem services: An analysis for decision making in Kolkata urban agglomeration

Urban Ecosystems - Urbanization has profound influence on the changes of land use and land cover, which on the other hand exert significant impact on ecosystem services and their values, especially...     

Capital and Mining Property Relations: Reconsidering Marxist Understanding of Feudal Mining Land

Marxism holds that feudal mining land was characterized by production relations that gave lords the upper hand. Lacking productive capital, mining land was generally a site of coercive feudal-property relations. The idea is indefensible, as evidence shows that mining lands triggered property arrangements antagonizing lordly power. This article discusses the labor and capital relations that transformed feudal land into mining land. It argues that this transformation challenged the supremacy of feudal lords by triggering property relations relatively unconstrained by feudal lordly power. The article concludes that mining lands were sites of antagonistic relations, were capital confronted feudal landed property, aiming at isolating lords from the gains of mines.     

“It’s a joke,I do not accept”: Derrida’s Demanding Call and Other Dead Voices

By 1975 the Plateau Beaubourg (“beautiful village”) and the entirety of the land known as the Les Halles section of Paris had been subject to an extensive programme of reconstruction inaugurated some 22 years earlier. During the demolition phase of the project, the area took on the general appellation “Le trou des Halles” (The hole of Les Halles) or “Le grand trou”. The old Les Halles car park became the projected site for the Centre Georges Pompidou. The American artist Gordon Matta‐Clark chose to work at Plateau Beaubourg precisely because of the controversy caused by the demolition and subsequent dispersal of the community, as well as the projected nature of the future site as a cultural centre. The resulting artwork, Conical Intersect (1975), and its problematic critical reception provide a series of interpretive opportunities that form the matrix of this essay. Conical Intersect recalls, on the one hand, a history of place, whilst, on the other hand, dramatising a situation where communities are evicted from the land: dispersed, made powerless. The specific form and reception of the artwork illustrates the tension between the narratives of historical progress — as embodied, for example, in the construction of the Pompidou Centre — and the destruction of site that was its prerequisite. This cultural tension is the subject and object of this essay as Conical Intersect becomes, by way of its particular morphology and its own inevitable erasure (its self‐effacement), emblematic of memory, loss, condescension and contradiction, artistic and “political” naivety, confusion and the powerlessness of communities over the possession and use of the land.     

Integrating Religion and Social Work in Dual Degree Programs

Abstract

This article offers challenges, suggestions and examples for integrating insights from religion and social work in the context of masters level dual degree programs that link social work and other fields of study about religion, such as theology, pastoral counseling, and religious studies. The author first relates some personal and professional experiences regarding his own journey during the past 30 years in trying to find ways to connect religious studies, pastoral counseling, and social work. Next, the article presents suggestions for mutually beneficial ways that fields for studying religion and social work can challenge each other. Finally, several practical suggestions are given for designing integrated religion and social work dual degree programs.     

Lutheranism from Above and from Below: “Pastoral Professionals” and Trust within the Nordic State/Society Nexus

The article points to the dispersion, democratization, and feminization of “pastoral” forms of power and authority since the mid-19th century as a key to understanding the exceptionally high degree of social trust in the Nordic countries. Taking Norway as its central case, it argues that the Nordic welfare state has been shaped by an older, distinctively Lutheran–Pietist combination of educational forms of government from above and edifying popular self-organization from below. This trust-producing synthesis has been sustained by such “pastoral” professions as teaching, nursing, and social work, functioning as mediators between public welfare policies and the life world of citizens.     

ORIENTALISM RECONSIDERED: ISRAELI MEDIA AND THE ARTICULATION OF RESISTANCE

Questions of the relation between race and nationality are at the centre of Israel' defence narrative and its violence, its deployment of blood and domination of land and bodies. Usually, the discourse of violence in a nation' logic involves images of penetration to borders and land. However, this essay is about internal violence, about the reproduction of the state not through land, but through bodies, and babies, narratives and memory, knowledge and censorship. To understand this case is to reconsider questions of how Orientalism, as a practice of knowledge and of violence works. The author revisits the concept of Orientalism thereby relocating the different ways in which it internally works within the Israeli nation state. To illustrate her claim, she finds it useful to locate parallel features in the discourse of the Gulf War and the image of Saddam Hussein, created by Western media, and the discourse of the kidnapped Yemenite babies scandal and the image of Rabbi Uzi Meshulam, created by Israeli media. Both cases involve questions of violence, resistance and Western domination. In the author' analysis, she focuses on the complexity in which Orientalism functions when the state demarcates people and identities rather then land and borders. It will be shown how concepts of violence, race and nationalism are reproduced through the media discourse of the kidnapped Yemenite babies at the junction of social conflict and resistance. A sample of newspaper reports on the Yemenite babies affair during the resistance of Rabbi Meshulam are examined, known in Israel as the ‘The Fortification in Yahud’. The author' analysis is also based on her experience as an investigative reporter covering the Yemenite babies affair, and first hand observation of the resistance of Rabbi Meshulam.¹     

Women's employment in Bangladesh agriculture: composition, determinants and scope

Gender composition of labour use and factors determining demand and supply of female labour in crop production is examined using survey data from 14 villages in two agro-ecological regions of Bangladesh. The share of women in labour use ranges between 11–18% in foodgrain (rice and wheat) and 14–48% in non-cereal (highest for vegetables) production. Incidence of female labour hire is very low and varies directly with land size classes while supply from family varies inversely. Cultivation of diverse crops (local and modern varieties of rice, jute, oilseeds and vegetables), education as well as women's ownership of land increases demand for hired female labour. On the other hand, membership in non-governmental organisation and women's ownership of land decreases supply of female labour from the family. Also, sharp regional variation exists in hiring female labour. A decentralised crop diversification policy, gender sensitive educational program as well as institutional arrangement to increase women's access to land would promote women's gainful employment.     

