Land Rights, Private Use Permits and Forest Communities Land Commission of Liberia Prepared with the support of EU Project FED/2011/270957 Paul De Wit, Consultant April 2012 Table of Contents 1. Context ............................................................................................................................................ 1 1.1 Land Use Rights ....................................................................................................................... 1 1.2 Land tenure rights..................................................................................................................... 3 1.3 Importance of PUP issuance..................................................................................................... 4 2. Background to Private Use Permits ............................................................................................. 5 3. Inventory and assessment of PUPs .............................................................................................. 6 3.1 Legal nature of underlying land rights ....................................................................................... 6 3.1.1 Public Land Sale Deed .......................................................................................................... 7 3.1.2 Aborigine Land Grant Deed ................................................................................................. 7 3.1.3 Public Land Grant – Tribal Territory Deed ........................................................................... 7 3.1.4 Other legal tools ................................................................................................................... 7 3.1.5 Conclusion on the legality of private ownership entitlements ................................................ 8 3.1.6 Issuance date of private ownership rights .............................................................................. 9 3.2 Areas covered by PUP contracts and underlying land rights .................................................... 10 3.2.1 Land area under a PUP contract is smaller than the underlying land rights area................... 11 3.2.1.1 Communities, FDA and land use planning .................................................................. 11 3.2.1.2 Erosion of community property rights ....................................................................... 12 3.2.2 Land area under a PUP contract is larger than the underlying land rights area ..................... 14 3.2.2.1 Revision of the deeded area ....................................................................................... 14 3.2.2.2 Issues of extending land use beyond the right ............................................................. 15 3.2.3 Land area under a PUP contract corresponds with the underlying land rights area .............. 15 3.3 Who are the people? Land holding communities; their representations and community dynamics ............................................................................................................................................ 17 3.3.1 Historic and present community land owners ..................................................................... 18 3.3.2 Community land owner representation and representation tools ......................................... 19 3.3.3 Community identity, land ownership dynamics and representation issues at work under PUP contracts ......................................................................................................................................... 22 3.3.4 Preliminary conclusions on land owning community institutions and their representation .. 23 4 Preliminary conclusions .............................................................................................................. 24 4.1 A way forward for handling PUPs .......................................................................................... 24 4.2 Community Land Policy Issues ............................................................................................... 25 i Table 1 - Present and Pipeline land use right issuance ........................................................................... 2 Table 2 – County PUP distribution .......................................................................................................... 4 Table 3 – Land rights used for formalizing private use permits .............................................................. 8 Table 4 - Dates of land grant deed issuance ........................................................................................... 9 Table 5 – PUP rights area as compared to underlying deed rights area ............................................... 10 Table 6 - Collective land owners original deeds compared to collective landowners as PUP signatories ............................................................................................................................................................... 18 Box 1 – Case study of the collective public land sale deed of the Geetroh Chiefdom in Sinoe County 12 Box 2 – Case study of the public land grant deed of the Tienpo Chiefdom in Grand Gedeh county ... 13 Box 3 – Irregular situation of a PUP issued over and beyond a public land grant deed ....................... 15 Box 4 – Institutional community dynamics at work .............................................................................. 20 Box 5 – Matching granted deeded and signed PUP areas with administrative/community territories 22 ii 1. Context The Land Commission (LC) is undertaking inventory work on land tenure and land use rights that have been acquired, granted or issued by the state over time. It is also assessing the use and management of these rights by its holders, local government structures and public institutions. This work is foundation laying to underpin a number of land sector processes for which the LC has direct responsibility, including: (i) the development of a coherent and holistic future land use policy which may culminate in a national land use plan, (ii) a concession land rights and land use policy as part of an overall concession policy, (iii) the drafting of new property rights legislation to deal with private, public and community land. The inventory work focuses on the following categories: Land use rights 1. Agricultural, Mining and Forest Concessions; the latter include Forest Management Contracts – FMC, and Timber Sales Contracts – TSC; 2. Private Use Permits -PUP; 3. Community Forests Management Agreements - CFMA; 4. Protected Areas. Property rights 5. Aborigine Land Grants and Collective Public Land Grants; 6. Collective Public Land Sales. 1.1 Land Use Rights Preliminary results indicate that the different land use rights categories issued by the State to mainly commercial entrepreneurs, to communitiesi, or to itself (in the case of protected areas) represent in excess of 50% of the total land area of Liberia (see Table 1). In fact they will determine land use patterns for many years to come, as most of these use rights have been issued for a period of 25 years or more. The situation of longer term committed land use becomes more problematic when consideration is given to pipeline land use rights allocations, ie. these that are already planned by the Government of Liberia (GoL), but still need to be formalized. These include up to another six Forest Management Contracts, in excess of 30 Timber Sales Contracts, six Community Forest Management Agreements, eight Protected Areas. The situation in the mining sector is less clear. The total area under exploration licenses is close to an eightfold of the present production areas. Existing Agricultural Concessions contracts such as Golden Veroleum and Sime Darby provide opportunities for an extension of contractually agreed areas. Conservative projections indicate that the State has committed itself to issue longer term land use rights over an area that corresponds with some 75% of the total Liberian land mass. Even taking into account that some of these land use rights are not necessarily mutually exclusive, it remains a major challenge to manage this situation. 1 Table 1 - Present and Pipeline land use right issuance Actually issued Land Use Right (hectares) PRESENT Agricultural Concessions – AGRIC 1.140.408,00 Forest Management Concessions - FMC 1.007.266,00 Timber Sale Contracts - TSC 65.000,00 AGRIC TSC Community Forest FMC CFMA Management Agreements – 126.785,00 CFMA Other MIN Mining Concessions - MIN PUP 113.256,00 Private Use Permits - PUP 2.239.630,00 Protected Areas - PA 193.932,00 PA Total 4.886.277,00 % of Liberian Land Mass 50,95% Potentially to be Land Use Right issued (has) PIPELINE Agricultural Concessions – AGRIC 1.140.408,00 Forest Management Concessions - FMC 2.270.097,00 Timber Sale Contracts - TSC 230.000,00 AGRIC Community Forest Other Management Agreements – 194.102,00 CFMA FMC Mining Concessions – MIN PA 113.256,00 PUP Private Use Permits – PUP 2.239.630,00 TSC Protected Areas – PA CFMA 1.037.865,00 MIN Total 7.225.358,00 % of Liberian Land Mass 75,33% 2 1.2 Land tenure rights Estimates on the coverage of the different categories of collective property rights (categories 5 and 6) are more difficult to make at the early stages of the inventory. The inventory work has so far focused on different sources of information including: FDA inventory work in 2007, when the Authority launched a campaign for collective entities providing evidence of their land ownership entitlements (aborigine land grants and