From forced displacement to conflict over resources, the coronavirus pandemic has created a “perfect storm” for land rights abuses - and the situation is likely to worsen, researchers and activists warned on Thursday.

The migration of men to rural areas due to lockdowns and job losses has increased competition over land, with a disproportionate impact on woman, said organisers of a land rights webinar.

Concession to extract timber from 148,000 hectares in upper Baram was granted despite repeated objections from local communities.

Main photo: Communities like Long Tungan are working hard to find a way to protect their lands and save some of the most valuable carbon and biodiversity stocks we have left. Photo courtesy of The Borneo Project.

• Lawmakers in Indonesia want to question pulp and paper company PT Arara Abadi about its dispute with an Indigenous community in Sumatra that resulted in a member of the community being jailed on dubious charges.
• The company has held the concession to the land since 1996, but the Sakai Indigenous tribe have lived and farmed there since 1830, and claim ancestral rights to the area.

• Sierra Leone is among the poorest countries in the world. In the 1990s, when other African countries were privatizing key industries in order to attract foreign investment and become eligible for international loans, a civil war was raging in Sierra Leone that prevented the country from taking part in the controversial structural adjustment programs initiated by the World Bank and the Inter-national Monetary Fund.

• Mbonjo sits in the heart of Cameroon’s country’s largest oil palm and rubber-producing region. In 2000, state-owned oil palm plantations around the village were acquired by Société Financière des Caoutchoucs (Socfin), a Belgian holding company that operates palm oil and rubber plantations through dozens of subsidiaries across Africa and Southeast Asia.

A giant Vietnamese agribusiness company is destroying indigenous land in Cambodia’s Ratanakkiri province, said a joint press release from Equitable Cambodia and Inclusive Development International that was published on Monday.

The human rights groups wrote that many indigenous people in Cambodia’s Ratanakkiri province have been waiting for years for the Vietnamese rubber company, Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL), to finally return their sacred land, as had been promised by a 2015 mediation agreement.

• A court in Indonesia has sentenced two indigenous farmers to eight and 10 months in prison respectively for harvesting palm fruit from land whose ownership is contested by the community and a palm oil firm, PT Hamparan Masawit Bangun Persada.
• The ruling appeared to ignore evidence showing that the villagers are the rightful owners of the land; the defendants say they will appeal and also file a lawsuit against the company.

While indigenous communities in Cambodia stayed home to stem the Covid-19 outbreak, a Vietnamese rubber firm bulldozed their land. Experts say disputes arising from Cambodia's complicated land management system will be difficult to resolve.

When the indigenous Kreung and Kachok communities locked down their villages in Cambodia’s Ratanakiri province in March to keep safe from the novel coronavirus, no one knew change was afoot in their ancestral forest.

Last year the world lost some 119,000 square kilometers (45,946 square miles) of tree cover – an area the size of Nicaragua – according to satellite data collated by the University of Maryland (UMD) released today by World Resources Institute (WRI). Almost a third of that loss – or an area the size of Switzerland – came from primary humid tropical forests, which house most of the planet’s plant and animal species and play an important role in climate regulation.

A Vietnamese agribusiness company in eastern Cambodia has illegally cleared old-growth forests, wetlands and spiritual sites on land that it pledged to return to indigenous communities. The land move reneges on promises the company, Hoang Anh Gia Lai, made in a mediation process with the World Bank.

New reports from eastern Cambodia say a Vietnamese rubber company has illegally cleared swaths of land in Ratanakiri province belonging to local indigenous communities, in violation of a World Bank-mediated agreement to return the land to local residents. 

Communities in biodiverse Tanintharyi Region are spurning big, top-down projects and seeking recognition for their own approach to conservation.

From its forested borderlands in the east, to vast mangrove forests and hundreds of island ecosystems in the Andaman Sea to the west, Tanintharyi Region is a bastion of nature and biodiversity. The region is home to one of the largest remaining expanses of intact low-elevation evergreen forest in Southeast Asia, a stronghold for endangered and endemic species including tigers, tapirs and pangolins.

Authorities in Laos’ Luang Prabang province arrested three rural villagers for trespassing after they tried to mine gold on land granted in a concession to a Chinese company, RFA has learned.

The villagers, from Phapon village in Luang Prabang’s Pak Ou district, were initially detained by Chinese employees of the Thian Chin Huakjan-Lao mining company. The Lao authorities arrived later to take them in. They were accused of illegally mining gold on the concession land.