News on Land

The Lesetlheng community’s victory against mining interests signals a start to the recognition of land rights of which SA’s oppressed people had been deprived for generations

The judgment recently handed down by the Constitutional Court in Maledu and Others vs Itereleng Bakgatla Mineral Resources comes after years of the constitutionally protected land rights of South Africans living in the former homelands being ignored by the department of mineral resources, traditional leaders and mining companies.

Over 1 lakh Adivasis, Dalits and landless from across Gujarat will converge for a mahasammelan in Gandhinagar to demand land and other rights on November 26.

Organised by the Jameen Adhikar Zumbesh, an umbrella body for organisations and people working on land rights, the mahasammelan will put forth a set of demands before the government that have not been addressed despite several representations.

The Arab Gulf Programme for Development (AGFUND) announces the first goal of the SDGs 2030 ” End of poverty in all its forms everywhere ” as subject for the 2018 AGFUND International Prize 2018 and invites the United Nations, international and regional organizations, ministries and public institutions, social business enterprises, national NGOs, individuals and development actors worldwide to submit nominations for the Prize. 

A global coalition of grassroots groups of small food producers and food sovereignty advocates has called on a United Nations expert to probe allegations of state-perpetrated land grabs in Cambodia ahead of an upcoming review of the human rights situation in the country.

Show leadership to halt forest loss from agribusiness, Amsterdam Declaration group tells EU

The UK, France and Germany have called on the European commission to launch tough new action to halt deforestation by the end of the year.

Indigenous communities in central Chiapas have been displaced due the presence of rival armed groups in their territories.

A territorial dispute between municipalities in Chiapas, southern Mexico, has displaced thousands of Indigenous people who now remain in precarious situations. In this attack, two people suffered gun shot wounds when an armed group prevented them from returning to their crops, a human rights organization reported.

The government has approved 116 projects valued at MAD 81 million for 93 “sulaliyat” groups, who hold the rights to communal agricultural land.

The projects, which were approved this year, aim to support income-generating projects for rights holders, said Minister of the Interior Abdelouafi Laftit on Wednesday, November 7.

• According to research released yesterday, small-scale gold mining has led to the destruction of more than 170,000 acres of primary rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon over the past five years.
• Scientists based in Peru’s Madre de Dios region at Wake Forest University’s Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation (CINCIA) say they’ve developed a new method for detecting artisanal-scale mining that is 20-25 percent more accurate than the tools used in the past.
• The researchers combined the CLASlite forest monitoring technology with Global Forest Change

At the Land Portal, we are in the business of building an information ecosystem for land governance that supports better informed decision and policy making at national and international levels. We realize that these concepts are often difficult to grasp, and that the linkages between open data and land rights are not exactly commonplace “dinner table” talk.

Politics trumps policy in the push for a constitutional amendment to expressly allow land expropriation without compensation. That much became clear at Thursday’s bruising and at times chaotic meeting of Parliament’s constitutional review committee. But in the world of politics it’s not necessarily what’s up front and visible that determines outcomes, particularly with the looming 2019 elections. 

We are honored to announce that Omidyar Network has renewed its support of the Land Portal Foundation with an investment of $400,000 to support the integration and visualization of spatial data and the dissemination of SDG-related data and information, as well as provide core funding for institutional enhancement, over the next two years.

UDALGURI, India — Not long ago, this lush land was nothing more than sand and stone. In the absence of shade trees, Alfred Daimari remembers carrying an umbrella to protect his face from the scorching sun and shielding his dinners from a fierce, dusty wind.

“Now look at it,” Daimari said, gesturing at the thick canopy that hangs over the bench where he’s resting in Udalguri, a district in the Himalayan foothills of northeast India near the Bhutan border.