News on Land

Decades-long legal disputes over land could cost tens of millions of dollars, research says

LONDON - Food companies doing business in Africa risk becoming bogged down in decades-long legal disputes over land that could cost tens of millions of dollars, according to a report released on Monday.

From sugar to coffee and palm oil, agribusiness firms could find that the land they are using is already claimed or occupied by local people, researchers said.

About 8 million indigenous people in India are in danger of being evicted from forests that their ancestors have lived in for millennia. This grave injustice follows a shocking supreme court ruling that rides roughshod over the rights of India’s indigenous people, known as Adivasi, or tribals.

Indigenous Náhuatl land and water defender Samir Flores Soberanes was a vocal opponent of the "Proyecto Integral Morelos" (the integral project for Morelos) in Mexico.

The project includes the construction of the 160-kilometre Morelos Gas Pipeline that would start in the state of Tlaxcala and run to the town of Huexca (in the state of Morelos) where it would supply a proposed gas-fuelled thermoelectric plant.

Scientists at the University of Bern have found a connection between rising levels of socio-economic inequality and the rates of deforestation in Latin America.  

In combination with a rising level or urbanization across Central and South America, human development is a growing threat to the lungs of the Americas. Agriculture in particular and a growing demand for meat around the globe has seen hectares of forrest replaced with farmland each year.  

The Supreme Court has directed 17 states to evict the Scheduled Tribe members and traditional forest-dwellers, whose claims to Forest Rights Act had been rejected, before July 27.

Innovation Programme Call for Proposals 2019. The Cities Alliance has launched a Call for Proposals to award small grants for innovative ways to improve tenure security, land and property rights in African cities.

The Secure Tenure in African Cities initiative

• A new UN Declaration protects peasant rights to land, seeds, and adequate incomes with an emphasis on civil and social rights.
• Peasants, which includes small-scale farmers, rural workers, fishing communities, pastoralists and landless agriculture workers, have been recognized as a vulnerable population with distinct needs for the first time ever.
• By protecting peasant rights, the new status aims to also help reduce climate change and protect biodiversity.

A few re-alignments have been made on the federal front, but following May 9th, business has continued as usual in Sarawak, the only state not to hold its local elections at the same time.

And business as usual means that those families and cronies linked to former Chief Minister and present Governor Taib Mahmud have continued to grant themselves all the concessions without restraint and suck the life’s blood from the land and its people.

Protesters seek land rights under Forest Rights Act, roll back of decision to give land to corporations for farming

Gujarat Police allegedly detained 19 members of Jamin Adhikar Jumbesh — a network of land rights organisations like Gujarat Dalit Sangathan, Saurashtra Dalit Sangathan and Adivasi Mahasabha Gujarat — on February 18, 2019, around 2 pm.

The Ainu people have long been repressed by a forced-assimilation policy which has resulted in significant income and education gaps.

After suffering decades of discrimination, Japan’s Ainu minority community will officially be recognized - for the first time - as an Indigenous people, under the country’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party-Komeito coalition.

Sougue Kadjatou is a 45-year-old farmer who lives with her husband and two children in Agboville, a village in Côte d’Ivoire. Her cocoa plantation, where she works every day from morning until early afternoon, is a forty minute walk from the village. “I’m glad they told me to plant banana and timber trees in my cocoa plantation,” she says. “It’s good to plant various trees. The bananas give me something to eat and sell, whereas the timber is a friend of the cocoa. Gives it shade.

The Constitutional Court’s October 2018 judgment was pivotal in protecting the secure land tenure by persons previously disadvantaged by apartheid laws

The current clamour for redistribution of land in SA has heightened interest in land reform and placed raging sociopolitical discourse at centre stage.