News on Land

• Last week on May 4, two bodyguards were wounded when armed gunmen tried to storm a meeting of Afro-Colombian activists that included 2018 Goldman Prize winner Francia Márquez.
• The community leaders had been meeting to discuss future actions following a massive land rights protests last month in Colombia’s Cauca region in which one protester was killed by armed forces.
• In March and April, Afro-Colombian activists participated in an indigenous-led protest with 20,000 people against the government’s environmental and social policies.

Through collective action, environmental protection can be achieved. This is what the Kalinga indigenous people in the Philippines demonstrated to the world when they stopped the famous Chico River Dam Project from being constructed, and it is what inspired Joan Carling to make her lifelong mission fighting for human rights in land development.

West Africa's native rosewood was listed as endangered last year following a huge increase in trade driven by Chinese demand

GAMAMADU, Guinea-Bissau - Before the ban, Chinese loggers drove straight through Gamamadu village to harvest its most important resource: the rosewood forest.

"So many Chinese came here. We were praying for a means to stop it," said Braima Djassi, a small, white-haired farmer in the village in central Guinea-Bissau, a tiny country in West Africa.

• The now-concluded investigative series “Indonesia for Sale” examined the corruption underpinning Indonesia’s land rights and climate crisis in unparalleled depth.
• The series was a collaboration between Mongabay and The Gecko Project, an investigative journalism initiative founded at Earthsight in 2017.

Land ownership and income inequality remain highly emotive subjects more than two decades after the end of apartheid in South Africa

JOHANNESBURG, May 7 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The South African government's promises of returning land to black South Africans taken during apartheid are under the spotlight during national elections this Wednesday, land experts said.

The findings of the first-ever Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services are important in the light of the ongoing Supreme Court case against Forest Rights Act

Biodiversity is declining everywhere at an unprecedented rate, but this rate is lower in areas where indigenous people own land, according to the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services’ (IPBES) Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

Far-right Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s personal crusade to extinguish indigenous rights and devastate indigenous territories just hit a wall. Two, actually. Both Brazil’s Supreme Court and Brazil’s top congressional leaders handed Bolsonaro setbacks over his executive decision to move control of protecting indigenous lands to the agriculture ministry, which is controlled by members of the agribusiness lobby known for its opposition to indigenous land rights.

Myrna Cunningham is the first Miskitu woman to study at a university. In 1973, she received a degree in medicine and returned to her home region in the isolated northeast of Nicaragua, where she was born in a small village surrounded by lush forest. Working as a surgeon, she served in more than one hundred remote villages.

• In Niger, where agriculture is the main source of income, the message is simple: Losing your soil means losing your livelihood.
• The ability to grow food is inextricably linked to the productive capacity of the soil. In the case of Niger’s soil, the picture is bleak: The soils hold poor structural stability, low nutrient holding capacity, low water retention capacity… the list goes on.
• How can soil management be improved in a region that has little to no resources?

PRESIDENT John Mangufuli has smelt a rat in the distribution of 5,975 hectares of land repossessed from Kaunga and Mbarali rice farms and directed Mbeya regional authorities to submit the names of all beneficiaries to his office. The land in question meant for ditribution to villagers in the area but President Magufuli suspected that it could have landed in wrong hands. 

BOGOTA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Guatemala’s subsistence farmers and indigenous people living in poor rural communities are most affected by rising temperatures and unpredictable rainfall linked to climate change, a leading researcher said on Friday.

Poverty makes the Central American country highly vulnerable to the impact of global warming that damages harvests and causes food shortages, said Edwin Castellanos, lead author of a report by the Guatemalan System of Climate Change Sciences (SGCCC).