News on Land

THE government has been forced to reintroduce its defunct Agricultural Finance Corporation (AFC) after financial institutions grouped under the Bankers Association and resolved not to accept the state-issued 99-year farm leases.

Agriculture Minister Anxious Masuka said his government had over the past 10 years held discussions with senior bank executives as they dangled a carrot for the bankers to finance the state issued 99-year farm leases.

The government’s proposal is that the farm leases will enable resettled farmers to access financial loans and boost production.

Augur Investments through its chief operations officer Tatiana Aleshina has implicated President Emmerson Mnangagwa in the land dispute in which the City of Harare entered into agreement with the company.

In a sworn affidavit before the High Court in response to Harare North legislator Norman Markham, Savings Scheme and Jacob Pikicha High Court application (case number HC 425/21) seeking reversal of the agreement, Aleshina implicated the President, the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission and legal affairs Permanent Secretary Ms Virginia Mabhiza.

Dzuds, a weather phenomenon characterized by extreme cold, used to be unusual. Now, they’re becoming the new normal.

DALANZADGAD, UMNUGOVI PROVINCE, MONGOLIA — Clouds gather in the moody winter sky, and the wind picks up. As the temperature plummets, sheep and goats turn from the pasture where they were grazing to huddle in the shelter of a shed.

Avec un million de tonnes produites par les hévéas ivoiriens, le pays assure 80 % de la production africaine. Un succès obtenu en une décennie à peine, et qui permet à la Cote d'ivoire d'espérer renforcer sa filière de transformation du caoutchouc.

Trend of large once green swathes of land turned into concrete jungles in recent years has environmentalists concerned

FAISALABAD, Pakistan

A mounting housing crunch is fast devouring Pakistan's agricultural lands, which may have cascading effects on the country's food security in years to come.

Since the 1980s, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) manages and publishes the AGROVOC Multilingual Thesaurus, which thematically covers FAO’s areas of interest with more than 39 000 concepts and 800 000 terms organized hierarchically. When launched, AGROVOC was made available in three languages – English, Spanish and French – and its purpose was to serve as a terminology for the indexing of publications in agricultural science and technology.

Kyrgyzstan has received swathes of land while granting Uzbeks control over irrigation resources.

Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan have agreed on a treaty that should, its signatories hope, spell an end to the recurrent territorial disputes that have pitted border communities against one another.

The Sri Lankan army and forestry department has continued its ban on Tamil villagers of North Nedungeeni Vedivaithakal in Vavuniya from entering the village. 

Although residents in the area have proof of their lands, the army has set up camp in the village and continues to prevent people from entering the area. Some 15 families who attempted to clear their own land to relocate there using a permit from the Divisional Secretary, were denied entry by the army and the forestry department. 

Improving tenure of forests by Indigenous and Tribal Peoples can lower deforestation rates and biodiversity loss, avoiding C02 emissions, but more investment is urgently needed to address rising threats.

The Balochistan High Court (BHC), in a landmark judgment, has declared that the ‘unsettled land’ of Pakistan’s largest province belongs to the indigenous tribes and not the provincial government.

Despite its low population, the Balochistan province is the biggest federating unit of Pakistan in terms of its size, making up for 43 percent of the country’s total area. 90 percent of the total area of Balochistan is unsettled and undocumented land, according to The Express Tribune.

LAND-at-scale has started to work in Colombia on land formalization through a Fit for purpose approach in Indigenous and Afro-Colombian communities. The project is based on previous work by Kadaster International, who piloted the Fit for Purpose methodology successfully in Colombia.