A high court ruling in Zambia could mean redistributed land and compensation for communities who were evicted for commercial farming.
On April 30, a High Court in Lusaka ruled in their favour, holding that the conversion of customary land was illegal and that the resulting forced displacement violated the community’s rights to life, freedom of movement and association, dignity, and equal protection of the law. The court ordered the attorney general, the local government and one of the companies at issue to provide relief, including providing alternative land and compensation for rights violations.
The Zambian government promotes large-scale agricultural investments to diversify its economy and reduce rural poverty. Central Province, known as Zambia’s breadbasket, has numerous large “farm blocks” where the government has promised to build roads, develop irrigation and other infrastructure to serve multiple farms.
The chiefdom also has a forest reserve, an open-air prison facility with farms run by the government and a “resettlement scheme”. For villagers in the chiefdom, land is scarce and beckons commercial farmers. Villagers were forced off their plots of land in this territory as soon as investors leased the land and started clearing to plant, sometimes without all the required permits.
Petitioners had sought more and requested that the court cancel the commercial farm’s land title, and questioned the legality of the conversion of their land into a farm block. The court stopped short of doing so. It found that though the procedure for converting the land was irregular, it could not cancel the title of the farm since the venture furthered the government’s national development plan. The court then ordered the government to provide alternative land and compensation.
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