News on Land

Monrovia - Amid the prolonged delay in the passage of the Land Rights Act into law, the Civil Society Working Group on land rights in collaboration with its partners are doing everything possible to ensure the passage of the act.

The group, in collaboration with the Rights and Rice Foundation on Monday, May 2, held a one-day national consultation dialogue with many organizations on the passage of the draft Land Rights Act.

As the powers that be in Sipasarubali, Odisha work to take over forest land to build a beach resort, villagers who are trying to fight them are under attack.

Puri, Odisha: On April 28, a friend and I went to Gola and Gopinathpur villages in Odisha to meet activists who, in the early 1990s, had been successful in stalling Tata’s proposed integrated shrimp farm project. As we were leaving, we learnt about an attack on a group of women land rights activists, six of whom had sustained grievous injuries.

A group of indigenous leaders in northeastern Brazil came under a brutal attack late Sunday by ranchers in a violent escalation of territorial disputes. The attack is the latest in a string of sometimes deadly assaults on activists.

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Rodrigo Tot is a 60-year-old farmer and an indigenous land rights activist from Guatemala. He represents an isolated, small Q’eqchi farming and fishing community of about 270 members in the long-running fight to secure legal ownership over their communal lands.

Tot and his community stood up to the government and nickel miners expanding into their land in Agua Caliente.

And now he's won one of the world's most prestigious activism awards, the Goldman Environmental Prize.

"I would come back to live here if I could," said Altair Guimarães, plucking a guava from a fruit tree that survived the re-development of Rio de Janeiro's once-thriving Vila Autodromo community, all but razed by the 2016 Olympics project.

Guimarães, 61, was evicted from his home two years ago and today the trees, a church and two rows of small white houses are all that remain of the neighbourhood on Rio's western fringe.

These innovations did not exist in 2010 when heavy flooding devastated the area, destroying crops, ecosystems and more than 20,000 homes.

The town of El Torno, in Colombia's northern province of Sucre, was seriously affected by flooding, which destroyed crops and homes, but today the community of 600 residents is an example of resilience and sustainable adaptation to climate change.

Tina Anyango (not her real name) aged 28 is a widow living in Kuoyo Kaila, East seme Ward in Kisumu County. She is living with HIV which robbed her off the man she had lived with and loved for the past eight years. Her husband’s death left her solely responsible for their two children. To meet their needs, she depended on a one-acre piece of land she and her husband used to do farming together.

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

Today, on Earth Day, we examine how climate-smart solutions hold the key to lifting people out of poverty.

We have been sharing the faces of the hunger crisis  in East Africa — bringing you the human stories that have sprung from devastating climate disasters in countries like Somalia, Kenya, and Ethiopia.

Campesinos producing coca, opium poppies and marijuana in Latin America try to make a living but become victims of a drug war.

Faced with few other viable alternatives for growing profitable legal crops, many campesinos have relied on growing marijuana, coca and opium poppies to help them survive, but are subjected the rules of the state and organized crime groups.

ASOLOKOBAL, Indonesia — Laurensius Lani’s footsteps can be heard at dawn alongside the traditional honay thatched-roof houses of the Baliem Valley, here in the archipelago country’s eastermost Papua province.