A report warning of the economic implications of climate change on the world's poor has brought together environmental and development groups, and has been endorsed by Nobel Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The report, entitled "Up in Smoke?" was written by Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation in Britain, and was launched by RK Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It calls for cuts in emissions far beyond Kyoto Protocol targets or risk failure with poverty reduction as part of the millennium development goals.

The landmark court case against Botswana's government by evicted communities of the San people is to recommence next week. The case was adjourned in July. The San communities are fighting for their right to return to their ancestral land in the Central Kalahari Game Reserve. The Gana and Gwi communities of the San people - also called "Bushmen" or "Basarwa" - are fighting for their right to maintain their extensive hunting and gathering livelihood in the desert reserve after having been evicted by the Batswana government.

Although 86 percent of women farm for a living on land in communal areas run by traditional chiefs, legislation is silent on the issue of land inheritance under these circumstances. According to custom, chiefs allocate land to male heads of households, but women do not automatically inherit this land upon a husband's death. Consequently, they may be evicted from the land when widowed. Although Zimbabwe's constitution prohibits discrimination on grounds of gender, it allows this clause to fall away where it runs contrary to customary law. Thus, if the husband dies, "the widow does not automatically inherit his land, which was not his to give away anyway," Edith Mashawidza, chairperson of the Women and Land in Zimbabwe lobby, told IRIN.

Blade Nzimande, General Secretary for the South African Communist Party, writes in the latest edition of Umsebenzi Online: "A central pillar of the SACP's Red October Campaign is the mobilisation of farm-workers and the rural poor in support of our ANC-led alliance's election manifesto commitment to "speed up land reform, with 30% of agricultural land redistributed by 2014". This coming Saturday, 6 November 2004 is our National Day of Action, under the slogan: "Mawubuye Umhlaba". We are calling upon the millions of workers and the landless poor to join us on this day, as we table our demands to white commercial agriculture for accelerated land reform and a national land summit."

As the DRC tries to consolidate peace after a five-year war, the government, private companies and foreign donors are all keen to find ways of tapping into the vast resources of timber in Africa's third-largest country. With nearly 222 million acres of woodland, it has the world's second largest rainforest, half of Africa's total.

Britain’s Channel 4 recently broadcast a programme entitled “America’s New Frontier” as part of its Unreported World series. The documentary focused on the social and political situation in Angola. Along with other Western African countries, Angola is becoming increasingly important as a source of oil for the United States. Reporter Sam Killey described Angola as “one of the most strategic frontiers in the American empire.” He explained that in the light of the unstable political situation in the Middle East, Angola and other West African countries were becoming a focus of America’s oil strategy. According to a Human Rights Watch spokesperson, $4.27 billion “went missing” between 1997 and 2002, around nine percent of GDP each year.

Indigenous Baka number 30-40,000 and live in the southern and southeastern areas of Cameroon. They are associated with, among other local communities the Bagando Bakwele, Knonbemebe, Vonvo, Zime and Dabjui farmers.

About 4,000 Bagyeli and Bakola live in the southwest, and are associated with Bulu, Ngoumba, Fang and Bassa. Most Baka, Bagyeli and Bakola still rely on hunting and gathering to secure their livelihoods, and the majority still rely on the forests. Baka, Bagyeli and Bakola in general retain many aspects of their forest-based culture, including non-hierarchical social structures coupled with community recognition for individuals' special skills, relatively small communities, an aversion to social conflict, proximate planning horizons and, to those from "outside", an opportunistic circumspection.

For almost all Baka, Bagyeli and Bakola, their forest is their ancestral home, their reliable grocery, the root of their existence, and their customary right, and forests throughout Cameroon's southern forest zone are dotted with their favoured hunting and gathering grounds and their hidden sacred places. Their primarily hunting and gathering lifestyle combined with subsistence trade is associated with high physical mobility, which means that they can be difficult to locate at certain times of year, and their places of work and home are rarely accurately recorded - most are literally off the map.

Cameroon's indigenous forest communities' geographical and social isolation has enabled many of them to retain their forest-based culture since pre-colonial times, while the world around the forest has undergone radical changes. The same applies to indigenous hunter-gatherer communities who have established permanent villages for cultivation outside forests, since the vast majority of them are also completely marginalised from civic and government structures in Cameroon.

This socio-political marginalisation reflects the gross discrimination that Baka, Bagyeli and Bakola face when they leave the security of their forest and communities, where they are powerful and relatively secure, for the amenities of the roadside or neighbouring local villages, where they may be mocked, cheated, and unfairly treated by government and civic authorities. This unsavoury treatment means that many Baka, Bagyeli and Bakola prefer to stay in the security of their forest community and to remain uninvolved in the "affairs of the village."

