http://farmlandgrab.org/post/view/19998
New global land rush trampling human rights
Published: 07 Feb 2012
National Geographic | 6 February 2012
by Dan Klotz
It is an age-old story in the developing world, one that rarely ends
happily ever after. Communities without economic power that live off
of land to which they do not “own” are devastated when their
government transfers the property rights to wealthy outside interests,
who exploit the natural resources. These land deals often result in
chaos, strife, and large-scale human tragedy.
According to a new report and a series of issue briefs issued by
Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), the majority of 1.4 billion
hectares (approx. 5.4 million square miles) of uncultivated land in
Africa are claimed by regional or national governments but are “held
in common” and managed by local communities. Less than 2% of African
forests, for example, are formally owned or administered by
communities, leaving states free to hand out the remaining 98% in the
name of economic development.
At least 428 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa rely on the land
without holding Western-style legal ownership. As a result, when this
land is sold or leased in the name of economic development, these
communities lose their livelihoods. And according to experts, the
pace of these deals has intensified lately.
“With the speed and scale of this surge into Africa in the last five
years, the chief concern should be that investors are cutting deals
with governments for land that really belongs to individual rural
communities,” concluded international land rights specialist Liz Alden
Wily, who wrote the reports. “Every corner of every state has a
customary owner.”
The United Nations champions land rights and tenure key to addressing
and eradicating extreme poverty and hunger and points to the erosion
of these rights as “an important driver of deforestation and
unsustainable land management.” But this advocacy in internationals
circles is often lost when development deals are struck.
“Controversial land acquisitions were a key factor triggering the
civil wars in Sudan, Liberia and Sierra Leone, and there is every
reason to be concerned that conditions are ripe for new conflicts to
occur in many other places,” said Jeffrey Hatcher, director of global
programs for the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI).
Liberia’s recent land transactions, under President Ellen Johnson
Sirleaf, present a perfect case study. Over the past five years, the
Liberian government sold or leased more than one third of the
country’s land to private investors for logging, mining, and
agriculture. One recent transaction, with Sime Darby of Malaysia,
provided a 63-year lease to develop 220,000 hectares of land for palm
oil and rubber production.
After local residents filed an appeal to the Roundtable on Sustainable
Palm Oil, an international certification body whose stamp of approval
is valued by the company, the company froze its operations and began
meeting directly with the villagers. But President Sirleaf stepped in
and ended these discussions, telling the communities that attempts to
defend their land rights “undermined” the Liberian government.
“You don’t need guns to kill people,” said Alfred Brownell, an
attorney and director of Liberia’s Green Advocates. “When you take
food from a village by destroying farm lands and cash crops, you are
starving its people. If you destroy their grave sites, poison their
drinking water, obliterate their cultural heritage, divert their
rivers, streams and creeks, there is no doubt you are removing an
ethnically defined population from their land.”
Of the 35 African nations covered in RRI’s analyses, only nine
received high marks with Uganda, Tanzania, Burkina Faso and South
Sudan rated as having the strongest laws. But even in those countries,
Alden Wily said, the laws are not respected in practice, and local
communities are rarely included in negotiating the terms of a purchase
or lease, even in countries where laws recognize such lands as private
property.
South Sudan, for example, is not only the newest country in the world
but one whose laws provide substantial protections for customary land
rights. But the government signed deals for control of nine percent
of the new nation’s lands even before announcing its independence,
according to RRI’s report. With new agreements signed since 2011, the
percentage is expected to be even higher, said David Deng, research
director, South Sudan Law Society, South Sudan.
“Land was at the heart of the civil war in South Sudan,” said Deng,
who spoke at a roundtable that RRI sponsored in releasing the reports
last week. “And now, with independence, communities expect that the
sacrifices that they made during the war will be repaid by recognizing
the legitimacy of their customary land tenure. Anything less would
undermine the nation’s fragile peace.”
“It’s tragic, since these conflicts between people and their
governments, and risks to investors and development, can so easily be
avoided,” said Andy White, Coordinator of the Rights and Resources
Initiative. “We are hoping that the governments that gather in Rio de
Janeiro for the UN conference on sustainability in June will respond
to this potential, and quit handing out the peoples’ land and forests
to outsiders.”
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Received on Fri Feb 10 2012 - 10:03:57 EST
