A policy brief introducing a new book edited by Khwezi Mabasa and Bulelwa Mabasa. The book examines how land and agrarian reform impacts nation building;citizenship and identity formation. It draws attention to the limitations of reducing land to a commodity and how this approach perpetuates social conflict and inequality in land reform policy implementation. The brief argues that it is important to explore the contested meanings of land in society. These varied meanings challenge traditional land reform perspectives.

The articles in this Bulletin are written by the following organizations and individuals: National Coordinator for the Defense of the Mangrove Ecosystem (C-CONDEM), Ecuador; Yayasan Pusaka Bentala Rakya (Bentala Raya Heritage Foundation), Indonesia; Venezuelan Observatory of Political Ecology and members of the WRM international secretariat in close collaboration with several allies who are part of grassroots groups in different countries.

       Context and backgroundWith many physical and human potentials, the Bamun country in the western highlands of Cameroon, which is an agricultural area excellence is today experiencing serious socio-economic and spatial transformations. The coffee crises, growth in cash crop production and demographic pressure within the former agricultural spaces has favored the movement of producers towards pioneer fronts. The availability of land capital in these new agricultural spaces attracts migrants from other horizons.

In this study we investigate whether the increasing investment in smallholder oil palm plantations that contributes to deforestation is motivated by financial gains or other factors. We evaluate the financial viability of smallholder farmers selling fresh fruit bunches (FFBs) to intermediaries or agro-industrial companies with mills, or processing the FFBs in artisanal mills to produce palm oil. We use data collected in four oil palm production basins in Cameroon and carried out a life cycle assessment of oil palm cultivation and CPO production to understand financial gains.

‘Over the past three decades hundreds of thousands of farmers in Burkina Faso and Niger, on the fringes of the Sahara Desert, have transformed large swathes of the region’s arid landscape into productive agricultural land, improving food security for about three million people. Once-denuded landscapes are now home to abundant trees, crops, and livestock.'

The paper critically engages with sustainable development goal targets (SDG-2- Target 2.3; SDG-5) to examine how and why large-scale agricultural land acquisitions modify the social relations of women’s food access. The study draws from impacts of various plantation schemes in Cameroon and Ghana. It argues that the framing of the SDG-2 appears to co-exist alongside promotion of corporate-led agricultural investment.

Le Cameroun s’est engagé dans un processus de réforme juridique dans les principaux secteurs des ressources naturelles (forêts, mines, terres). Exprimant la position d’un groupe d’organisations et de citoyens intéressés par la gestion de la terre au Cameroun, ce document s’appuie sur les leçons apprises de quarante-cinq années de gestion foncière, depuis la dernière grande réforme de 1974, et sur les développements nouveaux dans ce domaine. Il est inspiré des propositions formulées par la société civile à l’attention de l’administration foncière, et de textes internationaux.

Drylands occupy more than 40% of the world’s land area and are home to some two billion people. This includes a disproportionate number of the world’s poorest people, who live in degraded and severely degraded landscapes. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification states on its website that 12 million hectares are lost annually to desertification and drought, and that more than 1.5 billion people are directly dependent on land that is being degraded, leading to US$42 billion in lost earnings each year.

À rebours des autres régions du monde, l’Afrique pourrait devenir bientôt le continent de la déforestation, avec la République démocratique du Congo qui perd plus d’un million d’hectares de couvert arboré par an. En Afrique centrale, la déforestation est le fait d’une petite agriculture dont l’emprise géographique s’accroît avec la démographie et la volonté de se constituer des patrimoines fonciers.

Understanding the land market is crucial when analyzing the spatial dynamics of cities. Spatial models, which are widely used to describe the growth of cities, are underdeveloped in Africa, due in part to the lack of urban data and/or the difficulty of collecting it. This paper presents a methodology for collecting analyzing land values in major sub-Saharan African cities. Through two case studies in the cities of Lomé and Yaoundé, it describes the implementation of such a methodology for collecting data on land prices and analyzing variations on an urban scale.

The Re-Greening of the West African Sahel has attracted great interdisciplinary interest since it was originally detected in the mid-2000s. Studies have investigated vegetation patterns at regional scales using a time series of coarse resolution remote sensing analyses. Fewer have attempted to explain the processes behind these patterns at local scales. This research investigates bottom-up processes driving Sahelian greening in the northern Central Plateau of Burkina Faso—a region recognized as a greening hot spot.

Land in Cameroon is under growing pressure for many reasons — powerful commercial interests, changing climate conditions and shifting demographic flows including mass migration and increasing population density. The rights of rural communities and indigenous people to access and use land for farming and grazing have been eroded — primarily due to failure to recognise customary land tenure rights, land use conflicts and lack of effective local governance. The country’s land legislation is indeed outdated and not compatible with customary law and local realities.