A Catholic Perspective on Gay Priestly Ministry from the Closet

Abstract

Overview of Catholic doctrine and interpretation of Catholic teachings pertaining to homosexuals and homosexual practice are reviewed by two “closeted” homosexual priests. The paper considers the role of the clergy and expectations of the Church regarding pastoral ministry to homosexuals. Case studies highlighting unique contributions by ‘closetedr’ and ‘open’ homosexual clergy to pastoral care of homosexual parishioners are presented. The authors discuss personal and professional dilemmas facing homosexual clergy including ‘coming out’, homosexual bonding within religious communities, and the wide range of attitudes among Catholics, lay and religious, concerning homosexual Catholics.     

关于发展、完善上海住房租赁市场的建议

当前上海住房租赁市场在租金、房源、规范监控、合同纠纷等方面都存在问题,尤其与发达国家住房租赁市场比较,上海在住房租赁市场的制度建设方面还处于起步阶段,政府对住房租赁市场长期处于缺乏基本数据、基本无法监控的状态。究其根源,我国在住房市场的培育、发展和管理上存有重买卖轻租赁的倾向。应重新认识和重视住房租赁市场对于社会生活健康发展的意义和作用,积极创新租赁住房建设的土地供给,多渠道开辟租赁住房投资的融资通道,加紧住房租赁市场的制度建设。     

Pluralism and ethnic conflict in Tanzania's arid lands: the case of the Maasai and the WaArusha

In Tanzania, the Maasai and Waarusha tribes are experiencing conflict because differences in their modes of productions and economic strategies undermine the peaceful coexistence that they have enjoyed since the 18th century. The Maasai are pastoralists, while the Waarusha are agricultural subsistence farmers who are encroaching on the best pasture lands. A sketch of the history of the two groups shows that the Maasai reached the peak of their land holding in 1880 before the arrival of European colonists who seized land and restricted the Maasai to a semi-arid reserve but allowed the Maasai to remain an autonomous and powerful group. The Waarusha began encroaching on Maasai land after independence due to land and population pressure. While closely tied, each group looks down on the other, and Maasai ascendancy has given way to Waarusha challenges. After independence, the tribal and ethnic rule that was protected by the colonial system was disrupted to allow for increased internal migration and new patterns of settlement. The rights of land ownership were transferred from tribes to the State, allowing privileged groups to benefit. The Waarusha began to engage in illegal land-grabbing and to encroach on the Maasai preserve using legal and illegal means. The Maasai view land as collective property and have had difficulty retaining title of traditional lands in the face of population pressure. This loss of grazing land has forced the Maasai into a mixed economy that depends upon agricultural production as well as livestock production. In the meantime, the Waarusha have deliberately sought political office to gain power to secure their holdings. Immediate action is needed to produce 1) a policy on spontaneous settlement, 2) an immediate adjustment of legal procedures for land acquisition, 3) a land tenure policy that equally emphasizes agricultural and livestock production, and 4) controls on undue expansion of subsistence agriculture into semi-arid rangelands.     

Commodity Agriculture,Civic Agriculture and the Future of U.S. Farming*

Abstract Commodity agriculture and civic agriculture represent two distinct types of farming found in the U.S. today. Commodity agriculture is grounded on the belief that the primary objectives of farming should be to produce as much food/fiber as possible for the least cost. It is driven by the twin goals of productivity and efficiency. Civic agriculture, on the other hand, represents the rebirth of a more locally oriented agriculture and food system. Using data from the 1992 and 1997 Censuses of Agriculture and other secondary data sets, we examine factors and conditions associated with the presence and growth of both types of agriculture. Our findings show that civic agriculture is associated with particular commodities and with specific social, economic and demographic characteristics of localities. Commodity agriculture, on the other hand, is more sensitive to the classic economic factors of production, namely, land, labor, and capital.     

Community Context,Land Use,and First Birth

This article examines the influence of community context and land use on the monthly odds of first birth in a society in the midst of dramatic fertility transition. The theoretical framework guiding our work predicts that proximity to nonfamily services should delay first births by creating opportunities for competing nonfamily activities and spreading new ideas that change expectations about family life. On the other hand, living in agricultural settings that provide opportunities for higher returns to child labor should speed first births. We use a longitudinal, multilevel, mixed‐method data from the Nepalese Himalayas to test these predictions. The empirical results reveal that nonfamily services during childhood and during early adulthood both have important independent influences on the odds of first birth. Also, as predicted, a high density of agricultural land use affects the odds of first births in the opposite direction, speeding first births. This clear pattern of contrasting effects provides important new evidence of the contextual dynamics that produce watershed changes in postmarital birth timing.     

Land Privatization and the Differentiation of the Peasantry: Nicaragua's Coffee Revolution, 1850–1920

Abstract The expansion of coffee cultivation in Nicaragua in the 1870s unleashed a social revolution. Previously most land was common property: by 1920 throughout the coffee districts land was privately owned. Influential historians of Nicaragua see this as the capitalist transition. This essay argues that instead of forging a rural proletariat, this social revolution created a differentiated peasantry whose access to land depended on relations of patronage. Peasant resistance to land privatization and the political, as opposed to economic, nature of the process are examined. The essay concludes that this revolution was more incongruent than congruent with a capitalist social order. The relevance of this history for contemporary political debates in Nicaragua is explored.