News on Land

For years, Christiana Akwabea admired the vast fields she visited in neighboring districts to buy maize for reselling and dreamed of one day owning a plot of land where she could grow the staple crop.

But there wasn’t much land for commercial farming in Seikwa in Ghana’s Bono Region, and the local soil is more suitable for cultivating cashew and yam.

Communities being able to participate on an equal basis in land governance is key to food security and inclusive development. How can securing land rights pave the way for responsible investments and what can we learn from experiences with the palm oil industry? To answer these questions we turn to West Africa where two activists are fighting for their communities’ right to land. ‘If we want to move forward, we need to share the wealth that the land brings.’

A licence to restart work at an iron ore opencast mine has been issued despite complaints of poor working conditions and dust and water pollution affecting the surrounding areas.

The second-biggest mountain in eSwatini, located in the north-east near the main border gate, is called Ngwenya because, at first glance, it looks like a crocodile. On its crown is a massive man-made crater, and on its side is a small hollow big enough to shelter a pride of lions, called the Lion Cavern.

The government recently requested a change in administrative boundaries between Phnom Penh and Kandal province by re-allocating 302ha from Kandal’s Takhmao town to the capital’s Dangkor district.

A letter signed by Prime Minister Hun Sen and sent to acting head of state Say Chhum on October 19 said the move will help the development of the new satellite cities of Boeung Tompun and Boeung Choeung Ek. It will also make the management of the district more efficient and improve public services.

The first ever global dataset that quantifies tenure insecurity puts Botswana in a category of countries with the highest land and property insecurity.In terms of the Prindex, a methodology for measuring tenure security for land and property around the globe, more than 30 percent of Botswana’s adults (18+ years of age) feel insecure about their land or property rights. In terms of the Prindex, which was developed by a London think tank, more than 30 percent represents extremely high levels of insecurity.

WHILE the principle of land reform in Zimbabwe was primarily to address the skewed legacy of colonial land ownership imbalances, the late former president Robert Mugabe and his family engaged in greedy accumulation of farms establishing themselves as the new landed aristocracy.

Owen Gagare

By the time of his death on 6 September 2019, Mugabe had became a top land baron with 24
farms in violation of his regime’s one-man-one-farm policy.

Can Sri Lanka live up to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s environmental commitments?

Main photo: The yak (Bos grunniens and Bos mutus) is a long-haired bovid found throughout the Himalaya region of south Central Asia, the Tibetan Plateau and as far north as Mongolia and Russia. (Used under Creative Commons license) Flickr/Arian Zwegers

An innovative community-based forest management policy has resolved a long-simmering land-use conflict between migratory yak herders and sedentary residents in a remote area of Bhutan.

Greenpeace slams Indonesia for lack of action against the palm oil sector as vast areas of forests burned in five years.

Main photo: Burned land is pictured next to a palm oil plantation after fires near Banjarmasin in South Kalimantan province, Indonesia [File: Willy Kurniawan/Reuters]

Maseru, Lesotho, 23 October 2020 – The African Risk Capacity (ARC) Group and the Government of the Kingdom of Lesotho have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to address persistent climate risks and scale up national disaster risk management and financing efforts.

As indigenous campaigner Alessandra Munduruku wins the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, she says the Amazon is 'crying for help

SAO PAULO, Oct 22 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Alessandra Munduruku, a leader of Brazil's Munduruku indigenous community, has seen her home broken into and been threatened over her work defending her people and their Amazon land from illegal miners and loggers, hydropower plants and other threats.