Africa has been at the centre of a "land grab" in recent years, with investors lured by projections of rising food prices, growing demand for "green" energy, and cheap land and water rights. But such land is often also used or claimed through custom by communities. What does this mean for Africa? In what ways are rural people's lives and livelihoods being transformed as a result? And who will control its land and agricultural futures?

This article outlines the legislative history of the Land Acquisition Act (Cap 152, 1985 Rev Ed) and the philosophy behind the legislation. The main thrust of the article is its analysis of the circumstances leading to the amendments to the Land Acquisition Act. In so doing, it also examines the development of the compensation framework and its implications for landowners. A number of landmark cases on interesting issues have also been referred to and these serve to illustrate the changing paradigms of the State and the landowners with the passage of the laws on compulsory acquisition.

Long-term planning and an efficient system of land administration and management have played a critical role in Singapore’s transformation from a colonial port to highly liveable global city.

In many cities and urban areas in Africa, land acquisition for urban redevelopment, land readjustment, and resettlement of affected urban residents are currently framed as innovative approaches to eradicating informal settlements, improving the living environments, and supporting the implementation of newly adopted city Master Plans. Nevertheless, it is not yet known how the responses of institutions and affected people shape these processes.

The state owns over 80% of the land in Sri Lanka. The remainder is owned by private parties. Under the State Lands Encroachments Ordinance, all waste lands, forest lands, unoccupied and uncultivated lands are presumed to belong to the state until the contrary is proved (section 7) and all cinnamon land which have been uninterruptedly possessed by the state for over 30 years are held and deemed to belong to the state (section 6).

This Case Study looks at the implementation of the Vacant, Fallow and Virgin Lands Management Law (VFV Law) in seven villages in Sagaing Region, to assess the practices on the ground and how the law impacts the land tenure security of smallholder farmers.

Over the past two decades, academics and development practitioners have written extensively about the harmful impact of corruption on economic development and social outcomes. From an economic perspective, corruption diverts resources away from their most productive uses, acting as a regressive tax that supports the lifestyles of the elite at everyone else’s expense. Corruption undermines the legitimacy of political systems by providing the elite with alternative ways of holding on to power, rather than through genuine democratic means.

Large-scale land acquisitions continue to be an important issue for governments, development organisations, NGOs and farmers’ organisations all over the world; this remains the case even in times of global economic slowdown, recession and crisis. The scale of this trend and its significant impacts on rural transformation and livelihoods make it necessary to further monitor, observe and positively influence such deals wherever possible.

In Kenya, the total land area of the country is 58 million hectares (ha), of which only around 10% is classified as arable land. As of January 2020, the Land Matrix had recorded a total of 14 concluded deals in the country, totalling 269 411 ha, or just 0.46% of the total land area. Although this is a relatively small land footprint, these deals may still have significant implications for local communities and indigenous people. It is important to note that in this country profile, regional filters were used to sort and extract the data on the Land Matrix online platform.

Land acquisition and use remain a critical issue of great policy relevance in developing countries such as Nigeria. This study therefore examined land acquisition and use in Nigeria within the context of food and livelihood security. The chapter used secondary data obtained from the World Bank website, National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and other sources. It was found that there are gender, location and income-group considerations in the allocation of land in Nigeria.

Land restitution carries implicit recognition of some previous claim to ownership, but when are first claims recognized? The concepts of first possession and original acquisition have long been used as entry points to Western concepts of property. For Austronesia, the concept of precedence is used in customary systems to justify and describe land claims and Indigenous authority. Conflict and political change in Timor-Leste have highlighted the co-existence of multiple understandings of land claims and their legitimacy.

On July 21, 2011 the then Acting Prime Minister Sam Abal announced the establishment of a Commission of Inquiry to investigate 77 land leases which were issued under the Somare government’s Special Agriculture & Business Leases (SABL). The inquiry, which was later extended by Prime Minister Peter O’Neill in October 2011 for a further five months, discovered that over 90 percent of the leases totalling over 5 million hectares were illegally obtained from traditional landowners (Zealand, 2015).