Leslie C. Gray

Diminished Access, Diverted Exclusion: Women and Land Tenure in Sub-Saharan Africa

Increasing commercialization, population growth and concurrent increases in land value have affected womens land rights in Africa. Most of the literature concentrates on how these changes have led to an erosion of womens rights. This paper examines some of the processes by which womens rights to land are diminishing. First, we examine cases where rights previously utilized have become less important; that is, the incidence of exercising rights has decreased. Second, we investigate how womens rights to land decrease as the public meanings underlying the social interpretation and enforcement of rights are manipulated. Third, we examine womens diminishing access to land when the actual rules of access change. While this situation may sound grim, the paper also explores how women have responded to reductions in access to land. They have mounted both legal and customary challenges to inheritance laws, made use of anonymous land markets, organized formal cooperative groups to gain tenure rights, and manipulated customary rules using woman-to-woman marriages and mother-son partnerships. These actions have caused women to create new routes of access to land and in some cases new rights.

Can home gardens scale up into movements for social change? The role of home gardens in providing food security and community change in San Jose, California

Urban policymakers and sustainable food activists have identified urban agriculture as an important strategy for confronting a host of urban problems, including food insecurity, health disparities, access to urban green space and community economic revitalisation. Much recent work on urban agriculture has examined community and school gardens, but little research has been undertaken on home gardens as a solution to urban problems. This article examines a home-gardening programme in San Jose, California, La Mesa Verde, asking whether some of the benefits found in community gardens can be found in home gardens. Specifically, we look at financial, health and community benefits, examining the potential of home gardens to become forces for broader social change. We ask whether gardens can become agents of cultural preservation, self-determination, particularly for recent immigrants who use these spaces to build identities and work towards collective action and self-determination.

Environmental Policy, Land Rights, and Conflict: Rethinking Community Natural Resource Management Programs in Burkina Faso

In this paper I will examine the effects of the implementation of the Gestion des Terroirs approach in several villages in the cotton-growing region of southwestern Burkina Faso, an area of both extensive immigration and fast-paced socioeconomic change. Efforts to restructure land-tenure relations have failed, despite the rhetoric of participatory development, because projects misunderstand the nature of changing land rights, agricultural practices, and village social relations. Failures of efforts to zone land have been exacerbated because land has become a major site of conflict. Population growth and agricultural growth have led to land shortages, intensified competition, and overt conflict. Efforts to restructure landholding by using participatory development methods have had unintended consequences as individuals and groups manipulate meanings and representations about rights to land and land-management strategies in order to lay claim to land. On the one hand some local farmers are attempting to expel migrant farmers from land by invoking notions of who is and who is not using environmentally sound management practices. Migrant farmers, on the other hand, are fearful of leaving land fallow because they fear that the project or their local hosts will take it away from them. Both of these outcomes have increased tension among ethnic and generational groups and fostered mistrust of the motivations of environmental projects. Instead of homogeneous cooperative entities, villages are often based on conflict and competition. Projects, therefore, should focus on conflict resolution and reconciliation when attempting to restructure how natural resources are allocated.

Subversive and interstitial food spaces: transforming selves, societies, and society–environment relations through urban agriculture and foraging

By way of introduction, we turn to an excerpt from Ryan Galt’s field notes from a field trip taken by his undergraduate food systems class in November 2012: In a neighbourhood park in Oakland, in the East San Francisco Bay Area of California, we stand waiting for Max, a member of Phat Beets Produce, a collective of people dedicated to promoting food and social justice through food provisioning, activism, organising, and popular education. Max shows up, has us identify ourselves and tell everyone our favourite band and a favourite vegetable that starts with the same letter. He then explains to us the historical origins of the Black Panther Party in the neighbourhood, their role in creating what is now the nationwide school lunch program, and how some of the current efforts of the collective are aimed in part at creating a cultivated landscape that is literally carved out of the city park’s former lawns of Bermuda grass. Like other similar efforts around the country, this example of “guerrilla gardening” includes diverse vegetable beds, an area for compost, and planting fruit-producing (not just ornamental) trees that community members harvest. The produce at Phat Beets looks great, is well-cared for, and absolutely free to anyone who wants to harvest it. And harvest it they do: vegetables and fruits are being utilised by people coming from around the park. Max tells us stories about what this newly cultivated space has done for people in the neighbourhood. He then takes us to a building being renovated into a community kitchen at the Crossroads, a centrally located former commuter light rail junction next to main street. He tells us that its parking lot already hosts a regular farmers market and swap meet, and that the renovated building will serve as a community gathering place, a restaurant, and as infrastructure where local food artisans and vendors can create, sell, barter, and/or share their wares. Already a local seafood community supported agriculture (CSA) program has asked to use the space in the before-dawn shift, when little other use of the space will be occurring. This example illustrates a shift happening in many urban food systems, where millions of people are rethinking and changing how we use contemporary urban spaces in relation to food. In contrast to patterns of urban development over the past many decades, where generations of city planners have been blind to or fervently discouraged primary productive activities within urban boundaries, gardeners, farmers, and foragers are once again investing their work and resources into their communities, and in the process, (re)making urban spaces (see Hynes 1996, Lawson 2005 for a broader discussion of past movements). And these actors are getting a great deal out of it – food, relationships, well-being, economic savings, jobs and wages, a sense of self-efficacy, (re)new(ed) green spaces, environmental connections, and many other things. These practices and spaces are transforming selves and relationships, social and socio-ecological, at multiple levels.

