Main photo: Bangladesh’s side of the no-man’s land separating the country from India, Lalmonirhat district has been sitting idle for years but just over the edge, sprawling tea plantations are seen in the neighbouring nation. Considering the economic benefits of tea farming in these lands, local farmers have called for more public and private investment in this regard. This photo was taken in the Angorpota area of Patgram upazila in Lalmonirhat recently. Photo: S Dilip Roy

• Singapore has launched a reforestation campaign after losing huge amounts of mangrove habitats in the past century.

• It plans to plant 1 million trees within 10 years to improve living conditions for wildlife and people.

• The scheme began in March 2020 and had led to the planting of 51,819 trees by October 2021.

• One goal of the project is to have all Singaporean households approximately a 10-minute walk from a park.

This LANDac session drew on the Land Portal Foundation’s experience working at the crossroads of land governance and open data. With the recent launch of the Land Module, a first of its kind global index on land data, it was a good moment to pause, reflect, and take lessons from the work that we have done with the Global Data Barometer, Open Data Charter, and Open Government Partnership have done over the past 2.5 years. One of our core beliefs is that land data that is open and accessible can benefit all stakeholders and make land governance more democratic.

April and May 2022 will be remembered as the most important months in the post-independence era. During this short period the much hoped for people’s awakening expressed itself powerfully. People who wielded authority failed to see the writing on the wall although the wall was just next to the Presidential Secretariat and everywhere in the country. Prime Minister Mahinda Rajapaksa thought he was merely seeing ghosts. President Gotabaya Rajapaksa believed in the comforting words of his friends despite knowing that the treasury was empty.

• A total of 17.6 million hectares (43.5 million acres) of Indigenous territories in Indonesia, an area half the size of Germany, have been demarcated under an independent initiative that began in 2010.
• The mapping is seen as the first step for Indigenous communities in the long and complicated process of applying for official government recognition of their land rights.
• But government efforts continue to lag behind this initiative, with the state to date only recognizing 15% of the territories demarcated by the latter.
• At the loc

Local residents of Gaur, Rautahat, have lamented the failure of police administration to arrest people involved in a plot to capture the land of Gaur Rice Mills, including a government employee who confessed he forged official documents.

Set up in 1946, the mill was closed after 22 years due to various reasons. As the mill could never resume operation, its land was being used as playground and programme venue for political parties and other organisations.

Photo: South Sudan's Deputy Minister for Foreign and International Cooperation Deng Dau Deng Malek met Agriculture Minister Muhammad Abdur Razzaque in Dhaka on Tuesday. Photo: Collected

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African country South Sudan wants to lease its vast fallow land to Bangladesh for producing crops.

South Sudan's Deputy Minister for Foreign and International Cooperation Deng Dau Deng Malek placed the proposal in a meeting with Agriculture Minister Muhammad Abdur Razzaque in Dhaka today.

The Netherlands Enterprise and Development Agency (RVO) and the Somalia department of the Netherlands Embassy (EKN) in Kenya are pleased to announce their collaboration with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), the UN Development Programme (UNDP), UN-Habitat and the Regional Coordination Office (RCO) in Somalia in the context of the Saameynta-programme. ‘Saameynta – scaling up solutions to displacement in Somalia’ will be implemented over a period of four years (2022-2024) and the LAND-at-scale contribution amounts to 2 million euro.

The Netherlands Enterprise & Development Agency (RVO) is pleased to announce its collaboration with the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (EKN) in Bujumbura, ZOA, VNG International and MiPAREC for the implementation of a LAND-at-scale project in Burundi “Amahoro @ Scale - An integrated approach towards improved tenure security and land governance in Burundi”. The intervention will run until 2025 and has a budget of 2.8 million Euros.

Burundi’s land challenges

Banner photo: Since most of the evicted families were Bengali-speaking Muslims, it was alleged that they are illegal immigrants who had forcibly occupied government land as well as land of indigenous people and also settled on grazing land. (PTI PHOTO.)