The HALO Trust
Land Release
Land Release is a new and rather unhelpful term that has appeared in the mine action sector. It is widely misunderstood and misrepresented.
The most common error is for people or agencies to “report” that they have successfully “released” land, when in fact they have done nothing, or almost nothing. Either local farmers have decided there is not the mines threat they had earlier perceived, and following no human or livestock accidents have reclaimed agricultural land themselves – without any intervention by outside agencies. Or, agencies report that they have released land when all they have done is viewed the land and spotted that it was inadvertently placed on a central mine action database through poor survey. Removing this incorrect data is “cancellation”, and NOT “release”. Put simply, the act of “Cancellation” of land from a data base does not “benefit” mined communities per se – there are no beneficiaries.
Agencies should not report the vast hectares of reclaimed and cancelled land as “released”, among their far smaller number of hectares released through planned and managed clearance activity. If they do include reclaimed and cancelled land then their statistics will be wildly exaggerated and they will mislead, possibly even defraud, their donors.
Prior to the fad of “Land Release”, there was a term “Area Reduction”, which usefully described the area in a confirmed minefield that agencies decided there was no need to physically clear as a defined mine belt had been found and satisfactorily neutralized.
HALO has written two papers on Land Release, to try to clarify just what the term means. These are linked below:
