The Deputy Mayor of Addis Ababa City Administration, Takele Uma (Eng.), has told city officials to take immediate action in granting farmers, who possess farming lands in the city’s surrounding area, with a legally binding land title deed.

The order comes after a discussion forum on activities to be carried out pertaining land audit and registration process was held with various officials in the city administration and various stakeholders. The meeting took place inside the Assembly Hall of the House of People’s Representatives (HPR) on Thursday.

The Religion Ministry will now require pagodas to have hard land titles as part of an effort to better regulate religious institutions in the country, a move some monks said would tighten authorities’ control of monks who participate in social work.

On Monday, the ministry issued a new directive requiring pagodas to file for land registration with authorities’ assistance, as well as announcing a temporary halt to new applications to establish Christian churches.

Following the development, the community leaders have asked the company to vacate their land for the interest of peace, alleging that it was illegally acquired.

Indigenes of Illushi community in Esan South-East Local Government Area of Edo State have disagreed with a rice farming company, Skaff International Agro Farms Limited, over the acquisition of a vast portion of land for agricultural purpose.

Settlers living adjacent to Adventure Park at 14-Mile in Central Province had their homes demolished yesterday, allegedly without being served a proper eviction notice. It is claimed the demolition exercise is the result of a directive from the National Capital District Commission (NCDC) over the Ilimo Farm land dispute in relation to a state lease on portion 1221. There are more than 400 settlers who have acquired, developed and settled on the land they claimed to have bought from customary owners, who are now the victims of the eviction.

Koh Kong provincial authorities said they would not approve the sale and purchase of land in protected areas without proper paperwork.

They vowed to weed out land corruption following a July 3 Facebook post by Prime Minister Hun Sen calling for the return of land to locals living in protected areas.

In an announcement on Tuesday, officials said land transactions are taking place in protected areas around villages and communes, especially in Botum Sakor, Kiri Sakor and Thma Bang districts.

This week from Geneva, the United Nations is hosting its annual Forum on Business and Human Rights. Thousands of participants from government, business and civil society groups from around the world will gather online to discuss current issues regarding the implementation of the UN’s Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights – which outline the global authoritative standards on the business responsibility to respect human rights.

Intensive farming makes future pandemics such as Covid-19 more likely as wild animals carrying diseases known to infect humans are forced into increasingly close contact with us, a research report showed on Wednesday.

Writing in the journal Nature, a team of researchers from University College London (UCL) warned that animal pathogens are increasingly likely to make the leap to humans as land-use changes benefit animal hosts.

The UN estimates that three-quarters of land on Earth has been severely degraded by human activity since the start of the industrial era.

More than 30 Cambodian-Muslim families protested the construction of a road running through Kampong Chhnang province’s Chhong Kos village on Wednesday after they noticed a portion of an ancestral graveyard alongside the road was damaged.

The Cambodian-Muslim community also noticed the road was being built at a higher elevation, another reason they protested the construction, said Mat Sary, an imam (religious leader) in the community located in Kampong Chhnang town’s Khsam commune.

Binit Agrawal analyses the global impact of a Thai court judgement, which provides a judicial forum to farmers from Cambodia, who were victims of transnational land grabbing.

A group of families in Banteay Meanchey province filed a lawsuit on August 5 against four officials and 13 local businessmen alleging they used forged documents to claim ownership of more than 100 hectares of land in a long-running conflict dating back nearly two decades.