News on Land

ISLA JOVAI TEJU, Paraguay (Reuters) - Rumilda Fernández’s indigenous community has long tended its ancestral lands in Paraguay, marking boundaries with an ancient system of names for trees and streams. Now, squeezed by deforestation and farming, the community is going digital to defend itself.

Fernández, 28, is one of the group’s first technology-equipped forest monitors, traversing the narrow earthen tracks of the Isla Jovai Teju community’s land to map the area with a smartphone app and GPS.

A Geographical indication (GI) label is seen as a guarantee of authenticity, which is closely connected to the land itself and can be lucrative for producers

BANGKOK, May 22 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Developing countries are increasingly using geographic labelling to boost the value of products ranging from carpets to rice, raising rural incomes and protecting farm land, according to agriculture experts and lawyers.

Despite efforts to protect them, tropical forests are dwindling at a near-record rate at a time when humanity needs them more than ever in the fight against climate change. In this interview with Eco-Business, World Resources Institute’s global forests director Rod Taylor argues that we need to rethink the balance between development and conservation.

MONROVIA –  The government of Liberia and major stakeholders in the forestland sector are developing guidelines for rural communities to accept and reject concessions targeted for their lands, a move advocates are hailing would curb land grab and strengthen the relationship between concessionaires and locals. 

Report by Mae Azango, New Narratives Correspondent

What are today’s greatest challenges to food security? Why is obesity an increasing symptom of malnutrition? How can famines be avoided?

Over the course of three weeks, students will delve into these and more questions by studying intensively theoretical aspects and debates combined with case studies and critical methods around the areas of:

1)     global food-, nutrition- and health-related challenges,

2)     globalised food systems and implications for nutrition and health and

Background

In the second triennium of its current strategy (2016-2021), ILC is changing its approach to explore new sources of funding and strengthening the capacity of its members to leverage funds for ILC platforms at country level and on specific themes linked to our 10 commitments.

An experiment conducted in Brazil in an area of Atlantic Rainforest suggests that intensive silviculture, including the use of herbicide and substantial amounts of fertilizer, is a more effective approach to promoting the regeneration of tropical forest and biomass gain than the traditional method based on manual weeding and less fertilizer.

Land redistribution through just and equitable means remains contentious in the South African political and judicial landscape. Under the apartheid rule, the distribution of land was aligned to race, with the minority white population allocated about 90% of arable and habitable land, while the majority black population was allocated the minute remainder, mainly in the homelands. Transitioning from an apartheid to a democratic state brought about the human rights laden Constitution which contains section 25 – the right property.

Indigenous communities in Nicaragua are facing violence and displacement, but agroecology is helping empower the Miskito people.

What do you do when your access to rivers, sacred sites, and forests, is cut off, especially when your whole identity has grown from a spiritual connection to nature?

When you face displacement from your native lands, discrimination, and human rights abuses, how do you survive?

This article was first published at The Lush Times.