Indigenous forest peoples' isolation also means that most of them still have almost no access to modern health care, or formal education, and most are unable to speak and read French, the official language that dominates the forest zone in Cameroon. Until recent moves by the Cameroon government and NGOs to enable formal registration few of these people had their own identity cards, and almost all were absent from official census data and electoral lists. Thus they have been unable to stand up to powerful outsiders who sought to abuse their rights and the forest remains an important refuge.

Despite a long history of trickery and persecution by people entering the forests to extract resources such as rubber, wildlife, timber, minerals, and data on the flora and fauna, Baka, Bagyeli and Bakola in general are very open to outside influences. Their traditional forest coping mechanisms, however, are proving unable to protect them from the increased demands on forests in which they have lived for aeons. Since the introduction in 1994 of Cameroon's new forest law there have been significant investments by donors in Cameroon's protected areas network to support older parks and to establish new conservation "planning regions".

The fact that these communities were "off the map" when the parks were established has led to a situation where their forest rights, and hence their right to isolation are denied through the application of non-discretionary rules to protect endangered flora and fauna. Many of these new rules undermine indigenous peoples' hunting and gathering lifestyles, even though their rights to resources and to "traditional sustainable use" of them are protected by national and international legal provisions, and international agency guidelines. Current plans by Conservation and donors (see http://www.wrm.org.uy/countries/Cameroon/still.html) threaten to widen this pressure to cover huge "landscapes" covering much of the Congo Basin, and this will place further burdens on communities no longer able to isolate themselves.

* Source: World Rainforest Movement Bulletin 87
E-Mail: [email protected]
Web page: http://www.wrm.org.uy

Why has environmental journalism remained on the fringes of mainstream media?

This is the question journalists, representatives from non-governmental organisations, government and the private sector in southern Africa pondered when they met in Johannesburg, South Africa in early October.

Under the theme “Taking Environmental Journalism from Margins to Mainstream”, the meeting explored ways of getting environment stories into the mainstream media in the region. Participants had the opportunity to interrogate editors who take decisions on what issues are covered in their media, be it electronic or print.

While the environment is showing increasing signs of stress and damage and the problems are acknowledged, the meeting observed that the tendency is to continue thinking the effects will only be felt in the ever-receding future. This attitude has led to little coverage of environmental issues in the mainstream media in southern Africa.

Hugh Tyrrell, the conference coordinator, put it simply when he said: “Environmental and sustainable development are priority issues in Africa today. The media has a responsibility to report on them in clear, compelling ways that create better understanding, wise decision-making and concerted action.”

It was observed that the attitude of mainstream media had resulted in alternative media as seen in the proliferation of specialised environmental publications produced by journalists concerned about ensuring coverage of environmental issues. However, these are restricted to specific audiences and usually miss those who would benefit more from such stories – the non-specialist readers.

A number of perspectives were aired on why mainstream media does not adequately cover environment issues. An interesting one is that there is fear, by the publishing houses, of losing business. If they are seen as publishing articles that blame some private companies for environmental degradation, the media houses risk losing advertisement.

George Monbiot, a leading environmental writer who gave the keynote address, said environmental journalists should not be surprised when their stories are not used because “a journalist who is concerned about the destruction of the environment will by definition find herself or himself at odds with the prevailing media culture.”

This is a culture where the owners of the mainstream media who are business tycoons either have direct financial involvement in other businesses or associate with those who do. The two, according to Monbiot, have one thing in common: they want “complete freedom to swing their fist, whether or not your nose is in the way”.

Another perspective that came up is that environment stories being submitted are shallow and usually not well-researched when written for use by the mainstream media. Some of the participants and editors, attributed this to lack of good accessible environmental information and the fact that most senior journalists have left the mainstream media.

One seldom finds journalists over 25 years of age in newsrooms today. Senior journalists who are equipped with research and investigative skills have either been attracted to the private sector or have joined the specialised publications.

When environmental information is available, it is usually not user-friendly. Journalists not familiar with the technical jargon end up writing stories that are rejected because they are not suitable for the person on the street.

There are a few sources of accessible information on southern African and Africa, including state of environment reports, but these are not well known.
A key environmental information centre in the region is SARDC’s IMusokotwane Environment Resource Centre for Southern Africa ((IMERCSA) at

The editors admitted that media is a business and to remain in it, they have to keep a following of readers and viewers. To do that, they have to publish or broadcast stories that are interesting to their audience. The onus is therefore on environmental journalists to make their stories interesting to win space and airtime.

