A policy brief introducing a new book edited by Khwezi Mabasa and Bulelwa Mabasa. The book examines how land and agrarian reform impacts nation building;citizenship and identity formation. It draws attention to the limitations of reducing land to a commodity and how this approach perpetuates…
The articles in this Bulletin are written by the following organizations and individuals: National Coordinator for the Defense of the Mangrove Ecosystem (C-CONDEM), Ecuador; Yayasan Pusaka Bentala Rakya (Bentala Raya Heritage Foundation), Indonesia; Venezuelan Observatory of Political Ecology…
Context and backgroundWith many physical and human potentials, the Bamun country in the western highlands of Cameroon, which is an agricultural area excellence is today experiencing serious socio-economic and spatial transformations. The coffee…
In this study we investigate whether the increasing investment in smallholder oil palm plantations that contributes to deforestation is motivated by financial gains or other factors. We evaluate the financial viability of smallholder farmers selling fresh fruit bunches (FFBs) to intermediaries…
‘Over the past three decades hundreds of thousands of farmers in Burkina Faso and Niger, on the fringes of the Sahara Desert, have transformed large swathes of the region’s arid landscape into productive agricultural land, improving food security for about three million people. Once-denuded…
The paper critically engages with sustainable development goal targets (SDG-2- Target 2.3; SDG-5) to examine how and why large-scale agricultural land acquisitions modify the social relations of women’s food access. The study draws from impacts of various plantation schemes in Cameroon and Ghana…
Le Cameroun s’est engagé dans un processus de réforme juridique dans les principaux secteurs des ressources naturelles (forêts, mines, terres). Exprimant la position d’un groupe d’organisations et de citoyens intéressés par la gestion de la terre au Cameroun, ce document s’appuie sur…
Drylands occupy more than 40% of the world’s land area and are home to some two billion people. This includes a disproportionate number of the world’s poorest people, who live in degraded and severely degraded landscapes. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification states on its…
À rebours des autres régions du monde, l’Afrique pourrait devenir bientôt le continent de la déforestation, avec la République démocratique du Congo qui perd plus d’un million d’hectares de couvert arboré par an. En Afrique centrale, la déforestation est le fait d’une petite agriculture…
Understanding the land market is crucial when analyzing the spatial dynamics of cities. Spatial models, which are widely used to describe the growth of cities, are underdeveloped in Africa, due in part to the lack of urban data and/or the difficulty of collecting it. This paper presents a…
The Re-Greening of the West African Sahel has attracted great interdisciplinary interest since it was originally detected in the mid-2000s. Studies have investigated vegetation patterns at regional scales using a time series of coarse resolution remote sensing analyses. Fewer have attempted to…
Land in Cameroon is under growing pressure for many reasons — powerful commercial interests, changing climate conditions and shifting demographic flows including mass migration and increasing population density. The rights of rural communities and indigenous people to access and use land for…