NEW DELHI, Jun 12 2017 (IPS) - In Meghalaya, India’s northeastern biodiversity hotspot, all three major tribes are matrilineal. Children take the mother’s family name, while daughters inherit the family lands.

Because women own land and have always decided what is grown on it and what is conserved, the state not only has a strong climate-resistant food system but also some of the rarest edible and medicinal plants, researchers said.

 Globally, principles for responsible investment in agriculture and food system, requires respecting, protecting, and promoting human rights, including the progressive realization of the right to adequate food, in the context of national food security. This is in line with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other human rights instruments and protocols.

International principles, protocols that safeguard land rights

Frustrated over the pace of housing delivery and poor living conditions in informal settlements in South Africa, a group of people from informal settlements in Tshwane municipality in May gathered to protest poor, overcrowded living conditions.

The Indigenous community has demanded that authorities investigate the killing.

An Indigenous community leader in Mexico has been assassinated alongside his brother, Mexico’s La Jornada newspaper, as the country’s human rights situation continues to spark national and international alarm just days after the murder of a renowned veteran journalist.

SANTIAGO, May 18 2017 (IPS) - Water at high prices, sold as a market good, and small farmers almost a species in extinction, replaced by seasonal workers, are the visible effects of the crisis in rural Chile, 50 years after a land reform which postulated that “the land is for those who work it.”

 A Brazilian congressional commission, led by a powerful farming lobby, has recommended dismantling the National Indian Foundation, or FUNAI, indigenous rights agency following a land boundary investigation.

The commission suggested FUNAI, which is run by anthropologists, should be replaced with an agency run by the Brazilian Ministry of Justice.

Critics have slammed the suggestion, arguing dismantling FUNAI would empower farmers who seek to use more land in the Amazon rainforest, Jornal O Globo reported.

Rights to land for women have been enshrined in law in Zimbabwe, but the practice of law in reality often has not delivered women’s empowerment and rights. This must change, but how?

Sixty percent of Zambians are small-scale farmers, who make up many of the nation's poorest people but produce 85 percent of its food

LONDON, May 12 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Zambia's smallholder farmers could be made squatters on their own land as the country opens up to farming multinationals in an effort to boost its economy, said a United Nations expert.

Guarani-Kaiowá leader Ladio Veron is touring Europe to raise awareness of violence and environmental destruction by agribusiness

“They use tractors with big chains to cut down everything.” Ladio Veron, leader of the Guarani-Kaiowá people, is describing the expansion of agribusiness in Brazil.

The Father Ring Parish Hall in Punta Gorda will be the venue for a lecture on the CCJ’s judgement in the Maya Leaders Alliance case that was brought against the Attorney General of Belize. The initiative is a collaboration between the National Garifuna Council and the Impact Justice Project. Sandra Miranda is the President of the National Garifuna Council.

SANDRA MIRANDA

More than 200 SC and ST farmers in Telangana have for the first time in the last 70 years got legal rights over their land, thanks to a land rights project. And community participation was the mantra that made it possible

The Ministry Lands and Resettlement has made significant strides in driving the land distribution programme through the willing buyer-willing seller model since the country attained independence.

This was revealed by the Ministry’s public relations officer Chrispin Matongela who also added that Government spent a whooping N$240 million to acquire land for resettlement in the last financial year.