News on Land

Land issues have forced work for the K2 billion PNG-China Integrated Agriculture Park Project in Korofeigu, outside Goroka town to stop.

Eastern Highlands Governor Peter Numu explained that negotiations led to the idea that the land would be given to the Chinese company.

It is understood that the Department of Agriculture and Livestock was not properly informed on the process and disagreed placed on a misunderstanding that the land had been sold to the Chinese company, believed to be China Railway International.

Hundreds of local residents and monks blocked a national road on June 19 in a protest against a sand dredging company they say is illegally occupying pagoda land.

About 600 residents and monks blocked National Road 6A from about 8 to 9:30am near the site of the sand dredging operation, which was set up along a section of the Mekong River in Kandal province’s Mok Kampoul district in Prek Anhchanh commune.

The Lagos state government has urged everyone facing problems with land grabbers to approach the Lagos State Taskforce on Land Grabbers (LSTFLG) for help.

Lagos State Attorney General and Commissioner for Justice, Mr. Moyosore Onigbanjo, who is also Chairman of the Special Task Force on Land Grabbers, stated this after rescuing Ajah Community Developers Association from land grabbers.

While indigenous communities in Cambodia stayed home to stem the Covid-19 outbreak, a Vietnamese rubber firm bulldozed their land. Experts say disputes arising from Cambodia's complicated land management system will be difficult to resolve.

When the indigenous Kreung and Kachok communities locked down their villages in Cambodia’s Ratanakiri province in March to keep safe from the novel coronavirus, no one knew change was afoot in their ancestral forest.

“Multinational companies have taken advantage of the COVID-19 Lock Down to continue with impugned violations rendering many homeless, hopeless and starving” ~ statement submitted by lawyers to a Ugandan high court. 

Despite a Ugandan government prohibition on land transactions during COVID-19 lockdown, illegal land evictions and concessions in community territories accelerated. Now the lockdown is gradually being lifted, communities continue to report cases.

Sai Wansai — Among stories dominated with the handling of Covid-19 pandemic and the escalation of Arakan armed conflict together with its human rights violations committed against the civilians, a less mentioned issue and rare report of Military or Tatmadaw land confiscation and the local protest against it made headlines recently in southern Shan State.

More than 40 officers from the Pailin Land Management, Urban Planning and Construction Department were made to swear before the statue of Yeay Yat on Monday that they had not misplaced 21 land titles.

No one knows the location of the missing certificates in question.

Department deputy director Suon Leaksmey told The Post on Tuesday that recent news about the loss of the land certificates belonging to residents is not true. He said the lost certificates were unused or they were just new certificates.

“They are unused ones and did not belong to any citizen,” he said.

CHANTHABURI: A man and his son have been arrested for making false statements and embezzlement over a land dispute that led to last year’s multiple shooting in a Chanthaburi courtroom.

Officers from the Crime Suppression Division’s Hanuman special force on Tuesday morning executed a search warrant at a house in tambon Khlong Phlu of Khao Kitchakut district of this eastern province.

They arrested house owner Boonchuay Charoensathaporn, 80, and his son Kittipong Charoensathaporn, 43.

A Lao woman held since March for protesting the government seizure of village land for a medical college and hospital was released after her family accepted compensation for their property loss, RFA has learned.

Keo, a resident of Xiengda village in the Saysettha district of the Lao capital Vientiane, was detained on March 16 after arguing with police in a dispute that was later shown in a video published on Facebook, local sources told RFA in an earlier report.

She has now been freed from detention, a family member told RFA’s Lao Service on June 8.

Since the coronavirus pandemic battered China's economy, tens of millions of urban and factory jobs have evaporated.

Some workers and business owners have banded together to pressure companies or local governments for subsidies and payouts.

But many of the newly unemployed have instead returned to their rural villages. China's vast countryside now serves as an unemployment sponge, soaking up floating migrant workers in temporary agricultural work on small family plots.

Worried by the huge housing deficit estimated at over 17 million, the Group Chief Executive Officer, Oxford Group Nigeria, Teni Adesanya, has tasked the country’s economic managers to pass a law that would make land documentation seamless.
 
Specifically, he said if a bill that will make land documentation as easy as opening an email is passed into law, the country’s housing deficit would be addressed quickly.