News on Land

Cases of double ownership of land are common in Kenya, where cartels collude with officials to create parallel titles for parcels want to acquire illegally

NAIROBI/ACCRA, Feb 16 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - On a recent Saturday afternoon, Joseph Njuguna received a worrying call. Without his permission, someone was excavating a small piece of land he had bought six years ago.

When he reached the site he found an excavator digging up soil, and two yellow Tata trucks waiting to ferry it away.

Rangelands are land areas with indigenous vegetation, including grass and shrubs, and used as a natural ecosystem for grazing livestock and wildlife. Rangelands occupy nearly half of the world’s land surface and include more than a third of global biodiversity hotspots, as well as habitat for 28% of the world’s endangered species.

Successive plans excluded Delhi’s urban villages from civic control and virtually turned them into islands. Haphazard construction and unchecked commercialisation only added to the civic mess in these 135 localities spread across Delhi.

The sprawling fields in front of Sultan Chauhan’s 20-room house in Hauz Khas village doubled up as playground when he was a child. But today, the fields have been replaced by a congested row of buildings that has cropped up in the last three decades.

While Prime Minister Trudeau called for an end to colonial-era laws, First Nations leaders cautioned of “a lot of good words” from his government.

Canada will create a legal framework to guarantee the rights of Indigenous people in all government decisions, doing away with policies built to serve colonial interests, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Wednesday as Native leaders in the country continued to caution against his charm offensive and demanded actions rather than words.

• For decades the Papua region in Indonesia has remained the country’s least-understood, least-developed and most-impoverished area, amid a lack of transparency fueled by a strong security presence.
• Activists hope their new website, Mata Papua, or Eye of Papua, will fill the information void with reports, data and maps about indigenous welfare and the proliferation of mines, logging leases and plantations in one of the world’s last great spans of tropical forest.

• Brazil’s Supreme Court has soundly rejected a lawsuit filed in 2003 by a right wing political party that would have drastically limit the ability of quilombolas (former slave communities) to legitimize claims to their traditional lands.
• There are 2,962 quilombolas in Brazil today, but just 219 have land titles, while 1,673 are pursuing the process of acquiring legal title. Titled quilombola territories include 767,596 hectares (1.9 million acres); these settlements have a good record of protecting their forests.

“We will fast for as long as we have to,” say protesting farmers who face displacement, even as the Kaleshwaram irrigation project has already received environmental clearance.

Ranga Reddy woke up at 5 am on December 1o, 2017, bathed in cold water and dressed in a white veshti and shirt. He had a busy day ahead.

Last year the Land Resources Planning Secretariat of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) conducted a survey on participatory land resource planning (LRP) to compile experiences among users of LRP tools and approaches. Around 750 land management practitioners responded and identified the emerging needs and trends in existing LRP tools.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has noted persistent problems with land grabs in Papua New Guinea.

Zeid Ra'ad al-Hussein visited Port Moresby last week and met with PNG's prime minister Peter O'Neill and civil society figures.

Mr Zeid found that corruption remains rife in PNG, affecting the right to land of its citizens. His spokesperson, Ravina Shamdasani, conveyed this concern in an interview with UN Radio.

For over fifty years, Hamisi Bidii farmed a small piece of land 50km north of Mombasa in Kilifi County, Kenya. Hamisi grew cashew nuts, palm and mango trees on his four-acre plot – which provided a modest income for his family – and served his community and country as a local Administration Chief in the years immediately following Kenya’s independence.

The State of Open Data is an ambitious research project reflecting on 10 years of action on open data and providing a critical review of the current state of the open data movement across a range of issues and thematic areas.

On February 14th we will examine the most effective strategies to combat women’s diminishing land rights within communities.

Individual titling is the most commonly accepted strategy for protecting women’s land rights, but it it is not without its problems. It can lead to increased domestic violence or result in women being run off their land. The webinar's guest presenters -- Rachael Knight of Namati and Judy Adoko of Land and Equity Movement of Uganda (LEMU) -- suggest a more effective strategy.