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On February 2, 2017, Philippine Environment Secretary Gina Lopez, who has the full backing of the country’s controversial president Duterte, announced the closure of 23 large-scale mining operations.

This report examines the challenges and opportunities of Feed the Future, the U.S. government’s global hunger and food security initiative, working in the complex political, economic, environmental, and cultural context of Nigeria.

It is encouraging to see that the United Nations Security Council is beginning to acknowledge the transboundary dimensions of fragility and conflict, as demonstrated by its newly launched Report of the Secretary-General on the situation in the Lake Chad Basin region.

[C]onservation is not a priority….. they [Frelimo] want economic growth at any point. So if they find …… coal and gas and other minerals it doesn’t matter where they are found, their priority is to develop those industries and I think they will worry about ecosystems ……. as an afterthought. Right now their main focus is growth, economic growth.

China has a unique land use system in which there are two types of land ownership, namely, state-owned urban land and farmer collective-owned rural land.

The Panguna mine on the Pacific island of Bougainville is one of the largest copper and gold deposits in the world. 

The mine was also at the center of a decade-long civil war fought between the Bougainville Revolutionary Army and the Papua New Guinea Defense Force in the 1990s. The conflict cost as many as 15,000 lives and displaced 40,000 of the island’s 200,000 inhabitants.

Continued stability and future development in Timor-Leste are dependent on establishing the necessary legal and administrative mechanisms for providing access to land, land tenure security, as well as preventing and addressing land-related conflict.

Since the reform era began in 1978, there have been significant changes in the nature and incidence of disputes, conflicts, and social disturbances, as well as the mechanisms for addressing them.