The People's Movement for a Just Society (P-Move), a grassroots group campaigning for land rights for the rural poor, has asked the government to help 486 communities that are waiting for land title deeds.
These forest dwellers, who have been living on national park land for generations, now find their homes are classified as encroaching on protected land following policy changes over the past 30 years.
PETALING JAYA: The Orang Asli community in Grik today claimed that the Perak government has encroached onto their land to carry out logging, barely a month after Putrajaya sued the Kelantan government for a similar alleged infraction.
Villagers from Kampung Tasik Cunex Grik have set up a blockade to prevent lorries from ferrying felled timber from entering the area.
On Feb 1, they lodged a police report on the matter.
They also claim the logging company and the Perak Forestry Department are threatening them.
The suit seeks the legal recognition of the Temiar Orang Asli's land rights
BANGKOK, Jan 18 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The Malaysian government said on Friday it would sue the local government of Kelantan state for failing to uphold the land rights of its indigenous people, a move that activists said was unprecedented and that could lead to more protection measures.
HATIYA, Bangladesh, Jan 14 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Ferdousi Akter's family struggled to survive after a crumbling riverbank forced them to abandon their home and move to a new part of the island where they live, off the Bangladesh coast.
Her husband worked as a day labourer on fishing boats but earned too little to cover their expenses.
Just over a year ago, however, the five-member Akter family was one of 45 households offered land on Hatiya Island under a decade-long free lease by the Bangladesh Forest Department.
When the water reached some of Kisiwa Panza's graveyards, people found themselves scrambling to protect the remains of their friends and families
KISIWA PANZA, Tanzania - First, the encroaching sea started eating away at homes and killing crops on the small island of Kisiwa Panza. Then the rising tides began bringing up the dead.
For over 25 years, rising seas linked to climate change have caused repeated flooding on this remote islet in the Tanzanian archipelago, saturating the land with saltwater.
Illegal logging and the encroachment of agriculture on the jungle, are the main drivers of the deforestation
SAO PAULO (Reuters) - The destruction of Brazil's Amazon rainforest reached its highest level in a decade this year, government data released on Friday showed, driven by illegal logging and the encroachment of agriculture on the jungle.
From the earth that Kamla Devi toils on, waves of nostalgia and pain rise to meet her. Her family once owned 18 acres of land. “I employed labourers, now I am one of them,” she says, quietly.
Kamla is from the Tharu community, a Scheduled Tribe that lives in the largest numbers in Udham Singh Nagar, a fertile district on the outer foothills of the Himalayas. Her people are counted among Uttarakhand’s earliest settlers and among its most disadvantaged.
Paraguay is home to vast swathes of wild land — forests, savannas, mountains — but over the past 20 years, it’s lost huge amounts of that. Agriculture and development have deforested 9 million acres (roughly the size of the Netherlands) in Paraguay since 2001, the majority of it to enterprises like soy and cattle.
In this series, we try to assess the consequences of laws on the people they are intended for. How do laws, framed in Delhi, impact people in the corners of India? Do people understand laws framed for them? What is their impact on the targeted people?
This is the sixth story on the intersection of law and society by Raksha Kumar.
Reclaiming tribal land rights – one stone at a time
The area of forest cleared in Colombia jumped 46% last year, data compiled by the World Resources Institute show, in an “alarming” trend
Tree loss in Colombia for 2017 jumped by 46% from 2016 to 2017, a World Resources Institute (WRI) report revealed on Wednesday. It follows a doubling of tree loss between 2001 and 2015.
ORANG Asli from six kampung have formed several blockades in Gua Musang, Kelantan, this morning to protest against the logging activities in the forest reserve which encroach into their land.
Mohd Syafiq Dendi, chairman of the customary land territory in Pos Simpor, said the protesters have set up three blockades at Chawas, Tohoi and Kuala Wok early today.
“The blockades started this morning. This is against logging and commercial farming.
“They are encroaching into Orang Asli territory. Stop the logging now,” he told The Malaysian Insight.
