Christopher Bendana

When Innocent Mutatina's father bought a large tract of land on the edge of western Uganda's Bugoma forest in the late 1990s, in a traditional informal sale, it was "a wilderness" covered in trees and elephant grass, his son said.

Now, the younger Mutatina wants either to build a ranch on the 15-square-kilometre (6-square-mile) piece of land, located by one of the country's largest rainforests, or sell it to the National Forestry Authority (NFA) for conservation purposes.