NAGAPATTINAM, India (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Last year farmer Veeramani leased a modest plot of land from his village temple in southern India to grow rice. He borrowed 40,000 rupees ($625) to prepare the field before the rains.

Then the rains failed. Veeramani, 31, was so distressed he suffered a massive heart attack on his field and died, leaving behind his wife, Kavita, and two young daughters. He also left a sizeable debt that Kavita was not aware of.

Burned-out homes in this dry landscape have become a symbol of the tensions around Tuesday's presidential election as Kenyans prepare for the possibility of yet more deadly violence.

For more than a year now, farms and homes in Laikipia County have been under siege.

Harare - Zimbabwean war veterans have reportedly claimed that President Robert Mugabe is improperly getting credit for the controversial land reform programme, adding that the veteran leader had "no land reform policy" during the height of the reforms.

Thousands of white commercial farmers and their employees were displaced and left without sources of income during the fast-tracked agrarian reforms that were masterminded by Mugabe's administration in 2000.

What do you get from fighting for land rights in Thailand? You cannot ask Den Khamlae, 65, a prominent grassroots land rights activist. He mysteriously disappeared in a forest reserve near his rickety home in Chaiyaphum last year.

The Swiss Ambassador to Zimbabwe, Ruth Huber, says investment in will remain stagnant as long as the Harare fails to compensate whites whose farms were forcibly taken without proper dialogue.

She was speaking during the Swiss National Day Tuesday.

Huber told journalists that although investment from Switzerland has slightly increased in Zimbabwe, the difficulty has been to attract new investment in the current political and economic environment.

The Swiss envoy described the political environment as polarized.

Director-General emphasizes FAO’s commitment to support the consolidation of peace

Report from Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

05 July 2017, Rome – Colombia’s progress in using rural development as a tool to clinch peace after more than half a century of civil war can “fill the entire world with hope and knowledge,” FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva said today.

Campesinos producing coca, opium poppies and marijuana in Latin America try to make a living but become victims of a drug war.

Faced with few other viable alternatives for growing profitable legal crops, many campesinos have relied on growing marijuana, coca and opium poppies to help them survive, but are subjected the rules of the state and organized crime groups.

Putting land at the heart of radical economic transformation – a perspective from the ground

Disputes over Brazil’s farmland are growing increasingly violent, pitting farmers against the original residents of the area