Land Tenure Center Newsletter
Number 80, Fall 2000, p. 8-9
The LTC-managed BASIS CRSP plans to enter a second phase on 1 October 2001 with five new projects. Current Program Director Michael Roth is principal investigator on one of the competitively-selected projects. His work on institutional innovations in privatization and farm restructuring in South Africa and Kyrgyzstan is an extension of current research in those countries. Center researchers Malcolm Childress and Susana Lastarria-Cornhiel will also work on the project. The four other projects focus on factor market issues in Central America, Eastern Europe, Eurasia, the Horn of Africa, and Southern Africa.
At the end of Phase I, Dr. Roth will step down as director of BASIS. Michael Carter (Agricultural and Applied Economics) will take his place. Synthesizing results and identifying overarching regional problems and solutions will be one objective of Phase II.
In August, eight high-level Guatemalan government officials and policymakers attended a Center Spanish-language workshop on land access as a method of reducing poverty. Designed especially for the visitors by Center researcher Susana Lastarria-Cornhiel, with assistance from Visitor Coordinator Christine Elholm, the workshop assembled Center experts and other University of Wisconsin professors and researchers to work with the visitors over the course of four days in developing ways to effectively use Guatemala’s newly created land fund.
The goal is to provide credit to rural people so they can buy farmland. In a letter following their visit, the members wrote, "We are looking forward to the practical implementation [of] activities that will follow from the seminar."
Anne Kuriakose was awarded a 2001-02 Research Fellowship by the American Institute of Indian Studies to conduct field research for her dissertation "Social Stratification and Employment Outcomes in Rural Industrial Clusters of Andhra Pradesh, India."
LTC researcher Michael Roth was invited to a State Department roundtable meeting to discuss issues in Zimbabwe. Focusing on land reform, Dr. Roth’s input drew from the knowledge he has gained during his eight years of research in Zimbabwe, a country he expects to be near the top of the next administration’s foreign policy agenda. His participation in the roundtable was unrelated to his current research in Zimbabwe.
Michelle Gavin, Legislative Assistant to Wisconsin Senator Russell Feingold, visited the Center in August. Prompted by his visit to Zimbabwe, Feingold, a member of the African subcommittee of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, hopes to use the Center’s decades of experience on the continent as an informational base on critical land issues and in making future ambassadorial appointments.
This past summer, Beverly Phillips, LTC Senior Special Librarian, helped preserve material on land reform, agricultural development, and the peace process in El Salvador for the USAID/El Salvador Mission. Working with Nathanael Bourns of Development Alternatives, Inc., she created four CDs consisting of a database of over 300 annotated citations and full text of over 100 documents. Copies of these CDs are located in the USAID Library (Washington DC), Special Collections in Memorial Library (UW-Madison), and the USAID/El Salvador Mission Library.
Donna Hornby, project leader from the Association for Rural Advancement (AFRA), made a stop at the Center to discuss her work. AFRA is an independent land rights NGO that works to redress past injustices and help the rural poor in South Africa secure land tenure.
The new resident field advisor for LTC’s Zimbabwe Land Reform and Resettlement Project II will begin work in Harare on 1 November. Pamela Pozarny has spent the last four and a half years working in Rwanda for the United Nations Development Program and Africare Rwanda. Her experience in rural development, particularly in land settlement and settlement policy, has grown through her training of consultants and government authorities, conceptualizing new programs, and coordinating land projects.
The First Peoples, Landownership, and Sustainable Resource Management project began this year under the guidance of Harvey M. Jacobs (LTC Director) and Thomas Yuill (Institute for Environmental Studies). The project plans to explore opportunities for cooperative teaching, research, and outreach on indigenous people’s rights and recent movements to re-establish traditional lands.
Two seminars were held to set a foundation for the project: "Labels and Assumptions: How What We Call Ourselves Matters" and "Land Recovery by (South) Africans and African-Americans (in the South)." Over the next few months, Marcus Lane (Urban and Regional Planning) will work on developing the future course of the project.
A schedule of discussion seminars is posted at http://www.ies.wisc.edu/ltc/firstpfl.html.
Ashraf Hussein concluded his one-month stay at the Center with a Brownbag Seminar on October 4th. Co-hosted by the African Studies Department and the Center, the seminar examined how certain villages are faring under Egypt’s new land tenure policy. Mr. Hussein described his research methods and hypothesis to the university community and received feedback on improving his final data gathering methods.
Ed Reed (‘79, Ph.D. in Development Studies) joined University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for East Asian Studies as associate director. Among many activities since receiving his doctorate, Dr. Reed has been a Fulbright Scholar in South Korea, director of research at the International Institute of Rural Reconstruction in the Philippines, and development specialist in the University Center for Cooperatives at UW-Madison. He has extensive experience in North Korea, beginning in 1991 when he traveled there as assistant director in the International Division of the American Friends Service Committee. In that capacity he worked to promote dialogue involving North Korea, South Korea, China, Japan, and the United States. In 1997, World Vision International invited Reed to head the organization’s emergency relief program for North Korea. For the past three years he has led negotiations with North Korean authorities and managed a multimillion dollar food and agricultural aid program. His familiarity with Korea will enhance UW’s expertise on East Asia.
LTC affiliate Thomas Mitchell (Law School) and Harvey M. Jacobs met with officials at the NAACP Legal Defense Fund headquarters in New York. Mitchell arranged the meeting in order to discuss potential linkages with foundations that might be interested in backing the Center’s Summer Law Extern Program. Mitchell and Jacobs detailed the activities of the Extern Program, which sends law students into the field to work with people in rural areas where lack of access to legal services places landownership at risk.
Center Director Harvey M. Jacobs will be the sole U.S. participant in a conference at the International Institute for Aerospace Survey and Earth Sciences in the Netherlands. The conference will focus on capacity building in land administration. Top researchers from around the world will discuss land administration and management, economic and social development, and environmental sustainability.
Copyright © 2000 by Land Tenure Center and Board of Regents, University of Wisconsin. All rights reserved.
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