Government has secured 300 acres of land to set up a multi-functional prison for terror suspects.
The disclosure was made by the Commissioner General of Prisons, Dr. Johnson Byabashaija. He said the new detention centre would also accommodate cyber crime suspects and drug traffickers.

In 2011 Global Witness visited 67 communities in three provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). This short film tells the stories of the people they met, who are impacted by the expansion of industrial-scale logging. A pattern of similarly devastating outcomes emerges. This film was shown at the World Bank’s annual meeting in Washington DC, September 2011. The World Bank is undertaking a review of its forest policies, such as those implemented in the DRC.

In August, SA's minister of water affairs and Lesotho's minister of natural resources signed an official agreement to implement Phase 2 of the Lesotho Highlands Water Project (LHWP). The LHWP has been fraught with problems since the treaty was signed in 1986, says this article from Business Day, which
notes that there are good reasons why the public should be paying more attention to the huge development and that there are better alternatives to building more huge dams in Lesotho.

A young woman is told she can only benefit from a land redistribution scheme if she provides sexual favours to the Moroccan official administrating it.

In order for global climate change policies and efforts to progress, intense local activism and countries most adversely affected by climate change must play a leading role. If they don't, an upcoming meeting of state parties to the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) in South Africa will be a conference of 'paralysis' and 'profiteers', says Patrick Bond, climate justice expert and author of the book 'Politics of Climate Justice' coming out in November.

Rights groups in Guinea have denounced the action of security forces against the inhabitants of a village more than one hundred kilometers south of the capital, Conakry. Lawyers Without Borders and the Equal Rights for All say they are disappointed with the government over the alleged attacks by gendarmes and army troops against inhabitants of the Saoro village over a land dispute with the Soguipah Company. The land conflict started in 2003 following a presidential decree allocating 2,000 hectares of land in Saoro village to the Company.

This website presents material linked to an on-going research project in Masvingo province in the south-east of the country. This has involved a detailed study of what happened to people’s livelihoods after land reform, across 16 land reform sites and 400 households.

Zimbabwe's political crisis continues. Yet with the stabilisation of the currency and the overhaul of some key economic policies, the agricultural economy in particular has begun to recover. IDS research has been tracking what has been happening in one province since 2000, looking at the changing livelihood prospects of those who gained land in Zimbabwe’s controversial 'fast track' land reform programme. A series of short films have been released which provide insights into what is happening on the ground, by offering some voices from the field. Following an overview film, each of the films in the series provides a profile of a particular farm family, exploring how they have invested in the land and their visions for the future.

Kenya human rights activist and author Philo Ikonya shares

South Africa's Department of Rural Development and Land Reform has released a green paper on land reform, but the paper has been described as a 'great disappointment' by Andries Du Toit from the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies. 'After more than two years of vacillation and evasion since President Zuma’s announcement of the need for a new policy framework, the Ministry has produced a document that provides almost no guidance on any of the crucial questions facing land and agrarian reform in South Africa. It fails to offer any serious proposals for public debate on what the alternatives are to scale up land reform. It is bafflingly slight, weighing in at no more than eleven pages. It is in fact surprising that the Ministry is willing to release such an insubstantial and vague document at all.'

Following the City of Cape Town’s demolition of over 100 structures at Kraalfontein that had been erected by backyarders on an unused piece of land, the Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign has issued a statement calling on the City to support rather than condemn the poor.

This year Fatimata Koama and her associates received more than half a million CFA francs as a reward for planting - and looking after - 1,200 trees in their small corner of Burkina Faso. Magoulé's payout – equivalent to about 1,200 dollars – is just part of more than 100,000 dollars disbursed over the past two years as a strategy to strengthen reforestation efforts, according to environmental group SOS Sahel and the Burkina Ministry of the Environment.

'Africa wants an outcome based on science that is fair and honours the promises all countries have made in the UN Climate Convention and its Kyoto Protocol. We need to agree to global reductions for 2050 that limit warming to well below the predicted 1.5 degrees Celsius in Africa.' This is according to Tosi Mpanu-Mpanu, who will lead the negotiations on behalf of the African Group of Negotiators on Climate Change (AGN) at the United Nations climate change conference later this year. He was interviewed by IPS.

Dan Rather devotes his program, 'Dan Rather Reports on HD Net' on Tuesday 27 September to exploring the complex issues involved with modern-day land appropriation in developing countries. The program profiles Oakland Institute's ground breaking work on land grabs in Africa involving over 30 land deals in seven countries. Rather interviews Anuradha Mittal of the Oakland Institute and looks at the role of American investors and US universities in this trend that threatens millions of lives, the future for Sub-Saharan Africa, and examines why this is happening at this time.

Mike Cowling finds that the first three pages of South Africa's land reform Green Paper seem to set the tone of what is to follow, by explaining what needs to be done without providing any indication of how this is to be achieved.

During the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal, in February 2011, social movements, organizations of small food producers and other CSOs released a collective appeal against land grabbing. Over 650 organizations have already endorsed it. If your organization has not signed on yet and would also like to support this appeal, please do so before 7 October 2011.

Investments in rural infrastructure, both physical and institutional, were needed to enhance the resilience of agriculture in the face of the uncertainties of climate change, South Africa's Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Maite Nkoana-Mashabane said at the African Ministerial Conference on Climate-Smart Agriculture.

The Mozambican government is providing large tracts of land at a symbolic price to Brazilian farmers to produce soy, maize and cotton, Mozambique’s agriculture minister, José Pacheco told Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo.

Indian agribusiness companies are ready to spend $2.5bn buying, or renting for decades, several million hectares of cheap land in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Uganda in what could be some of the largest farming deals struck in Africa in the last 50 years.

REDD+ intends to develop financing mechanisms that will compensate developing countries as an incentive for changing the way forest resources are used to curb CO2 emissions. The performance based compensation will pay for actions that prevent forest loss or degradation, conservation, the sustainable management of forests and enhancement of carbon stocks. Isilda Nhantumbo argues that REDD+ is now driving a race for land in Mozambique.