This report investigates cases of land grabbing in Uganda, focusing in particular on oil palm plantations in Kalangala, Lake Victoria. It assesses the impacts on rural communities and on the local environment, and questions who benefits from these projects.

The protection given to the land rights of women, orphans and any other vulnerable groups in Northern and Eastern Uganda is probably as good as can be found anywhere in the world. Customary land law is based on three main principles. First, everyone is entitled to land, and no-one can ever be denied land rights. A second principle is that all inherited land is family land, never individual property.

Compulsory acquisition is the power of government to acquire private rights in land for a public purpose, without the willing consent of its owner or occupant. This power is known by a variety of names depending on a country’s legal traditions, including eminent domain, expropriation, takings  and  compulsory purchase.

Violent conflicts between nomadic herders from northern Nigeria and sedentary agrarian communities in the central and southern zones have escalated in recent years and are spreading southward, threatening the country’s security and stability. With an estimated death toll of approximately 2,500 people in 2016, these clashes are becoming as potentially dangerous as the Boko Haram insurgency in the north east. Yet to date, response to the crisis at both the federal and state levels has been poor.

Excluding the introductory and concluding chapters, this book has 11 chapters presented in three sections. The first section dwells primarily on conceptual issues, which comprehensively unravels large-scale agricultural investments and their impacts at the theoretical level.

Land-use conflict is not a new phenomenon for pastoralists and farmers in Tanzania with murders, the killing of livestock and the loss of property as a consequence of this conflict featuring in the news for many years now. Various actors, including civil society organisations, have tried to address farmer–pastoralist conflict through mass education programmes, land-use planning, policy reforms and the development of community institutions. However, these efforts have not succeeded in the conflict. Elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa traditional systems are not making much headway either.

Pastoralism – the predominant form of livestock keeping in the Horn of Africa – has always been a source of disputes and tensions in the regions. So it is maybe no coincidence that precisely those countries with the largest cattle and camel herds should be the ones that have been suffering from prolonged armed conflict for years. This article takes a look at the closely interwoven aspects influencing conflicts in the Horn of Africa in general and South Sudan more specifically.

'In Somalia, land issues are particularly complex. Those involved in both policy and practice need to understand this complexity better if durable political solutions are to be identified and property rights for individuals and communities secured. Lee Cassanelli explains the complex nature of land use, as well as the concept of ‘home’ in the Somali context. His paper is food for thought for all those interested in land reform.'
 

The Committee met to deal with the two proposed amendments that had been made by the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) on the Expropriation Bill [B4B-2015]. The first amendment aimed to increase the number of days in which the municipal manager must inform the expropriating authority, in writing, of charges from 20 days to 30 days, if land which had been expropriated is subject to municipal rates.

The Committee was briefed by the Department of Rural Development and Land Reform (DRDLR) on the performance of Communal Property Associations for March to December 2015. In all, 1 483 Communal Property Associations (CPAs) had been registered since the passing of the Act and 48 were registered in the 2015/16 financial year. The CPAs had been afflicted by a number of problems and the Department had taken steps to address them by the establishment of CPA District Fora to serve as a platform to share experiences.