This proposal is directed to the Resource Scarcity, Growth and Poverty Reduction theme. Resource scarcity is at the centre of the new geopolitics of growth and development. In global markets, scarcities have been felt in the forms of food price hikes and rising and volatile oil prices. Many investors have responded by acquiring large tracts of land in African countries in order to secure a new base from which to supply growing markets, often changing land uses and displacing existing populations in the process. There is growing evidence that this can threaten existing efforts to alleviate poverty and undermine geopolitical stability, as competition grows over access to and control of natural resources, particularly land and water on which to produce food, fuel, feed and fibre. This trend is most marked in sub-Saharan Africa, where land rights are often inadequately recognised and protected. These same countries are hungry for investment, seeing it as essential for growth, yet substantial evidence now shows that African governments are not concluding the most advantageous deals possible, leading to costs at both the local and national levels. This situation raises an urgent policy question: how can the new land investments driven by perceptions of rising global resource scarcity be used as opportunities to promote growth and reduce poverty and inequality in developing countries? This project presumes that the outcomes of such investments are contingent on their terms and the institutional arrangements that structure them. We therefore propose research that investigates the different institutional arrangements and associated business models for such investments, their respective impacts on livelihoods and resource utilisation and, beyond local level impacts, their implications for land use planning and agrarian transformation in three countries in Africa: Ghana, Kenya and Zambia. The purpose of the research is to determine what forms of investment can best promote growth and reduce poverty and inequality, while also improving the productive utilisation of natural resources for national development. Five sets of questions - elaborated further below - will frame the research: 1. Global drivers and resource scarcity: what narratives of resource scarcity are driving the new land deals and how are these understood by different actors in these deals? 2. Mapping land deals in Africa: Where are land deals happening, what forms do the deals take, who is acquiring the land, and what rights are they acquiring? 3. Historical experiences: Wwhat are the national histories of experiences with large-scale land acquisitions for agriculture, what changes in broad agrarian structures are emerging, and are these new forms of agrarian capitalism or repeats of the past? 4. Institutional arrangements: What are the pre-existing national and local institutional arrangements, what new institutional arrangements are emerging or have been established through new land deals and what forms of accumulation do these promote? 5. Livelihood impacts: What are the livelihood and food security impacts of different kinds of land transactions and institutional arrangements on rural communities, and how are these impacts socially differentiated?

In the Western Cape Province of South Africa, there is a large burden of diseases including infectious diseases HIV and TB as well as chronic diseases like hypertension, diabetes and kidney disease. Often patients have more than one condition at the same time. The Provincial Health Data Centre (PHDC) at the Department of Health collects ongoing patient information about their visits to health facilities, medicines received and laboratory tests done, in order to provide health care. Where patients consent, these health data can be used for research to better understand health conditions. Genes and DNA are unique to each individual and can affect whether they will get some diseases, how ill they will get with those illnesses, and how they respond to treatment. By understanding this relationship between DNA and diseases, individual patients will be able to receive better health care tailored to their own DNA sequence. Most of the research done on DNA and diseases until now has been done on Caucasian populations, and African patients have been poorly represented in research. This means that most health care is not optimised for Africans, even though African populations have rich genetic diversity which can provide many insights into the mechanisms of disease through biomedical research. In addition, research about genetic effects on disease have generally been conducted from the perspective of looking at a single disease and doing the analysis on who has the disease or not without taking into consideration other health conditions that the participant might also be experiencing. Recently, the H3Africa Bioinformatics Network (H3ABioNet) developed the H3Africa Illumina genotyping chip, a tool that is specifically optimised for measuring DNA variation in Africans, across the whole human genome. With the consent of research participants, health data from the PHDC can be combined with genetic data generated using the H3Africa genotyping chip, making it possible to research the relationship between DNA and different diseases in African individuals. In the first instance, this project aims to collect 700 DNA samples from consenting participants and link their DNA data to their health data from the PHDC. In this first stage it will be possible to research the more common diseases - hypertension, diabetes and kidney disease; but as the number of research participants increases in the future it will also become possible to research the less common illnesses. Updated health information will be received from the PHDC twice a year, to document all health outcomes as they occur in participants going forward. An additional benefit to this research is that it will use a participant-based approach rather than a disease-based view, researching the whole health profile of the participant instead of only looking at whether they have a single disease or not. By working in collaboration with the Department of Health, a system will be set up to return useful findings from the research so that they can be used to provide better tailored health care by the Department of Health for individuals as well as the whole population. The information will also help to inform health care in other African countries, and well as providing research insights that can help improve our understanding of disease processes across the world.

This project is directed at the Agriculture and Growth theme. In this project we will investigate how agricultural development can contribute to non-farm employment in rural areas in low-income and developing countries. A strong non-farm sector is a key aspect of sustainable rural development - especially when many do not have land and are not involved in agricultural production, and where land investments or productivity increases may lead to people being displaced out of agriculture. Yet while policymakers have long been aware of the importance of non-farm employment, they often press ahead with agricultural development plans without considering these impacts, and regularly simply assume that people who are leaving the land will automatically find employment elsewhere. It is however becoming clear that such automatic re-employment does not happen, and that increases in agricultural productivity, even where they lead to greater incomes for farmers, do not automatically stimulate non-farm employment. The links between agricultural growth and non-farm employment are not clearly understood. It has long been assumed that agricultural growth benefits non-farm employment by increasing the local demand from farmers and farm workers for goods and services, but history shows that this is not always the case. The employment benefits of agricultural growth depend on many factors -- including, crucially, the spatial organization of production, processing and marketing, and the nature of the value chains that link farmers to local and distant markets, as consumers and as producers. If these forms of organization bypass local markets, agricultural development can lead to links with distant markets being strengthened, while not contributing to the local economy. In the context of increased pressure on agricultural land, these questions are becoming increasingly important in many parts of the world. This is so particularly in Southern Africa where rural development is being affected by a host of pressures, including competition for agricultural land, the political saliency of land reform and small farmer development, and the increasing power of supermarkets. A better understanding is needed of the spatial and institutional factors that support employment-intensive rural development. PLAAS aims to address these questions by doing case study research in three countries where these issues are pressing: South Africa, Malawi and Zimbabwe. It will consider dynamics both of low-income countries (Zimbabwe and Malawi) and more 'advanced' ones (South Africa). Here, it will apply an innovative methodological approach: instead of trying to capture all these complex linkages by constructing a social accounting matrix (which has expensive data requirements and cannot capture the spatial linkages involved) the study will focus on carefully mapping actual resource flows between economic actors, 'following the money' by identifying the upstream and downstream connections that link households and enterprises to one another, and iteratively building a map of social and economic networks. It will analyse these networks using software developed for mapping social networks. In a second phase of the study, a household livelihood survey will measure the impact on employment, incomes and food security of women and men. We will use this data to build a detailed understanding of how local economic networks and value chains shape the prospects for non-farm employment. This research will be done in close co-operation with policy-making bodies and planners. The research agenda set out here touches on key issues central to the South African government's new economic growth path as well as NEPAD's Comprehensive Africa Agricultural Development Plan, and PLAAS will use the data and findings to increase policymakers' understanding of how to support non-farm employment through appropriate approaches to the spatial design of agricultural development.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.

Abstracts are not currently available in GtR for all funded research. This is normally because the abstract was not required at the time of proposal submission, but may be because it included sensitive information such as personal details.