The Sierra Leone Network on the Right to Food (SiLNoRF) has published a report on the sugarcane-to-ethanol project of the Geneva based firm Addax Bioenergy. The researchers found that 'many farmers in project affected communities have already lost their access to fertile lands, though Addax has provided community members with alternative farm lands and confined them to smaller lands, promises by Addax to plough and harrow the lands materialized too late in 2010.' Furthermore, the researchers observed that 'water has become an ever increasing problem for the communities as lands leased by Addax are currently being prepared and even at this initial stage some water bodies such as the "Kirbent" and "Domkoni" streams near the Maronko village in the Makari Gbanti Chiefdom have ceased to exist.'

Over 30 people have so far been arrested in an operation to crack down on illegal encroachment and settlement in the national forest reserves in Kibaale district that started on Monday, 13 June. The operation which started last week in Kangombe Central Forest Reserve was mounted by National Forestry Authority (NFA) with the help of police. However, Deo Ndabiyareza, one of the encroachers, claimed that some encroachers bought land in the reserves. 'They very well know it that some of us came into the forest and the old settlers sold land to us. We cannot accept to leave this land because we have already planted crops,' he said.

'Eco-label fatigue' is setting in as green logging certification schemes are undermining proper government management of forest resources while 'greenwashing' private ownership of these public resources, critics say. The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), created in 1993, is an internationally recognised scheme for the certification of the responsible management of forests. FSC-certified territory in sub-Saharan African countries has more than doubled, from three million ha in April 2008 to 7,6 million ha in Aprril 2011. Yet, African and international civil society organisations are increasingly wary of what some nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) call 'eco-label fatigue', and particularly of the FSC labelling scheme.

The Climate Change Media Partnership (CCMP) has announced the launch of a Fellowship programme that will send journalists to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Durban (COP17) in late 2011. The Fellowships are open predominantly to journalists from developing countries, but journalists from the US and Russia are also welcome to apply.

This special issue will focus explicitly on instances of 'water grabbing', where powerful actors are able to reallocate to their own benefits water resources already used by local communities or feeding aquatic ecosystems on which their livelihoods are based, as well as processes of contestation and resistance. It will in particular focus on how material, discursive, administrative and political power is mobilised to enable such water reallocation and on the impacts of the latter on local livelihoods, rights, gender, class and other social relations.

A series of investigative reports reveal never-before-seen materials connecting financial backers – including US universities and pension funds – to land deals responsible for destabilisation of food prices, mass displacement and environmental damage, writes the Oakland Institute.

'Land grabs encompassing the size of France, displacing thousands of families, building miles of irrigation canals without concern for environmental impacts, allowing crops to be planted that do not improve food security for Africa--done with little or no consultation with those directly impacted, and have no accountability or transparency--are exactly the kind of issues the Oakland Institute was established to investigate and make public.'

During the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal, in February 2011, social movements and organisations released a collective appeal against land grabbing. Over 150 organisations have already signed. If your organisation would also like to support this appeal, please do so before 15 June 2011. The Dakar Appeal, together with the names of organisations endorsing it, will be presented during the mobilizations against the G20 Agriculture Ministers' meeting in Paris on 22-23 June. Read and sign the petition here:

Developed countries must become carbon neutral well before 2050, undertake ambitious nationally appropriate mitigation actions, pay their adaptation debts and discontinue carbon market mechanisms. These are some of the conclusions reached by delegates who attended a meeting on the climate crisis in Johannesburg between 24-26 May.

GA had looked forward to leaving Eritrea with her husband and living a better life in Israel, until they found themselves kidnapped for money by local Bedouins in Egypt’s Sinai desert. GA, who spoke to IRIN in the Israeli city of Jaffa, is just one of the hundreds of asylum-seekers trafficked by international gangs every month from the Horn of Africa to the Middle East, mainly through Sudan, ostensibly in search of better opportunities. However, say human rights groups, many of them end up in captivity. Bedouin tribes in Sinai, which borders Israel, often hold them until their relatives pay a ransom.

Egypt and Kingdom Holding Co., the company controlled by Saudi billionaire Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, have signed an agreement in Cairo over contested land in Toshka in southern Egypt. The signing ends a dispute over a 100,000-feddan (104,000- acre) piece of land that is part of the Toshka agricultural development project, which is intended to use water diverted from the Aswan High Dam reservoir to irrigate land in Egypt’s western desert. Kingdom’s original acquisition came under criticism after a revolution in Egypt that ended the 30-year rule of President Hosni Mubarak.

Producing electricity from the local waterfall was once just a dream for two farming communities on the fertile lower slopes of Mount Kenya. But thanks to a local initiative backed by UN cash and know-how, it is now a reality. Eager to harness power from the waterfall, villagers started the project by building a weir and powerhouse. But without a turbine, the work was in vain. But then the UN Industrial Development Organisation, or UNIDO, stepped in to provide the turbines.

Hydropower dams are ‘well-suited for facilitating industrialisation and exploitation of natural resources, but not for reducing Africa’s energy poverty’, writes Lori Pottinger. And given the water-security problems posed by climate change, ‘the proposed frenzy of African dam building could be literally disastrous.’

Donors and development banks have largely focused on private-public partnerships in their attempts to develop water management capacity around the world, overlooking the vast expertise of public sector water operators. But now they too are starting to recognise the benefits of Public-Public Partnerships for the provision of public water and sanitation services, writes David Hall.

Mali’s Dogon have traditionally seen water as a source of life and a public good, with the right to water ‘a prerequisite to all other human rights.’ Now the privatisation of water threatens to exclude citizens from managing their most precious resource, leaving ‘the task with a commercially minded technocracy’, says Sékou Diarra.

Despite UN recognition of access ‘to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right that is essential for the full enjoyment of life and all human rights,’ it is a right that is far from being realised in most parts of the world, writes Jacques Cambon.

Changes to the water sector in Senegal that have seen a disengagement of the state and the promotion of the private sector have had unforeseen effects, writes Moussa Diop. Increased waste in domestic water consumption is one of the contradictions, while existing social relations also have a significant impact on the water delivery environment.

While both North–South partnerships and South–South partnerships have strengths and limitations, linking these in networked models is an effective way to mobilise expertise and funding and achieve success, writes Samir Bensaid, with reference to the example of ONEP (Morocco) and SNDE (Mauritania).

A Tanzanian gold mine leaks polluted water into a major river. A mining town in Zambia is listed as amongst the most polluted places in the world. And a water pollution problem in South Africa that is caused by mining threatens national water resources. Khadija Sharife examines the hidden costs behind Africa's resource extraction reputation.

While the Senegalese government wishes to ‘disengage financially from the water sector’, it is precisely the previous public management of water that has begun to improve infrastructure and people’s access to the resource.