A presentation focusing on facts about land and land dispossession in South Africa

This article was submitted for the UN Economic Commission for Africa “2017 Conference on Land Policy in Africa” Nov. 14-17 2017, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

This article sheds light on a series of events that triggered escalating tensions over land and resources in the coastal communities of Lagos, Nigeria. This article provides an in-depth analysis of Nigeria’s laws on expropriation and the processes of acquiring land and compensating landholders in the Lekki Free Trade Zone (LFTZ) case. Specifically, the analysis addresses the following research questions:

The book provides the history of land issues in South Africa.

London-based New Forests Company (NFC) would seem to be the design blueprint of how a young modern company should conduct a major land investment in Africa in a responsible way. Oxfam’s investigations reveal that serious allegations by people who were evicted from land to make way for NFC’s operations remain unresolved. How will the company respond?

This review critically examines the evolution of laws, policies and practices across colonial, apartheid and contemporary eras to identify the associated processes and patterns of uneven development and their contribution to the structural poverty and systemic inequality and the ways in which these are manifested in space and place. The primary focus is on the effectiveness of policies and laws shaping land tenure and governance in the democratic era and the extent to which they have been able to engage with these spatially differentiated legacies in order to promote spatial justice.

Conclusion: "Most relevant reports and surveys I have been able to access state essentially that people from all parts of Burma leave home either in obedience to a direct relocation order from the military or civil authorities or as a result of a process whereby coercive measures imposed by the authorities play a major role in forcing down household incomes to the point where the family cannot survive. At this point, leaving home may seem to be the only option.

This report is a preliminary exploration of forced migration/internal displacement in Burma/Myanmar in two main areas. The first is the status in terms of international standards, specifically those embodied in the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, of the people who leave home not because of conflict or relocation orders, but as a result of a range of coercive measures which drive down incomes to the point that the household economy collapses and people have no choice but to leave home.

These mixed pieces from various parts of Burma, including Mon areas, show that coercive measures and other problems which may lead to displacement are ongoing. Reporting by the Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) and the Human Rights Foundation of Monland (HURFOM).

This report seeks to contribute to greater understanding of how people respond to and resist land dispossession. Regardless of the context or mechanisms of dispossession, victims face common experiences of marginalisation and the failure to respect human rights. It contains detailed case studies on Angola, Colombia, Sierra Leone and Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory. The aim of the report is not to draw parallels between these vastly different contexts, rather it seeks to examine resistance to dispossession and replacement.

Includes economic dispossession: neoliberal trade agreements; twenty-first-century land grabs: accumulation by rural dispossession; problems with the growing global emphasis on large farms.

Contributes to the research gap on host country governance dynamics by synthesizing results and lessons from 38 case studies conducted in Ethiopia, Ghana, Nigeria, and Zambia. It shows how and why large-scale farmland investments are often synonymous with displacement, dispossession, and environmental degradation and, thereby, highlights 7 outcome determinants that merit more explicit treatment in academic and policy discourse.