Joe Thloloe, Chief Executive Officer of South Africa’s E-Television (etv) and chair of South Africa’s National Editor’s Forum, said he would not force stories “down people’s throats” if they did not like them. His organisation carried out research on what people like to watch on television and environmental documentaries ranked among the last issues.

South Africa’s Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, told the meeting that despite the hurdles that the journalists face, it is undisputable that today’s environmental journalist occupies one of the most important and challenging positions in the media spectrum, that of balancing the roles of watchdog, educator, researcher, activist and social commentator.

He said the region needs more environmental journalists, but these should be equipped with up-to-date skills, cutting-edge knowledge and in-depth understanding of the environmental and sustainable development issues.
The journalists also felt there is need for training of journalists in environmental reporting to equip them with skills to tackle the technical aspects of environmental issues.

The need to network was emphasised as an association for environmental journalists in southern Africa was formed at the end of the conference. A steering committee was appointed, tasked to come up with a name and to draw up a list of environmental journalists in the region as well as coordinate them with the aim of improving reporting on the environment (SARDC).

* by Leonissah Munjoma
* SOURCE: Southern African News Features offers a reliable source of regional information and analysis on the Southern African Development Community, and is provided as a service to the SADC region. SANF is produced by the Southern African Research and Documentation Centre (SARDC), which has monitored regional developments since 1985. This article may be reproduced with credit to the author and publisher. http://www.sardc.net

It would be hard to exaggerate the significance of land as an asset for the poor in today’s structurally adjusted, economically liberalised and globalised world. Trying to understand the many dynamics at play in today's complex post-Cold War world is not easy. As someone who since 1997 has tried to support Oxfam International staff, partners and allies engaged in land issues principally, but not exclusively, in Africa, I feel this problem acutely. What is really happening in the contexts in which we are seeking to intervene, and what are the critical links between the local, national, regional and global levels? There are never easy answers to these questions, but it is important to continue to ask them.

At the level of ideas, I find quite helpful some of the debates which have appeared in the pages of the Journal of Agrarian Change. But they do make for rather gloomy reading. In one of his many contributions, Henry Bernstein (2002, 2003, 2004) ponders pessimistically about the prospects for significant future redistributive land reform targeted at the poor. He argues that the long wave of land reform across the world beginning with the French Revolution came to an end in the 1970s, coinciding with the emergence of the phenomenon we now refer to as globalisation. The back of feudal landlordism was broken in many parts of the world, allowing the development of both industrialisation and more productive agriculture, based on capitalist relations. Industrial urbanisation took people off the land and provided new and expanding markets. But now, Bernstein argues, we live in a globalised world characterised by the search for ever cheaper and more exploitable labour.

The existence of cheap labour export processing zones (EPZs), which many governments seem proud to boast of, is an illustration of this. In the infamous maquila factories of Central America or in the clothing sweat shops of East Asia, we seem to be in a world in which human and labour rights are being put into reverse gear. The lack of bargaining power of poor people in today's global supply chains has led some NGOs to characterise this as ‘the race to the bottom’. We are all aware of the growing gap between rich and poor and the intensification of inequality in many parts of the world.

Africa's recent economic history has been almost uniformly dismal. Structural adjustment may well have been necessary to attack the bloated and unproductive bureaucracies and parastatals in many countries, but the social impact of the medicines applied has been harsh in the extreme. Zambia is one of many countries to have suffered truly radical economic decline. As someone who lived in Zambia in the 1970s and witnessed with my own eyes the rapid formation of a new urban middle class as Zambians abandoned the land in their tens of thousands for new economic opportunities in the cities, it has been deeply disturbing to return in subsequent decades to observe the rapid and demonstrable decline in people's hopes, expectations and lifestyles.

In Zambia, as in much of Africa, the huge loss of regular urban jobs has made it far harder for people to engage in economic reciprocity with rural kinfolk. Scholars such as Deborah Bryceson have written of 'de-agrarianisation' or 'de-peasantisation', to describe a process in which people adopt what in the jargon is now called ‘diversified livelihoods strategies’ in an increasingly desperate attempt to survive. In such a context, intensified by population increase and related pressure on resources, access to land as a key asset for survival has become much more important, in ways that would have seemed highly unlikely in Zambia back in the mid-1970s. As a result, conflicts over land have intensified across the continent.

The purpose of this brief, crude global sketch is to make the point that struggles over land will take different forms in different parts of the world depending on a range of important variables such as levels of economic development, political awareness and mobilisation, degrees of urbanisation and literacy, levels of education and technology, and the agricultural potential of soils - a critical factor in Africa, as Archie Mafeje (2003) has pointed out recently. In short, the local context is all important.