A political ecology of socio-economic differentiation: debt, inputs and liberalization reforms in southwestern Burkina Faso

This paper builds on work from the agrarian change and political ecology literatures to analyze the process of agrarian change among smallholder cotton farmers in southwestern Burkina Faso. Specifically, we use a rural survey of 72 heads of household in three villages to examine whether and how (1) access to agricultural inputs, (2) debt and (3) liberalization reforms combine to produce rural socio-economic differentiation based on wealth. We find that wealthier farmers use more mineral fertilizer and manure inputs than their poorer counterparts. Wealthier farmers are also better able to remain debt-free as cotton prices drop and input prices rise. Moreover, they are able to take advantage of the neo-liberal restructuring of cotton cooperatives to change polices on debt repayment and input provisioning to their favor. This growing divide has large implications for rural food security, particularly as land becomes scarcer, fallows disappear and the need to intensify production grows. This research addresses two gaps in the agrarian change literature in relating how liberalization reforms and biophysical elements drive rural socio-economic differentiation. This work also shows that merging the concerns of political ecology with the agrarian change literature allows for a deeper examination of rural socio-economic differentiation.

Integrating conservation and development in the Peruvian Amazon.

Recent studies have critiqued integrated conservation and development projects for failing to attain either of their two major goals. This paper evaluates one such project in Perus Pacaya Samiria National Reserve, which entailed community-based natural resource-management plans for palm and aquatic resources. We conducted semistructured interviews with reserve inhabitants (n=57) during May 2007, as well as key-informant interviews with state and non-governmental organization (NGO) staff. Monitoring data and reports from NGOs were important secondary sources in this study. The intervention has improved the status of targeted species and has improved the well-being of participants. This project worked well for a number of reasons, including the long-term commitment of the implementing organization, the social capital and legitimacy provided by participation in management groups, and the fact that local knowledge was incorporated into resource-management techniques.

Local politics in the time of Turabi's revolution: gender, class and ethnicity in western Sudan

This article marks a first step towards understanding the micro-politics of this civil breakdown. We focus particular attention on two central conflicts in the village of Bireka during the three years between 1989 and 1992. In one conflict over the administration of a womens grain bank some wealthy Arab villagers raised the issue of the proper public behaviour of women. Poorer villagers and villagers from marginalised ethnic groups opposed what they saw as an attempt by wealthy families to preserve and extend their power by wresting away control of valuable grain. They entangled the conflict in more general issues of ethnic marginalisation and class solidarity. In a second conflict over the participation of women in market activity along a roadside villagers again mobilised representations of class gender and ethnicity. Some villagers argued that the roadside was an inappropriate work environment for women tea sellers. The closure of the stands was seen by others as marking the definitive ascendance of Arab villagers over their Hausa and Burgo neighbours. (excerpt)

Community and home gardens increase vegetable intake and food security of residents in San Jose, California

As of 2013, 42 million American households were involved in growing their own food either at home or in a community garden plot. The purpose of this pilot study was to document the extent to which gardeners, particularly less affluent ones, increase their vegetable intake when eating from either home or community garden spaces. Eighty-five community gardeners and 50 home gardeners from San Jose, California, completed a survey providing information on demographic background, self-rated health, vegetable intake and the benefits of gardening. The gardeners surveyed were generally low income and came from a variety of ethnic and educational backgrounds. Participants in this study reported doubling their vegetable intake to a level that met the number of daily servings recommended by the U.S. Dietary Guidelines. Growing food in community and home gardens can contribute to food security by helping provide access to fresh vegetables and increasing consumption of vegetables by gardeners and their families.

Vegetable Output, Cost Savings, and Nutritional Value of Low-Income Families’ Home Gardens in San Jose, CA

ABSTRACT Participation in home food gardening in the United States has been growing. From 2008 to 2013, the number of home gardens increased by 4 million, and the number of households with annual incomes of less than

Drought, water access, and urban agriculture: a case study from Silicon Valley

35 000 that are food gardening rose by 38%. The purpose of this study was to measure crop output, cost savings, and nutritional value of low-income home gardeners in San Jose, California. This pilot study included administering a background survey to a convenience sample of low-income home gardeners with a subset of gardeners weighing vegetable output of plots during the 2104 spring–summer growing season. Participants included an ethnically diverse group of 50 low-income families who completed the survey and 8 gardeners who weighed vegetable output of their garden. The gardeners produced an average of 1.23 lb vegetables/ft2 and saved an average of