News on Land

Many cash-strapped Maasai have become landless after subdividing and selling swathes of land to the south of Nairobi

NAIROBI, June 20 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Kenya's opposition leader has raised tensions weeks ahead of elections by criticising the Maasai community's sale of ancestral land to other ethnic groups in an area hit by political violence in the 1990s, land rights experts said.

Religious and indigenous leaders appealed on Monday for better protection of tropical forests from the Amazon to the Congo basin, with a Vatican bishop likening current losses to a collective suicide by humanity.

Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and Daoist representatives met indigenous peoples in Oslo to explore moral and ethical arguments to shield forests that are under threat from logging and land clearance for farms.

The Amazon basin faces irreversible environmental disturbance on an enormous scale due to hydroelectric dam development. Hundreds of existing and planned dams in both the Amazonian lowlands and the Andean headwaters are already impacting, and will continue affecting, waterways, floodplains and the estuary by disrupting sediment and nutrient flows.

This is the message of a new study, published in Nature, which quantified the impacts of dams on the hydrology and geography of each of the Amazon’s 19 major sub-basins.

On June 2, Guatemalan police and military carried out the eviction of Q’eqchi Maya residents of the community of Laguna Larga in the Laguna de Tigre region of the country. Days later, the refugees from the eviction arrived in the Mexican state of Campeche.

Statement of the Network of Indigenous Peoples in Thailand (NIPT) at the 7th AWG-SF Conference held in Chiang Mai, Thailand

ASEAN Working Group on Social Forestry (AWG-SF) Chairperson, distinguished delegates from the ASEAN Member States, distinguished guests, participants, CSOs and indigenous brothers and sisters, I bring greetings on behalf of indigenous representatives, forest dependent communities and civil society organizations (CSOs) from Thailand who were part of the 6th CSO Forum on Social Forestry in ASEAN (9-10 June 2017) held here in Chiang Mai.

Jose Maria Lemus' murder adds to the growing list of recently assassinated social, Indigenous and human rights activists in Colombia.

Jose Maria Lemus, president of the Tibu Community Board in Colombia’s North of Santander state, has been killed, the Peoples’ Congress reported Wednesday.

His murder adds to the growing list of recently assassinated social, Indigenous and human rights activists in the South American country.

"People have many reasons to come after me - because I talk about land grabbing, because I talk about the rights of indigenous people, of crimes against minorities"

MUMBAI, June 14 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - In her long career defending the rights of women, indigenous people and ethnic minorities, Sultana Kamal has faced numerous threats and intimidation. But none over a statue.

Monrovia - The Civil Society Working Group on Land Rights Reform has launched what appeared to be a last minute fight in persuading the 53rd National Legislature to pass the Land Rights Act before the dawn of the hefty campaign season, which will virtually end the workings of that assembly.

In a press conference held in Monrovia on Monday, June 12, the CSO working group re-echoed their dismay over the delay of the passage of the bill and called on the law makers to act quickly as time is of the essence.

On December 22, 2016, President Michel Temer revised a law that specifically regularizes urban and rural land owned by the federal government, notably eliminating requirements for upgrading infrastructure on those lands.

The FRA sought to correct the historical injustice done to the traditional forest-dwelling communities by conferring rights to hold and own forest land where they traditionally lived and cultivated

NEW DELHI, Jun 12 2017 (IPS) - In Meghalaya, India’s northeastern biodiversity hotspot, all three major tribes are matrilineal. Children take the mother’s family name, while daughters inherit the family lands.

Because women own land and have always decided what is grown on it and what is conserved, the state not only has a strong climate-resistant food system but also some of the rarest edible and medicinal plants, researchers said.