In South Africa the ANC Government has clearly judged (perhaps correctly) that it can afford to delay meaningful land reform because it fears no danger of peasant revolts in the foreseeable future. In countries such as Uganda and Kenya, small pressure groups including land alliances have little serious political constituency and bear no resemblance to the great Brazilian mass movement of the landless, the MST (O Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra). Decades of political conflict culminated in the 1988 Constitution, which proclaimed that land in Brazil must perform a 'social function'. In other words (and this has particular resonance for the Zambian Copperbelt) that it is not politically acceptable for vast tracts of land to lie idle in the legal hands of absentee landlords, neither producing anything nor providing jobs.

Elsewhere, for example in Guatemala and Honduras, class configurations are very different and the local equivalents of the MST struggle against the outright and often violent hostility of the big landlords (and vigilantes) and their urban allies. Here the issue is further complicated by ethnicity - by the palpable hostility directed towards the indigenous people of Central America; in Honduras there is a 'popular' saying 'better be dead than have indigenous people living on my land'.

In this part of the world land activists need to be both extremely courageous and members of organised trade union or political movements. Put crudely, in parts of Central and South America such people routinely get killed for their beliefs. This does not happen in Africa. This is a fundamental difference, reflecting contrasting historical conditions. (Of course, people do regularly get killed in local level conflicts over land in Africa and this seems likely to increase as conflicts intensify over resources more generally.)

A persistent theme in much of the land advocacy work in which I and many others have been involved is that of lack of information, particularly on the part of the politically powerless. This is a state of affairs which governments in general and ministries of land in particular are often keen to perpetuate in their own interests. Extracting information from them can often be extremely difficult, though donor demands for transparency can be helpful here.

A very imaginative land campaign (Campanha Terra) in Mozambique sought to address this by translating key aspects of a potentially progressive new land law into local languages, and by using imaginative media such as comics, audio cassettes, theatre, music and posters to help raise people's awareness of their new rights. This was particularly important in a country such as Mozambique, with its high levels of illiteracy, and where the law imaginatively and unusually acknowledged peoples' historical rights to land as communities, on the basis of acknowledged occupation rather than formal written records. (Palmer 2003, Hanlon 2002).

Awareness of one's rights is nowhere more important than in the area of women's land rights. These too vary greatly across the world depending on factors such as the legal context (which is surprisingly gender progressive in Latin America) and levels of political awareness and organisation. Even between neighbouring countries realities can be very different, with women enjoying greater legal rights in Columbia and Nicaragua than in Honduras and Mexico because of greater mobilisation by and unity within women's groups.

But in Africa women face particular obstacles, often being regarded legally as minors and generally enjoying only secondary rights through their husbands, if married. Such rights are frequently ill-defined, of uncertain duration and subject to change and to maintaining good relations with others. Women often need to be married - and may remain in oppressive relationships - in order to enjoy access to or rights in land. Patriarchy remains dominant at all levels, while patrilineal traditions, combined with the HIV/AIDS pandemic, make women particularly vulnerable to loss of assets, including land, on the death of her spouse. Widows are frequently chased away by their late husband's relations and there are increasing harrowing individual tales of destitution as a result. In such a context the work of legal aid and information groups such as the women lawyers' association, FIDA, in Kenya and Uganda and the Women's Legal Centre in South Africa is particularly important.

Despite strenuous efforts by women lobbyists, including the Uganda Land Alliance, concrete gains by women have been few and far between. Awareness and support work are absolutely critical. Changing laws is important, but changing social norms is even more so (FAO/Oxfam GB 2003). Information is indeed power, but Latin American experience suggests that there is no substitute for political struggle in the fiercely contested arena of women's land rights - as elsewhere.

Land is always a deeply political issue, involving highly disputed and often very dangerous terrain, as events in Zimbabwe have illustrated all too graphically. Working on land requires adopting very long term horizons and sticking with things through thick and thin, for these are long term processes which defy quick fixes or easy final solutions. Donors, generally speaking, are unable to adopt such long-term horizons. Fashions come and go in the notoriously fickle development world, as they do in the academic world.

Contexts do differ greatly, but it is clear that the clumsy imposition of liberalisation, the rolling back of the role of the state and of the state marketing boards, grain reserves and the like, combined with manifestly unfair international trade rules, have left many poor people far more vulnerable than they were and far more dependent on access to land than ever before, while that very access is increasingly threatened in a globalising world.

