News on Land

Can Sri Lanka live up to President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s environmental commitments?

WHILE the principle of land reform in Zimbabwe was primarily to address the skewed legacy of colonial land ownership imbalances, the late former president Robert Mugabe and his family engaged in greedy accumulation of farms establishing themselves as the new landed aristocracy.

Owen Gagare

By the time of his death on 6 September 2019, Mugabe had became a top land baron with 24
farms in violation of his regime’s one-man-one-farm policy.

KB.L seeks to bring to life all aspects of the ‘land issue’, recognizing that land is both a deeply important aspect of our history, and an emotive issue shaping our political landscape. KB.L seeks to develop a comprehensive sense of this history, heritage and memory through a combination of news, commissioned articles and links to research. We aim to be recognised as a trusted site providing a wide range of land related news content and research links both nationally and within Southern Africa.

Main photo: The yak (Bos grunniens and Bos mutus) is a long-haired bovid found throughout the Himalaya region of south Central Asia, the Tibetan Plateau and as far north as Mongolia and Russia. (Used under Creative Commons license) Flickr/Arian Zwegers

An innovative community-based forest management policy has resolved a long-simmering land-use conflict between migratory yak herders and sedentary residents in a remote area of Bhutan.

Greenpeace slams Indonesia for lack of action against the palm oil sector as vast areas of forests burned in five years.

Main photo: Burned land is pictured next to a palm oil plantation after fires near Banjarmasin in South Kalimantan province, Indonesia [File: Willy Kurniawan/Reuters]

Maseru, Lesotho, 23 October 2020 – The African Risk Capacity (ARC) Group and the Government of the Kingdom of Lesotho have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to address persistent climate risks and scale up national disaster risk management and financing efforts.

As indigenous campaigner Alessandra Munduruku wins the Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights Award, she says the Amazon is 'crying for help

SAO PAULO, Oct 22 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Alessandra Munduruku, a leader of Brazil's Munduruku indigenous community, has seen her home broken into and been threatened over her work defending her people and their Amazon land from illegal miners and loggers, hydropower plants and other threats.

Main photo: The area of China's proposed Vang Vieng development project in Laos is shown in a March 2019 photo (RFA).

A controversial Chinese development project in Laos is now moving ahead despite environmentalists’ warnings and long delays caused by villagers’ objections to surveys of their land by the Chinese firm, Lao sources say.

KUALA LUMPUR, Oct 18 — The Federal Land Development Authority (Felda) intends to reclaim some 350,000 hectares of land that it has leased to FGV Holdings Berhad (FGV) as a means to shore up its financial position, Berita Harian reported today.

Mondulkiri provincial authorities are working to identify suspects who cut down tens of thousands of trees and buried them in a 60ha patch of forestland in order to take over the land.

The search came after a joint force confiscated three machines in Pu Leh village, in O’Raing district’s Dak Dam commune.

Provincial Forestry Administration director Um Van Sopheak told The Post police have been looking into the case since last Thursday.

Reports suggesting that a Canadian oil and gas firm is planning to start hydraulic fracturing (fracking) in one of Africa’s most sensitive environmental areas along the Namibia-Botswana border have made environmentalists, civil society organisations and local communities apprehensive about the long term effects of the activity on the Okavango Delta, one of Africa’s last natural sanctuaries.