Land Tenure Center Newsletter
Number 83, Spring 2002, p.6-7
A new group of Community Land Specialists completed training at the Center. These specialists assist their neighbors with land-related issues and provide help to minority communities that often have little access to legal services, including African-, Latino-, and Native-American communities. This year’s group is from Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, New Mexico, North Carolina, North Dakota, Texas, and Wisconsin. The Center’s Brenda Haskins oversees the program, which is part of the Center for Minority Land and Community Security at Tuskegee University. Funding comes from USDA’s Fund for Rural America. The goal is to enhance and empower minority rural communities by addressing critical land tenure issues.
Center and UW experts were invited to participate in each of the World Bank’s regional workshops on land issues. To help prepare for the upcoming Policy Research Report on Land Issues, the Bank and host countries organized workshops in Eastern Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. David Stanfield attended the workshop in Hungary. Malcolm Childress and Michael Carter (Agricultural and Applied Economics) attended the workshop in Cambodia. Michael Roth attended the workshop in Uganda. Carter also attended the workshop in Mexico. Tidiane Ngaido, a UW Ph.D. graduate and now a senior researcher at IFPRI, delivered a paper at the Africa workshop.
St. Olaf College founded the Kloeck-Jenson Endowment for Peace and Justice, funded by friends and family of Scott and Barbara Kloeck-Jenson. Scott and Barbara died in 1999, along with their two children, in a car accident in South Africa. Scott was a doctoral candidate at UW and managed the Center’s research project in Mozambique. Through the Peace Corps and later work in Africa, Scott and Barbara were dedicated to world peace and justice. The endowment provides opportunities for students and faculty at St. Olaf to improve global equality, much as Scott and Barbara dedicated their lives to doing. Sargent Shriver, one of the founders of Peace Corps, delivered a letter that was read at the endowment ceremony.
The Center is helping the Republic of Chad and other countries in the Sahel region of Africa establish “land tenure observatories.” As part of this effort, Koulassim Doumtangar, a librarian at the University of N’Djaména in Chad, came to the Center for training. The Sahel has suffered prolonged droughts, and conflicts over land and resources are on the rise in the region. Land tenure observatories will be university-based centers of research, training, and technical assistance meant to help countries in the Sahel improve natural resource management, achieve sustainable development, and reduce conflicts. Working with the Center’s Beverly Phillips, Mr. Koulassim was trained on the diverse services the observatories will provide researchers in the Sahel.
The right to own and control land lies at the heart of what it means to be a citizen of the United States, but tensions are growing between private property rights and the public’s right to use land for the public good. The Center co-sponsored a public forum on this issue: “Who Owns the Land? The Future of Private Property in Wisconsin.” Center Director Harvey M. Jacobs was a featured speaker.
The Center continued its training of high-ranking Russian land management officials in order to help Russia develop real estate markets for the first time. Russian experts have been coming to the Center to study general characteristics of land markets, land valuation, methods of taxation, mortgage, and credit. The head of the second delegation in February was Deputy Chairperson of the Russian Federation Land Cadastral Service. The 11 others chosen for training were among those who will have the most impact implementing a successful land market in Russia. Faculty and staff from the Department of Agricultural and Applied Economics, the Business School, and the Law School presented seminars and worked individually with the visitors.
The Center co-sponsored a symposium on the challenges facing North Korea’s effort to increase its engagement with the international community through trade, investment, and broader diplomatic relations. Speakers debated how extensive and serious this effort is, what lessons from other socialist countries can be applied, and how countries such as China, Japan, and the United States can encourage North Korea’s engagement with the world community. The Center’s Harvey M. Jacobs was a moderator, and Ed Reed (East Asian Studies) was one of the key speakers. (See LTC Newsletter 81, Spring 2001 for Reed’s article on North Korea’s agricultural sector.) The Center’s David Stanfield presented lessons from socialist and former socialist states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia.
The Center’s Malcolm Childress, Michael Roth, and David Stanfield delivered a seminar on “Strategies and Lessons: Management of Land-Based Conflicts” to USAID’s Office of Democracy and Governance. The online newsletter Democracy Dialogue will summarize the key findings of that presentation.
While visiting Kellogg Foundation projects in Mexico, Herman Felstehausen (Urban and Regional Planning) discovered an interesting conception of “sustainable development.” Low- and modest-income Mexican families have learned that it is not possible to make a living from low-paying wage jobs, and so “sustainable” in Mexico is starting to mean the development of a multiple income strategy involving the whole family. The key is to produce part of the family food supply in backyard parcels. These systems have spread nationwide; they are low tech and have greatly increased the value of family labor. Millions of households are involved in these sustainable-survival strategies. Felstehausen was working with colleagues from the World Bank and El Colegio de Postgraduados in Montecillo. The director of El Colegio received his Ph.D. from UW.
Suriname’s Ministry of Natural Resources is modernizing its land administration and land use planning. Like many countries in the Caribbean, Suriname’s land tenure system includes a large sector of state-owned land rented out under long-term leasehold contracts, a holdover of its Dutch colonial heritage. Together with Buursink International, the Center participated in a feasibility study that looked at the legal, institutional, economic, and technical aspects of Suriname’s current land administration. The Center’s Malcolm Childress focused on economic constraints to a more dynamic land market, and Susana Lastarria-Cornhiel examined institutional and equity tenure issues. A particularly difficult problem Suriname faces is the recognition of customary tenure systems as practiced by Maroon and Amerindian societies in the interior of the country.
The Center’s Michael Roth organized and chaired “Recreating or Losing Common Property? Decentralizing Rights to Land and Water in Malawi, Zimbabwe and the US,” a panel at the International Association for the Study of Common Property 9th Biennial Conference. Jane Larson (Law School) also presented at the conference.
Lydia Zepeda (Consumer Science) is the new chairperson of the Ph.D. in Development Studies Program, administered by the Center. Recently, Zepeda was awarded a fellowship at UW’s Center for World Affairs and Global Economics for her work on “Alternative Food Demand in the US and Australia.” Marion Brown (Life Sciences Communication) stepped down as chair.
Ibtisam Ibrahim, graduate of the Center’s Ph.D. in Development Studies Program, returned to the Center to give an informal talk on events in Israel as they touch on her own life as a Palestinian living and working there. Dr. Ibrahim held a Post-Doc fellowship at the Sociology Department at Tel Aviv University. Currently, she is a visiting scholar at the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, University of Pennsylvania.
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