Liberia: New law to protect local communities' land rights against investors including mining & agribusiness
"Liberia passes landmark law to secure ancestral land rights"
Liberia has passed a landmark law that will help communities fight foreign land grabs by giving them ownership of ancestral territory...The topic has been contentious since most of the population has no formal rights to their land, and the state has signed away more than 40 percent of national territory in concessions for logging, mining and agriculture, according to rights groups. “This is a landmark victory not only for the government, but for the entire citizenry of our country,” said James Otto, a campaigner at Liberia’s Sustainable Development Institute (SDI). “For the first time in our history, a law is finally saying that communities that have lived on their land forever and ever are now owners of that land,” he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.