... Karenni people celebrated three kinds of pole festivals in a year. The first one is called Tya-Ee-Lu-Boe-Plya. During this festival, the people went to their paddy fields, vegetable farms, picked the premature fruits and brought it to the Ee-Lu-pole. They put the premature fruits on altar, thank god and then pray for good fruits and good harvest. The second one called Tya-Ee-Lu-Phu-Seh. In this festival they pray god to bless the teenagers with good conducts, and good healths. The third one is Tya-Ee-Lu-Du. The festival concerned to everyone.

Land is the most important productive asset in agrarian societies such as Cambodia’s. Throughout Cambodian history, land ownership rights have varied with changes in government. In the period before French colonisation (pre-1863), when all land belonged to the sovereign, people were freely allowed to till unoccupied land and could cultivate as much as they liked. With French colonisation, a property-rights system was introduced in 1884.

Over the last decade, forests have played an important role in the transition from war to peace in Cambodia. Forest exploitation financed the continuation of war beyond the Cold War and regional dynamics, yet it also stimulated co-operation between conflicting parties. Timber represented a key stake in the rapacious transition from the (benign) socialism of the post-Khmer Rouge period to (exclusionary) capitalism, thereby becoming the most politicized resource of a reconstruction process that has failed to be either as green or as democratic as the international community had hoped.

Examines the impact of the recent farm invasions in Zimbabwe. The independence compromises forced on Zimbabwe (and Namibia and South Africa) implied the legitimation of a century and more of past white land grabbing which could only be changed with the consent of the beneficiaries of this past expropriation. But Mugabe has now torn up the old rules of the game and let the genie of redistribution out of the bottle, earning himself much popular support elsewhere in Africa and causing alarm to many governments and a hasty revision of existing plans for land reform.

The seizure of land by those with no legal title to it is what was done a thousand times over by pioneers, colonists and builders of empire. There is nothing new in the transformation of pirates into legitimate landholders who then invoke the law to protect what they have stolen. It all depends when history starts. The powerful have always grabbed land, but when the poor do it, all hell breaks loose.

Issa Shivji is Professor of Law at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and Executive Director of the Land Rights Research and Resources Institute (LARRRI) or Hakiardhi (in Swahili). He is an acknowledged authority on land law in Africa and chaired the 1991-2 Presidential Commission of Enquiry into Land Matters. Here he examines the new Land Acts, including fundamental principles, land administration and allocation, village titling, land grabbing, dispute settlements, gender, youth and children, and concludes with the ’virtues’ of the Acts.

Article from his regular column in The African, in which Shivji discusses villagisation, land grabbing, village titling, dispute settlement, and radical title. Argues that MPs should be given a free vote of the Land Bills.

Covers land grabbing, land titling, land reform, indigenous tenure systems, and NGO responses.

If 2009 was the end of the hinterland and the beginning of a new globalized forest era, 2010 was a year of pushback. Worldwide, the news was full of reports of forest communities and Indigenous Peoples pushing back at land grabs and shaping policy at the national and global levels, and of governments countering and trying to contain community rights. Some governments and private investors accepted or even embraced the new players at the table and began to promote fairer business and conservation models.

An interesting research carried out by AgroParisTech Students, and researchers from AgroParisTech and Terres d’Europe-Scafr. The interventions during the AGTER thematic meeting were articulated around the following points: 1. Duality of Ukrainian agriculture: micro-farming and agribusiness 2. Economic and social performance of different models of agriculture, future perspectives 3. The revitalization of agriculture through land reform Very interesting data to understand the real nature of agrobusiness and the efficiency of small-scale farmers.

Le Sénégal pays agricole essentiellement composé d’agriculteurs, de paysans est situé à l’extrême Ouest du continent africain avec une superficie totale de 196 720 km 2. La superficie totale cultivable est estimée à 3,8 millions d’ha soit 19 pour cent de la superficie totale.

Almost two-thirds of farming families from ethnic Ta’ang communities in Burma’s northern Shan State have lost land to the country’s powerful military, according to a new report.

The Ta’ang Students and Youth Organization, or TSYO, says 63 percent of farming families from the Ta’ang community in the area have had land confiscated by the military. The Ta’ang are also known as Palaung.