Framing LT and RITI within territorial development approaches

Three ideas can be considered when it comes to analyzing the relationship between land tenure and the RITI approach in the light of the debates on rural development in the past decades and based on the Brazilian case. Addressing the debate about RITI within an agri-food system perspective is very welcome as it represents a step further in relation to previous approaches focusing solely on agricultural productivity growth. However, some caution is necessary:

1) There is a risk involving a potential "missing link" regarding territorial development theories, that were fundamental in the previous decade. Without recovering the learnings from that cycle, the agri-food system framework can incur in an agricultural sectoral perspective (and its limits), even if under a systemic approach. This has consequences for the ways we can analyze land tenure.

2) Current structural transformations suggest a growing process of heterogenization/differentiation of the relationships between agriculture and other economic sectors in a post-industrial world. Even urbanization has not only one form. Consequently, there are multiple possibilities for territorial configurations involving the interdependencies between land tenure and other domains of social and economic life. This idea of multiple configurations invites us to pay attention not only on the analysis of "impacts" of land tenure over specific dimensions, according to a linear approach (productivity, income, demands, multipliers) - we need to focus on the "interdependencies" between land tenure and other variables, such as local markets and rural-urban linkages and its multiple possibilities of combination, with corresponding different effects for resilience and inclusion.

3) The Brazilian case is an example of heterogeneity patterns (between countries and within the country) and of how land tenure needs to be seen as a crucial variable, since combined with others. In Brazil, land tenure, isolated, explains inequalities, for instance, but it does not explain poverty. It depends on the other territorial variables for each territorial configuration. Such an approach can inspire new land tenure polices combined with other instruments capable of acting in the "leverage points" of territorialized socioecological systems.