In Brazil, indigenous and traditional communities are fighting for their land in the face of threats from big businesses, mining and environmental destruction. In some cases, the peoples' very survival is at stake.
In early 2018, Ageu Lobo Perreira was on the run. He'd received word that his life and the lives of two other members of the traditional Amazon riverside community he leads were in danger.
The expropriation of land without compensation is dominating debate on land reform, but speakers at a conference on land reform on Wednesday said there are deeper and more imperative challenges to tackle to ensure South Africans access to land.
Changing the law to allow for the expropriation of land without compensation will have little impact on land reform unless the government first tackles systemic problems within its own institutions that have hampered land reform in the democratic era.
KOTA KINABALU: The Dusun Begahak people in Lahad Datu are crying foul over what they claim as unfair treatment of indigenous people by the state government, past and present, after their ancestral land was given to Felda.
Speaking to FMT, Robin Balud, a representative of the small community, said the conflict started 36 years ago when the then Berjaya government decided to grant 120,000ha of prime agricultural land in Tungku to Felda.
“Somehow, the land also included some 2,400ha of our native customary right (NCR) land.
The National Indigenous Organization of Colombia (ONIC) demanded the Tribunal of Bogota to halt a proposed reform bill on the Law of Land and to “protect the fundamental right to territory and previous consultation for indigenous people.”
The Ignacio Huilipan Indigenous community won back 97 hectares from a major Chilean conglomerate Tuesday, setting precedent for native land rights.
In a historic ruling, a Chilean judge ruled that a major national lumber company has to give back nearly 100 hectares to the Ignacio Huilipan Indigenous community the company had illegally claimed as its own.
Most of Zimbabwe’s economic challenges, including a ballooning budget deficit, a huge trade deficit and crippling foreign currency shortages, can be traced back to how the southern African country handled land reform, a leading economist has said.
Zimbabwe embarked on a land reform programme in 2000, but came under fire for the manner in which it was conducted.
The country was a self-sufficient food producer prior to its land reform programme, but now imports many of its goods.
Monrovia – The Sustainable Development Institute (SDI), a local civil society organization that advocates for the participation of local communities in decision-making processes on natural resources, has welcomed the passage into law of the landmark Land Right Bill.
According to Ms. Nora Bowier, SDI Coordinator, the groundbreaking legislation will be a transformative milestone of the post-conflict era in promoting citizens’ participation in the decision-making process.
"In many communities, customary law is used as a tool to deny women their rights to housing, property, land, and inheritance."
BANGKOK - An indigenous woman in northern India is taking her fight for inheritance rights to the country's top court, leading others who are pushing back against sexist laws and customs.
Ratan Manjari, who heads the women's rights group Mahila Kalyan Parishad in Himachal Pradesh state, received land she had inherited from her parents - a rare occurrence where she lives.
This is the first article in a four-part series on the potential to apply the Community Land Trust (CLT) model under existing Brazilian laws to secure land rights in Brazil’s favelas.
Twenty-eight years after independence, wealth in Namibia is still skewed along racial lines laid down in the colonial period. The level of inequality is one of the highest in the world, according to the World Bank.
JAKARTA — Indigenous rights activists in Indonesia have expressed concern that the government is stalling the passage of a long-awaited bill on indigenous rights by tangling the legislative process in red tape.
The government said in July that it had agreed with members of the House of Representatives to stat discussions on the bill on Aug. 16. But the legislative docket seen by Mongabay shows the start of those discussions has been pushed back to Sept. 27.
One similarity between the three Asian economies, namely Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, is their success in becoming high-income countries after World War II while maintaining a more equal distribution of income. Currently the Gini Index of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are in the low 0.30s, while Indonesia’s index (a lower middle-income country) is around 0.40. Key to the ability of the three countries in maintaining a more equal distribution of income is land reform, which they conducted as early as the 1940s and 1950s.
