Topic: land titling

Venezuela Embarks on New Land Reform
Dow Jones Newswires
June 21, 2005 - The government of President Hugo Chavez is moving
aggressively in a plan to overhaul landownership in the
Andean nation, where about 80% of the population lives
in poverty. A new land titling effort aims to address inequality in the countryside. The efforts are part of a more comprehensive "land revolution" to be implemented over several years.

75,000 Venezuelan Peasants Win Land Titles
Argiris Malapanis with Olivia Nelson & Natalie Doucet, The Militant
July 06, 2004 - Big farmers tried to block implementation of agrarian reform law that has already benefitted tens of thousands of Venezuelan families.This report comments extensively on how the land reform is benefitting poor peasants in Venezuela.

Brazil : Agrarian Reform for Informal Lands
Mario Osava, Inter Press Service (IPS)
June 03, 2004 - Nearly a quarter of Brazilian territory (200 million hectares, equivalent to the area of Mexico) does not have known landowners because there is no legal register of titles. During the previous administration, of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the annual average number of families settled reached 80,000, while last year, under Lula's watch the total was 37,000. In addition to these formal efforts by the Brazilian government, peasant organizations have continued to push for more immediate land access in ways that have proven to be as successful. . . . . Read More

Scoping Study on Land Policy Research in Latin America
Stephen Baranyi, Carmen Diana Deere & Manuel Morales, Baranyi-The North-South Institute (NSI)-Canada
May 21, 2004 - After being relegated to the margins of development debates for over a decase, land policy has moved rapidly up the international agenda in recent years. In Latin America, a wave of market-oriented land policy reforms were adopted in the 1990s, from Mexico through Honduras and Nicaragua to Brazil, Ecuador and Peru. At the same time less visible yet important innovations were taking place on a number of fronts: joint titling to couples to promote gender equity; the regulariazation of indigenous peoples' titles to communal lands. . . . . Yet by the turn of the century frustrations with the uneven pace of change led certain social movmements and political parties to revive the banner of redistributive land reform. . . . Read More

Monitoring Paper: Thailand's Land Titling Program
Rebeca Leonard and Kingkorn Narintarakul Na Ayutthaya, Northern Development Foundation
November 06, 2003 - The World Bank’s Land Titling Programme in Thailand has been one of the largest land titling programmes implemented throughout the world. The Bank has praised itself for what it sees as the success of the programme in several of its own reports. However, the very people who were supposed to have benefited from this World Bank programme have, instead, become much worse off.

Backgrounder Part II-The World Bank and Land Reform in Brazil
Sérgio Sauer, National Forum on Agrarian Reform and Rural Justice
November 06, 2003 - The second of a three part report on the history and status of land reform in Brazil. In this section of the report Sérgio Sauer focuses on the role of the World Bank in shaping land reform policy at the national level and its emphasis on the establishment of land markets.