News on Land

After years of blood, sweat and tears Badiri Vamaga, the largest clan group in Kirakira, NCD, is enjoying unprecedented optimism now that they are registered with the Department of Lands and Physical Planning as an Integrated Land Group (ILG).

They received their ILG certicate recently from the State clearing the way for business dealings involving their native customary land.

The national government’s upcoming plan to re-open the world-class Porgera mine in Enga Province will hit a snag because local landowners are claiming billions of kina in compensation.

Prime Minister James Marape and Minister for Mining Johnson Tuke recently announced that the government was taking Porgera mine seriously and will re-open it in due time.

A Recent Victory

In September 2020, President Mokgweetsi Masisi amended the 2015 Land Policy to give married women in Botswana the right to own land. Previously, married women were only eligible to own land if their husbands did not. The policy excluded not only married women but widows and single mothers as well, which left millions of women affected.

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Illegal land grab cases are on the rise in protected areas as land prices have soared and the development of the agricultural and agro-industrial sectors has ballooned, Ministry of Environment spokesman Neth Pheaktra said.

“In 1964, Cambodia was 73 per cent forest land with a population of only 5.7 million. But in 2018, the country was 46.86 per cent forest land – 8.5 million hectares – with a population of 16 million,” he said.

Pheaktra said the lost land has been turned into plantation or for housing.

It is a windy day in Marange, Chanakira village. Small clouds scuddle the blue sky giving it a blurred look. About 110 kilometers southwest of Mutare, Norah Mwastuku (48) a subsistence farmer sits at the verandah and contemplates when the first rains will arrive. 

She anxiously looks at her fields, decorated with mulched holes.

Mwastuku is one of the farmers who have embraced the Pfumvudza program — a concept where crops are planted on zero tillage in a bid to conserve water and inputs on a small piece of land.

The struggles of Indigenous leaders of the Honduran Peoples within a multiethnic, multicultural and multilingual country that is made up of four ethnic groups: mestizo or white, Indigenous (Lenca, Misquito, Tolupan, Chorti, Pech or Paya, Tawahka), Garífuna and Creole-Anglo-speakers, have turned into streams of blood through the years, under the rule of capitalism.

Fishermen say a development on two islands could destroy their livelihoods

KARACHI, Nov 3 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - In the quarrel over building a gleaming "new Dubai" on two small islands off Pakistan's Arabian Sea coast, the voices of the fishermen who have plied these waters for centuries often go unheard.

Steering his boat out of the Jamote jetty in the village of Ebrahim Haideri, 25-year-old fisherman Shakil said the islands around which he catches fish, crab and shrimp are now patrolled by armed guards.

Close to 20 million hectares of land have already been restored, as part of the Great Green Wall (GGW) initiative, according to the implementation report released recently at a virtual meeting of environment ministers from Nigeria, Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Chad, Sudan, Eritrea, Ethiopia and Djibouti together with regional partners, international organisations and development agencies.