In such a context, struggles for land rights continue to form a vital part of the wider fight for global justice. It is my very strong belief that continued support should be lent to support and sustain people and organisations who are engaging in fighting for land and justice for the poor. The fact that poor people are struggling against increasingly long odds in a hugely hostile global climate makes this more necessary than it has ever been. So the historic Frelimo slogan from Mozambique remains as valid today as it was back in the heady days of the Front Line States - A luta continua!

* Robin Palmer is Global Land Policy Adviser with Oxfam GB. This is a slightly shortened version of a paper presented to an Oxfam Zambia workshop on the Copperbelt in March 2004. Click on the link below for references.

* Please send comments to

Nigeria has failed to agree on a new date for handing over the disputed Bakassi peninsula to Cameroon after refusing to withdraw from the potentially oil-rich territory by the original deadline of 15 September, the UN mediator in the border dispute has announced. The UN Office for West Africa (UNOWA) said the latest meeting of the Cameroon-Nigeria Mixed Commission in Abuja on 21 and 22 October had simply referred the issue to the heads of state of the two countries and UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan.

A widening investigation has implicated some of the world's largest oil services firms in an alleged scheme to bribe Nigerian officials to win $5.3 billion in contracts to build a natural gas complex in the African country. As details of the case unfolded, one of the key players, Houston-based Halliburton Co., said that the questionable conduct occurred almost entirely before it became a partner. But information shows that Halliburton, through a subsidiary, was more involved in some of the suspicious deals than it has acknowledged.

They were fêted by Robert Mugabe as patriots and pioneers in a radical redistribution of land to redress colonial injustice. But the war veterans who ousted white farmers have now themselves been invaded. Last month, police units fanned across Trelawney, a rural district outside the capital, Harare, and erased settlements with matches and mallets. "Now we are in the position the white farmer was. The authorities used us," Richard Mapuringa (33) said last week, sifting through the ruins of his house.

Donors are belatedly coughing up cash to fight locusts in West Africa, but agricultural experts warned on Monday that it will take two or three years to reduce the number of insects to the point where they no longer present a significant threat to agriculture. Nearly half the crop-spraying aircrafts in West Africa have been sent to Senegal. FAO officials and the representatives of European donors admitted on Monday that not enough has been done to control the largest locust invasion to hit West Africa for 15 years.

As Malawi attempts to consolidate gains in agricultural production after three years of drought, experts have highlighted access to land and the preservation of biodiversity as key to future food security. International NGO Oxfam has warned that a lack of access to arable land had contributed to food shortages and was also heightening tensions, with land-hungry communities increasingly encroaching on forests and tea estates. Early last week a land dispute erupted in the Chimaliro traditional area in Thyolo district in the Southern region of the country.

A World Conservation Society (WCS) project in eastern Zambia's game-rich Luangwa valley is helping to transform poachers into farmers and entrepreneurs. The key is the use of food aid to persuade poachers to turn in their guns and join Conservation Farmer/Wildlife Producer Training Centres (CTCs), established by WCS to teach sustainable farming methods. WCS is linked to the Bronx Zoo in New York.

The Landless People's Movement (Gauteng) welcomes the decision of the South African Communist Party to add its voice to our longstanding 'Land! Food! Jobs!' campaign and to rejoin the struggle for land and agrarian transformation in South Africa on the basis of many of the LPM's demands, including our call for a Land Summit and an audit of unused and unproductive land.

This report presents the results of Global Witness and Amnesty International's survey into the diamond jewellry retail sector's implementation of self-regulation to support the Kimberley Process, the international diamond certification scheme launched to combat the trade in conflict diamonds.

Representatives from organizations and peoples movements from around the globe came together in Durban, South Africa October 4-7, 2004 to discuss realistic avenues for addressing climate change. The group emerged from the meeting with this call for a global grassroots movement against climate change. We therefore call on activists, organizations and communities to sign on to the statement that emerged from the Durban meeting and join this growing global movement. Please send sign-ons to [email protected].

The African Conservation Foundation (ACF) is delighted to announce an exciting new Art for Conservation project, "When Paintings Come Alive" - The Endangered Species Project. We are teaming up with internationally renowned creative artist Daniel Taylor to raise funds for the conservation of three endangered species in Africa: gorillas, elephants and lions.

Hundreds of families evicted last month from a farm outside the Zimbabwean capital Harare, occupied under the land reform programme in 2000, have been granted a reprieve. High Court Judge Rita Makarau ruled in favour of Percy Masendu and 429 other settlers who had filed an urgent court application to have their eviction nullified. Brian Zindi, one of those returning to the farm, said although they were excited by the court order, the evictions had traumatised them and depleted their resources.