News on Land

• A new UN Declaration protects peasant rights to land, seeds, and adequate incomes with an emphasis on civil and social rights.
• Peasants, which includes small-scale farmers, rural workers, fishing communities, pastoralists and landless agriculture workers, have been recognized as a vulnerable population with distinct needs for the first time ever.
• By protecting peasant rights, the new status aims to also help reduce climate change and protect biodiversity.

Protesters seek land rights under Forest Rights Act, roll back of decision to give land to corporations for farming

Gujarat Police allegedly detained 19 members of Jamin Adhikar Jumbesh — a network of land rights organisations like Gujarat Dalit Sangathan, Saurashtra Dalit Sangathan and Adivasi Mahasabha Gujarat — on February 18, 2019, around 2 pm.

A few re-alignments have been made on the federal front, but following May 9th, business has continued as usual in Sarawak, the only state not to hold its local elections at the same time.

And business as usual means that those families and cronies linked to former Chief Minister and present Governor Taib Mahmud have continued to grant themselves all the concessions without restraint and suck the life’s blood from the land and its people.

The Ainu people have long been repressed by a forced-assimilation policy which has resulted in significant income and education gaps.

After suffering decades of discrimination, Japan’s Ainu minority community will officially be recognized - for the first time - as an Indigenous people, under the country’s ruling Liberal Democratic Party-Komeito coalition.

Report finds Brazil's indigenous communities are facing growing attacks, threats and land grabs under the new president.

Sao Paulo, Brazil - Brazilian indigenous groups say far-right President Jair Bolsonaro has ramped up land grabs, intimidation and killings during his short time in office. 

Sougue Kadjatou is a 45-year-old farmer who lives with her husband and two children in Agboville, a village in Côte d’Ivoire. Her cocoa plantation, where she works every day from morning until early afternoon, is a forty minute walk from the village. “I’m glad they told me to plant banana and timber trees in my cocoa plantation,” she says. “It’s good to plant various trees. The bananas give me something to eat and sell, whereas the timber is a friend of the cocoa. Gives it shade.

The Constitutional Court’s October 2018 judgment was pivotal in protecting the secure land tenure by persons previously disadvantaged by apartheid laws

The current clamour for redistribution of land in SA has heightened interest in land reform and placed raging sociopolitical discourse at centre stage.

Rapid felling of South Sudan's teak forests, largely by foreign-owned firms, has drawn protests - and brings environmental risks

KATIRE, South Sudan - Sprawling teak forests, planted nearly a century ago to supply lumber and government income, are fast disappearing in South Sudan as timber companies take advantage of the country's chaos to extract large amounts of wood, environmentalists say.

Cape Town – A legal battle for ownership of rights to land leased to a major petrol station has ended up in the Constitutional Court.

Shell South Africa had in 1991 built a petrol station in Nelspruit (now Mbombela) in Mpumalanga, on land it leased from HL Hall & Sons and, according to court papers, Hall had undertaken that, if ever it wished to sell the land, it would first offer it to Shell.

The energy giant would then have 30 days to exercise its right.

• New Minister of Infrastructure Tarcísio Gomes de Freitas is considered one of President Jair Bolsonaro’s most capable ministers.

The People's Movement for a Just Society (P-Move), a grassroots group campaigning for land rights for the rural poor, has asked the government to help 486 communities that are waiting for land title deeds. 

These forest dwellers, who have been living on national park land for generations, now find their homes are classified as encroaching on protected land following policy changes over the past 30 years. 

In early October 2018, residents of Trapicheiros—a small favela of 52 families situated near Salgueiro in Tijuca, in the North Zone of Rio—began receiving messages of harassment from strangers on the Internet.