Land Dispossession
Give farmers addl benefits
Speakers tell int'l seminar
Farmers who are dispossessed of their lands and relocated for infrastructural developments must be provided with additional benefits along with financial compensation, academics opined at an international workshop yesterday.
They called for enactment of a law and effective policy to protect farmlands from being used for infrastructural developments without control.
Bielefeld University and Dhaka University (DU) jointly organised the workshop, "Controversial Democratic Spaces: Land, Environment and Human Rights in Bangladesh", at DU Senate Bhaban.
Panel speaker Prof Rehman Sobhan said that in addition to cash compensations, the farmers should be offered lifelong benefits from their lands used for developmental measures.
"All land should be… legally recognised as its owner's (farmers) equity, whenever it is acquired either for public or even private development," he said.
"All such owners must be guaranteed an equity stake in the development of their acquired land, whether this be for the Padma Bridge, an export processing zone or a real estate development project."
Prof Sobhan also recommended identifying khas lands under illegal occupation and a strategy for distribution of the lands among the land poor and landless farmers.
Keynote speaker Dr Ridwanul Hoque of Department of Law, Dhaka University, said, "The rule of law to protect Bangladeshi farmers needs stronger enforcement as 10 percent of agro land has been reduced in the last decade."
Citing a research, he said, "70 percent of the civil suits are land-related and most of these litigations turn out to be futile, as many of them are based on false allegations or just due to mistakes, corruptions or twisting of documents relating to land."
Dr Joanna Pfaff-Czarnecka, research group director of Social Anthropology at Bielefeld University, said, "Land grabbing is done by the powerful elite in a democracy which oppresses the land poor and landless majority. Such post-colonial, oppressive practices go against the idea of democracy itself."
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