This summary provides a full scale;context specific and implementable "Business Case for the Rural Land Administration Information Service (RLAIS)".This resource was published in the frame of the Land Investment for Transformation (LIFT) Programme. For more information;please check: https://landportal.org/community/projects/land-investment-transformation...

This business case provides a full scale;context specific and implementable “Business Case for the Rural Land Administration Information Service (RLAIS)”..This resource was published in the frame of the Land Investment for Transformation (LIFT) Programme. For more information;please check: https://landportal.org/community/projects/land-investment-transformation...

Despite a recent transparency law and participation in transparency initiatives;Cameroon’s investment environment remains plagued by poor transparency.

Proponents of large-scale agriculture have put forward a multitude of reasons to support the advancement of this approach to farming. Large-scale agriculture is seen as the only way to “modernise” and “develop” the land;to close the yield gap;and to ensure food availability. Furthermore;socio-economic outcomes are assumed to be higher under the management of large-scale farming operations than on small-scale farms. This study reviewed scientific literature on the microeconomic and social effects of large-scale land acquisitions in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The land crises and large-scale land grabs affecting many African countries today stem from historical and colonial mistakes whose problems remain. The systems;policies and laws that are being pushed to “register” and “formalise” land ownership do not put into consideration the cultural and historical aspects that govern land in many countries on the continent. Professor Sam Lwanga Lunyiigo asks pertinent questions about this push and about implications of customary land registration in Uganda.

The reality that significant improvements in security of tenure at scale in rural Africa are still needed nearly a decade after the adoption of the Voluntary Guidelines for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land;Fisheries and Forests (VGGT) suggests a need to explore its limitations and consider what it would take to realize its objectives. The article documents significant impacts of the VGGT reform processes and highlights illustrative or “one-off” results.

Pressures on land and natural resources are growing;and many communities affected by land rights violations struggle to assert their rights. In this interview Rachael Knight talks about how IIED’s legal tools team supports grassroots advocates and communities impacted by large-scale land acquisitions. Includes a 5.40 minute video on drafting community by-laws.

Includes history of the project;the scale down;the role of European DFIs (Development Finance Institutions);recommendations. The issues of concern and damages often expressed by a critical mass of the Addax project communities have been confirmed. The communities were taken by surprise when the project was first scaled down and then sold twice. The DFIs have failed to provide timely information on obvious risks of failure and to act accordingly. All this created harm that could have been avoided. In the end;communities did not have access to justice.

There are many misconceptions about farming in southern Africa;and one of the most insidious is the notion of ‘viability’. A narrow economistic version has predominated that is based on a normative vision of farming based on full-time;large-scale commercial production. But taking a wider view;what is viable can take different forms more appreciative of the diverse ways farming is intertwined with wider livelihoods;and across different scales.

The globally driven acquisition of land puts rural farmers across the globe at risk and Africa is the hotspot of global land grabbing. Shows the ongoing work of the Remote Sensing Research Group (RSRG);University of Bonn;to map land grabbing events in Southern Africa;with examples from Mozambique and Zambia. Provides an overview of current land grabbing databases;their lack of spatial information and how remote sensing datasets can overcome this lack when being used to detect large scale agricultural production schemes.

One of the most striking things about some of the study sites in the A1 (smallholder) land reform schemes of Zimbabwe is the amount of small-scale irrigation going on. This is not on schemes or in formalised group gardens;but irrigation by individual farmers;many using small pump sets and pipes. This has been investigated in Masvingo;in Mvurwi in high-potential Mashonaland East;and in Chikobedzi in Chiredzi district in the dry lowveld. It seems to be a widespread phenomenon but is emerging largely unnoticed and unsupported.

Since the arrival of multinational agribusiness company SOCFIN in 2011 as part of a large-scale investment in palm oil in the Southern Province of Sierra Leone;social conflict has raged in the Malen Chiefdom. SOCFIN is controlled by a Belgian businessman (Hubert Fabri) and the French group Bolloré;which has developed a business empire in many parts of Africa. This report found that affected communities who have lost access to and control over their land have been exposed to serious human rights violations and abuses since 2011.