Land rights

Based on Oxfam’s 20 years of development experience in Brazil, A Mask Called Progress examines the conflicts that have brought many traditional communities to the edge of extinction, and threaten to destroy one of the richest natural environments on earth. In their own words, the people of the Brazilian rainforest – rubber-tappers and indigenous people […]

Throughout the world there are minority peoples who lead their lives independently of the nation state. Over generations they have watched national boundaries harden around and through their territories until they have become outcasts in their own lands. The economic activities of national societies have further undermined these people by encroaching on their land base […]

Whoever owns the land also holds power. In the Third World the poor do not always have their own land. Oxfam, in its support for the poor overseas, increasingly has to face the problems of land tenure, problems which have to be overcome if the poor are really to escape from their poverty.