"How commercial farms are ripping apart Zambian communities", 15 Nov 2017

A new Human Rights Watch report found that some commercial farmers in Serenje District, in Zambia’s fertile Central Province, have acquired thousands of hectares of land while ignoring laws meant to prevent forced evictions and ensure that rural residents are compensated if their land is taken. While some farms have started operations without evicting residents, others have fired up their bulldozers and forcibly evicted residents whose families had farmed the land for generations...[R]esearch found that hundreds of people have already been forced out of their homes and off their land by commercial farming in the area, with several thousand more at risk of eviction without a cent of compensation. This is devastating for the whole community, but particularly hard on women, who described their enormous struggles to sustain their families after losing fertile land for growing food, providing drinking water, and to use for hunting or foraging...Government officials say the land in Serenje district was long ago converted from customary status (where it is managed by traditional authorities) to state control, but this is news to locals, who say they did not know about the change and were definitely not consulted on it. Officials we spoke to also had no records to prove this claim.