Rift Valley Institute PSRP Briefing Paper 14

Del Desarrollo Rural al Socialismo Agrario en Venezuela
 Carina Salazar*

We present a report on the results of a 10-month pilot project conducted in North- Western Rwanda that aimed to explore fruitful ways to engage with customary law in order to empower rural communities and rural women in particular. The focus is on the effectiveness of land dispute resolution at the community level and the respect for women’s formally guaranteed land rights by the institutions involved.

This publication is the product of the CSO Land Reform Monitoring Initiative, which was spearheaded by ANGOC and undertaken by Land Watch Asia members in seven countries, including Nepal. The said initiative seeks to strengthen CSOs’ capacities in monitoring selected indicators on land, and has proposed common regional indicators for monitoring land tenure and access to land at the regional level.

This synthesis of our findings from an investigation of tenure risk in East, West, and Southern Africa, shows that a majority of tenure disputes are caused by the displacement of local peoples, indicating that companies and investors are not doing enough to understand competing claims to the land they acquire or lease. This failure in diligence is particularly noteworthy given that a majority of the disputes analyzed had materially significant impacts: indeed, a higher proportion of projects in Africa are financially impacted by tenure dispute than any other region in the world. 

This video is part of one of the major activities of the L&A initiative “Collective Learning on Land Conflict Resolution” in Cambodia. It shows how successfully the participatory resolution of land conflict by the villagers in Sre Chhuk village in Lumphat district has been managed.

In the Mekong region, conflicts between local communities and large scale land concessions are widespread. They are often difficult to solve. In Cambodia, an innovative approach to conflict resolution was tested in a case involving a private company, Hoang Anh Gia Lai (HAGL), and several indigenous communities who lost some of their customary lands and forests when the company obtained a concession to grow rubber in the Province of Ratanakiri. The approach was developed by CSOs Equitable Cambodia (EC) and Inclusive Development International (IDI) with the support of QDF funding from MRLG.

Countries in the Latin America and Caribbean region were the first in the developing world to go through rapid urbanization. Today, the region is the second most urbanized region in the world. This urbanization process has been accompanied by sharp social contrasts and economic disparities, a buoyant informal housing and land development process and increased local democracy and municipal autonomy, coupled with active social urban movements. This makes the Latin America and Caribbean region a unique landscape in the study of land and housing for the poor. 

Dead Donkeys Fear No Hyenas - a documentary thriller about land grabbing and the global rush for farmland - the new green gold! 

It is almost a decade now since the fights between Pastoralists and peasants broke out in Kilosa district Morogoro region in December 2000 claiming tens of people’s lives and causing irreparable losses and damages their properties. While the wounds of that dark record are still fresh in some of the minds of the communities in Kilosa, another very serious fight between the same or rather similar groups occurred this October prompting the media and human rights activists to find some ways to intervene in a bid to find lasting solutions for the problems.