Land News

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 13 2018 (IPS) - A new landmark initiative aims to make quality data and tools available to the international community in order to combat an “existential crisis”: land degradation.

The Land Degradation Neutrality Initiative (LDN), launched by United Nations-backed partnership the Group of Earth Observations (GEO), aims to put data directly into the hands of local and national decision makers to help stop and reverse environmental degradation.

The Lesetlheng community’s victory against mining interests signals a start to the recognition of land rights of which SA’s oppressed people had been deprived for generations

The judgment recently handed down by the Constitutional Court in Maledu and Others vs Itereleng Bakgatla Mineral Resources comes after years of the constitutionally protected land rights of South Africans living in the former homelands being ignored by the department of mineral resources, traditional leaders and mining companies.

"All around us, we have seen forest land taken for mining and for palm oil plantations that are not good for the environment or for the people"

GAJAH BERTALUT, Indonesia, Nov 13 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - In a community hall, a group of men sit cross-legged on mats, poring over documents and maps marked with forests, farmland, a river and the village of Gajah Bertalut in Indonesia's Sumatra island.

They are gathered to work on their claim to legal rights and a collective title to 4,414 hectares (17 square miles) of land on which they have lived and farmed for years.

Show leadership to halt forest loss from agribusiness, Amsterdam Declaration group tells EU

The UK, France and Germany have called on the European commission to launch tough new action to halt deforestation by the end of the year.

A global coalition of grassroots groups of small food producers and food sovereignty advocates has called on a United Nations expert to probe allegations of state-perpetrated land grabs in Cambodia ahead of an upcoming review of the human rights situation in the country.

Over 1 lakh Adivasis, Dalits and landless from across Gujarat will converge for a mahasammelan in Gandhinagar to demand land and other rights on November 26.

Organised by the Jameen Adhikar Zumbesh, an umbrella body for organisations and people working on land rights, the mahasammelan will put forth a set of demands before the government that have not been addressed despite several representations.

Indigenous communities in central Chiapas have been displaced due the presence of rival armed groups in their territories.

A territorial dispute between municipalities in Chiapas, southern Mexico, has displaced thousands of Indigenous people who now remain in precarious situations. In this attack, two people suffered gun shot wounds when an armed group prevented them from returning to their crops, a human rights organization reported.

The Arab Gulf Programme for Development (AGFUND) announces the first goal of the SDGs 2030 ” End of poverty in all its forms everywhere ” as subject for the 2018 AGFUND International Prize 2018 and invites the United Nations, international and regional organizations, ministries and public institutions, social business enterprises, national NGOs, individuals and development actors worldwide to submit nominations for the Prize. 

The government has approved 116 projects valued at MAD 81 million for 93 “sulaliyat” groups, who hold the rights to communal agricultural land.

The projects, which were approved this year, aim to support income-generating projects for rights holders, said Minister of the Interior Abdelouafi Laftit on Wednesday, November 7.

• According to research released yesterday, small-scale gold mining has led to the destruction of more than 170,000 acres of primary rainforest in the Peruvian Amazon over the past five years.
• Scientists based in Peru’s Madre de Dios region at Wake Forest University’s Center for Amazonian Scientific Innovation (CINCIA) say they’ve developed a new method for detecting artisanal-scale mining that is 20-25 percent more accurate than the tools used in the past.

UDALGURI, India — Not long ago, this lush land was nothing more than sand and stone. In the absence of shade trees, Alfred Daimari remembers carrying an umbrella to protect his face from the scorching sun and shielding his dinners from a fierce, dusty wind.

“Now look at it,” Daimari said, gesturing at the thick canopy that hangs over the bench where he’s resting in Udalguri, a district in the Himalayan foothills of northeast India near the Bhutan border.

Politics trumps policy in the push for a constitutional amendment to expressly allow land expropriation without compensation. That much became clear at Thursday’s bruising and at times chaotic meeting of Parliament’s constitutional review committee. But in the world of politics it’s not necessarily what’s up front and visible that determines outcomes, particularly with the looming 2019 elections.