Summaries and selected replays from the 3rd Mekong Regional Land Forum are available below. Full replays of the plenary sessions will be posted shortly -- check back soon!
La tenencia consuetudinaria se encuentra con las inversiones agrícolas responsables
Boletín de Perspectivas País N.1 / Mayo 2021
In this first edition, Daniel Hayward brings you four articles that talk about customary land tenure and responsible agricultural investment. It’s a prelude to the 3rd Mekong Regional Land Forum with each article unfolding the topic of each session.
As part of the launch of the Responsible Land-Based Investment Navigator 2.0, the Land Portal spoke with Amaelle Seigneret, Researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development(link is external), to hear what’s new.
As part of the launch of the Responsible Land-Based Investment Navigator 2.0, the Land Portal spoke with Nathaniah Jacobs, Senior Researcher at the International Institute for Environment and Development, to hear more about the Advancing Land-based Investment Governance (ALIGN) project. The Navigator is positioned to be a valuable tool and resource for ALIGN stakeholders.
Since last year, 35,000 people in Uganda’s Kiryandongo district were forced from their lands to make way for large-scale farming, including at gunpoint and by a sugar firm with international backing.
This article was originally published through CSDS (Center for Social Development Studies) at Chulalongkorn University, Thailand. It can be found at: https://www.csds-chula.org/publications/2020/4/28/critical-nature-are-chinas-dams-on-the-mekong-causing-downstream-drought-the-importance-of-scientific-debate
By Chris Hufstader
After an audacious land grab by a foreign company, indigenous women in a remote Cambodian village struggle to regain their farms and sacred sites.
Sol Preng remembers vividly the day in 2012 when bulldozers unexpectedly arrived on her family farm.
“The company came and cleared away our cashew trees right before the harvest,” she says. “I lost four hectares of land and all my cashew trees.”
Agriculture represents a key sector in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially when it comes to lifting close to a billion people out of rural poverty. We can’t ignore that many millions of poor households continue to depend primarily on farming.
A recent project by the Business & Human Rights Resource Center shows how OpenLandContracts.org can be used to strengthen advocacy around corporate accountability and good governance of natural resources.
In a saturated marketplace, food and beverage companies too often avoid addressing land rights issues.
Large scale land grabs are often sites of immediate and sometimes violent mobility, as people are evicted and obliged to move elsewhere. The term “grab” signals abruptness.
Yet processes that change peoples’ access to land, and the diverse processes of human mobility that land transformations generate, often take decades to unfold. Research on Indonesia's large scale oil palm plantations shows the importance of attending to these long term processes.