Burundi has the world’s highest hunger score and around 45 percent of the population is affected by food insecurity. The country copes with increasing scarcity of land as a result of increasing population size, returnees and IDPs and climate change. With the majority of Burundians depending on agriculture for their food and livelihoods, land scarcity makes this reliance on agriculture precarious. This pressure on land causes elevated levels of land disputes with over 55% of all court cases being related to conflicts over land.

Rather than scaling up, I think we should be talking about scaling out and scaling over time when it comes to inclusive, community-led land governance. I tried these ideas out with some success two weeks ago at the annual LANDac Conference in the Netherlands, specifically during a Round Table which asked “(how) can we scale bottom-up or community-based initiatives towards fair and inclusive land governance”?

Wetlands are among the most important natural resources in Uganda. They protect the country’s water resources, and are important for sustaining agricultural productivity and rural livelihoods, particularly in areas with low or unpredictable rainfall, land scarcity, or where surrounding land has low potential for agriculture.

By Allan Cain, Development Workshop Angola

* This article was originally published as part of the online discussion on customary law in Southern Africa

In a recent episode of the podcast Uncharted Ground, host Jonathan Levine spoke with Namati about building a global environmental justice movement. You can find it on any major podcast platform or listen to the episode (and access the full transcript)  on Stanford Social Innovation Review's website. A  recap of the episode, written by SSIR, is below.

There is an underlying tension in the land rights movement that is rarely addressed head on, which is the perception that securing women’s land rights threatens community land rights. Community land rights are typically held by indigenous people, small-scale and subsistence farmers, pastoralists, herders and many other groups who are directly dependent on land for their livelihoods but whose land tenure is often the most precarious.

From 2013 to 2016, Oxfam's Behind the Brands campaign called on the 10 biggest food and beverage companies to adopt stronger land rights commitments. Now, as the coronavirus pandemic worsens inequality and food insecurity around the world, we asked the question: Are companies taking meaningful steps to implement their commitments?

To better understand key land tenure terms and their meaning, four bilingual glossaries have been prepared with the title "The ABC of land tenure - Key terms and their meaning with a focus on the Voluntary Guidelines and the Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security".

A new UN report entitled, "Making Peace With Nature”, finds that nearly 90 percent of all known species are threatened by climate change. Another UN report warns the world is “nowhere close” to fighting climate change. Unsurprisingly, panicked governments are adopting short-sighted solutions, and in the process are missing important templates for slowing, and even reversing, climate change.

Advancing women’s land rights is a priority for the international development agenda. Yet, there is no consensus on which rights should be monitored and reported. Three indicators of women’s property rights are widely used in the literature. Each captures a different aspect of women’s land rights, but a recent paper explores the extent to which these different rights are held by the same person, using data from six African countries.

By David Matsinhe for the Daily Maverick. 

Originally posted at: https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2021-04-25-recipe-for-conflict-n...