Between 1989 and 1991 I worked with movements representing landless rural workers in Brazil.
Some countries those in West Africa which import their staples, or Bangladesh, with its huge numbers of landless labourers risk ruin and civil strife.
The fear of one expert in Laos is the emergence of a landless poor.Not all Chinese influence is welcomed by the government.
His defence minister withdrew a promise to allow landowners to renew their gun licences.The landowners do not question the right of landless peasants to a plot of land.
The array of social tensions plaguing the country, from landless peasants and disgruntled "Lugo-ites" and left-wing guerrillas, will worsen.
Part revolution and part ritual, "Red April" commemorates the killing 11 years ago of 19 landless protestors by police in the Amazonian state of Pará and promotes the martyrs' cause, the redistribution of land.But nowadays much of the activism seems to have little to do with land reform.
The answer to a parliamentary question, now made public, showed that 270 farms, acquired from whites since independence for redistribution to landless poor, had been given to just 400 people, many of them the president's political supporters.Peace talks on Burundi chaired by Nelson Mandela, South Africa's former leader, opened in Tanzania.
In the biggest criminal trial in Brazil's history, some 150 policemen are accused of murdering 19 protesters from the landless farmers' movement.
Higher farm income boosts demand for rural labour, increasing wages for landless peasants and others who buy rather than grow their food.
As the World Bank's annual World Development Report shows, the number of urban consumers varies from over half the total number of poor in Bolivia, to about a quarter in Zambia and Ethiopia, to less than a tenth in Vietnam and Cambodia.But overall, enormous numbers of the poor both urban and landless labourers are net buyers of food, not net sellers.
A widow receives one-eighth of her husband's property if they have children and one-fourth if they do not.But to concentrate on the unfairness of the inheritance laws would be to ignore the broad majority of women (and men)—approximately two-thirds of Bangladesh's 160m people are landless.
