By Ben Cousins, Emeritus Professor, Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), University of the Western Cape
* This article originally appeared in the The Conversation on 22 June 2021
Summaries and selected replays from the 3rd Mekong Regional Land Forum are available below. Full replays of the plenary sessions will be posted shortly -- check back soon!
Leon Verstappen, profesor de derecho privado en la Universidad de Groningen y juez adjunto del Tribunal de Apelaciones de La Haya, ha dejado el cargo de la presidencia de la Junta del Land Portal, cargo que ha ocupado desde la creación de este en 2014. Leon relata su compromiso con el Land Portal desde su inicio como un proyecto de más de una década y su evolución hasta el día de hoy.
About 350 land actors from government, academia, civil society and business came together from more than 15 states and outside India to discuss and debate various land issues. In more than 30 sessions, about 150 speakers and panelists deliberated over 3 days around interdisciplinary land-conversations to generate important information and evidence for policy, practice and academics.
Ten important land messages that emerge from these land conversations are:
The land sector is increasingly being cited as a corruption hub. Many countries across the globe are grappling with land-related corruption that dates to the colonial years and which have metamorphosed into historical injustices and continue to be a source of conflict and violation of basic human rights. Cases of land grabbing, compensation-less expropriation, gender-based discrimination in accessing and ownership of land and related resources, illegal mining deals, bribing to access land administration services among others are not new in the lands sector.
This blog is a summary of a paper that assesses the effectiveness of a specific land tenure intervention to improve the lives of women, by asking new questions of available project data sets.
Last week the World Cocoa Foundation, a membership organization of more than 100 cocoa companies, held its annual partnership meeting in Berlin, Germany. The aim of the meeting is for governments, cocoa companies and farmers to identify and tackle the sector’s largest sustainability challenges. A 90-minute session was devoted to the topic of land tenure. The prominence of the session, as well as the seniority of the presenters – the Head of Sustainable Sourcing for Hershey’s and the Deputy Director General of Cote d’Ivoire’s Land Agency among them – is a powerful signaling effect.
By Chris Hufstader
After an audacious land grab by a foreign company, indigenous women in a remote Cambodian village struggle to regain their farms and sacred sites.
Sol Preng remembers vividly the day in 2012 when bulldozers unexpectedly arrived on her family farm.
“The company came and cleared away our cashew trees right before the harvest,” she says. “I lost four hectares of land and all my cashew trees.”
By Deborah Espinosa and Patrick Gallagher, USAID’s Land Technology Solutions Program
Persistent and pervasive gender inequality is a global development challenge that constrains economic growth, educational opportunities, and health outcomes. It jeopardizes food security and undermines poverty reduction strategies. The world over, some formal and many informal laws and customs operate to hinder women’s empowerment and thus their full potential as agents of economic and social change.
This July is the first time the United Nations will review the progress made towards meeting Sustainable Development Goal 15, which is about Life on Land. Each goal will be reviewed about every 4 years until 2030.
The reviews will be based on the 10 indicators countries agreed on, that assess change in each country over time. Two important developments relating to the indicator on land degradation neutrality (15.3.1) have occurred, since its adoption in 2015.
