The Land Portal published a new country portfolio for Tajikistan as part of our Country Insights initiative.  The initiative seeks to expand knowledge about how countries govern their land, the challenges they face, and the innovative solutions they find to manage land tenure issues. 

BY NOFALIA NURFITRIANI AND APRILIA AMBARWATI

Original source: https://indonesiaatmelbourne.unimelb.edu.au/does-indonesia-really-need-a-land-bank/

Environmental policy interventions often result in conflicts because they fail to recognize people’s identity and sense of belongings, as shaped through the places where they live. A recent paper explores a case study of a palm oil project in East Kalimantan, Indonesia, in which competing claims of recognition and land rights have led to conflict between transmigrants and indigenous Kutai people.

In Dr. Tajamul Haque’s untimely demise on 2nd May, India has lost a scholar policy maker, a champion of the causes of farmers, tribal, an advocate of land rights for women and dalits and a messiah for marginal farmers and tenants. With his departure, farmers lost a tireless, fearless advocate at the echelon of power corridors, while for ministers and secretaries, gone now is a highly knowledgeable yet an unassuming pragmatic advisor.

Marc Wegerif, of the Human Economy Program within the Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship at University of Pretoria, was presenting at the 2019 Conference on Land Policy in Africa (CLPA) in Abidjan Cote d’Ivoire on 28^th November 2019. The theme of the CLPA was “Winning the fight against Corruption in the Land Sector: Sustainable Pathway for Africa’s Transformation”.

The passing of the Land Expropriation Without Compensation bill by the South African parliament with overwhelming support by the ruling African National Congress (ANC) and the radical Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) has instigated uncertainties in the country's property rights and agricultural production.

It has been decades since Africa’s independence, and the peasants (rural land cultivators) are still suffering. How did Africa ignore the agricultural sector, after the peasants ushered the continent’s independence? Agriculture has become Africa’s “sunset” sector making the continent the most impoverished region, with over 70% rural poverty, heavy dependence on donor food aid valued at over US$ 51 million annually and high rates of unemployment.  At least Africa is now embarking on agrarian reforms after years of neo-colonialism.    

We meet Rosalía in a roadside café in a dusty town in the Quiché department, in Guatemala’s Western Highlands. She lowers her voice whenever people come in – you never know who might be listening. Land is sensitive stuff, especially in Quiché, a region that still bears, perhaps more than any other part of Guatemala, the scars of the civil war (1960-1996) – as we will see. In 2018 alone, 15 defenders of land rights in Guatemala have been killed with total impunity, several of them in Quiché.

Of late, land has increasingly been figuring into the development sector, for both positive and negative reasons.

There is no doubt that land use and reforms are at the heart of Kenya’s political and economic future stability. In Kenya in particular, land has a central position in Kenya’s social, economic and political history. An estimated 75% of the country’s population depends on land for their livelihoods, making the ownership, management and control of the resource of great importance. Land is an enabler to support manufacturing, access to affordable and decent housing, universal health care, food security and nutrition.

The history of land rights in Colombia is a centuries-old tale of colonialism, highly concentrated land ownership and unsuccessful agrarian reforms. Fifty years of civil strife have left vast sections of the country’s land undocumented, vulnerable to land record manipulation and outright lawlessness.