Main photo: Fourteen Lao Christians evicted from their homes in Luang Namtha province's Long district are shown in a February 2020 photo. (Citizen Journalist)

Seven Lao Christians evicted from their homes in southern Saravan province in October for refusing to renounce their faith have returned to their village, but are being refused permission to rebuild homes demolished by authorities when they were first thrown out, RFA has learned.

HARARE, Zimbabwe - Zimbabwe’s dispossessed white farmers are trickling back to their land, this time as tenants to Black farmers, officials from the country’s governing and opposition parties claimed Monday.

In an interview with Anadolu Agency, George Makombe, a top official of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) party and liberation war fighter, said reports of Black farmers renting out the land they repossessed from white farmers two decades ago are true.

At least 1.76 million jobs in the nation of about 16 million people are at risk due to COVID-19, while the poverty rate could double, to about one-in-four people, the World Bank said in May.

A white former Zimbabwean commercial farmer says most landowners who were dispossessed of their farms during the country's violent land grab programme post-2000 would prefer financial compensation as opposed to land offers by government.

Government recently inked a US$3,5 deal with farmer representative groups in what would see the use of the giant figure to compensate former landowners for infrastructural improvements they made on the properties.

Main photo: new high-rise apartments are under construction in villages around Heze, in eastern China's Shandong province. Rural residents say these complexes are too expensive, too far away from their fields and ill-suited for farmers (Amy Cheng/NPR)

A farmer from Shandong province along China's east coast, Liu recalls how during Chinese Lunar New Year in January, he went out for a walk and came home to discover local officials preparing to demolish his home.

Nearly 30 years after starting land reform, Namibia’s distribution of land ownership is still skewed. This is a colonial legacy. It is high time to return land to dispossessed communities. As a former colonial power guilty of terrible bloodshed, Germany should contribute to making that happen.

Main photo: People protest in front of the Dambe district hall in Tbong Khmum province on October 18, 2019. (Supplied)

Twenty villagers engaged in a dispute with a rubber plantation over more than 400 hectares of land in Tbong Khmum province were released from custody on Tuesday after they were arrested the day before for allegedly damaging the company’s land-clearing machinery, an official said.

Settlers at 9-Mile quarry celebrated in style and colour after receiving their long awaited land titles from Prime Minister James Marape and National Capital District Governor Powes Parkop yesterday. However, this did not go down well with more 200 families who had lost their land to an access road into the quarry. Those settlers who were living at the entrance of the quarry lost their land while those at the back celebrated with Mr Marape and NCD Governor Parkop.

Peace-building nongovernment organization (NGO) International Alert Philippines (IAP) has expressed alarm over what it described as “raging conflicts” over land and natural resources in the Bangsamoro amid the Covid-19 pandemic in the last two months.

The group has been monitoring events in conflict areas, particularly Mindanao, through its critical events monitoring system (CEMS) bulletin.

While indigenous communities in Cambodia stayed home to stem the Covid-19 outbreak, a Vietnamese rubber firm bulldozed their land. Experts say disputes arising from Cambodia's complicated land management system will be difficult to resolve.

When the indigenous Kreung and Kachok communities locked down their villages in Cambodia’s Ratanakiri province in March to keep safe from the novel coronavirus, no one knew change was afoot in their ancestral forest.

A Lao woman held since March for protesting the government seizure of village land for a medical college and hospital was released after her family accepted compensation for their property loss, RFA has learned.

Keo, a resident of Xiengda village in the Saysettha district of the Lao capital Vientiane, was detained on March 16 after arguing with police in a dispute that was later shown in a video published on Facebook, local sources told RFA in an earlier report.

She has now been freed from detention, a family member told RFA’s Lao Service on June 8.

JAKARTA — Two people have died in a series of land disputes between major companies and rural communities in Indonesia.

Activists have denounced the escalation in the conflicts, saying businesses shouldn’t be taking advantage of the country’s focus on dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic to further their own — often illegal — interests.