Skip to main contentdfsdf

Arabica Robusta's List: land tenure in Africa

    • Years ago I began to support a unique and influential social movement called Abahlali baseMjondolo (AbM), the Shackdwellers’ Movement.

       

      At the time, the movement had just refused to work with an influential leftist NGO called the Centre for Civil Society (CSS) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal. Supported by the militant Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC), AbM had protested against the takeover of the Social Movement Indaba by NGOs such as CCS.

       

      As grassroots activists, they understood that their voice was being managed and also often silenced by those on the left coming from more privileged backgrounds.

    • AbM and the Anti-Eviction Campaign’s principled stance was brave. They lost massive support from leftists who believed themselves to be the vanguard of working-class struggle and who thought the poor must be directed towards the “right politics”. Leaders were ridiculed, pseudo-academic pieces were written to undermine the movement, and friends of the movement received death threats – some even lost their jobs. Many Marxist-Leninists and Trotskyists scoffed at their “No Land! No House! No Vote!” campaign as being short-sighted and liberal. The only legitimate form of organising, they said, was around the creation of a workers’ party.

    9 more annotations...

    • Over the last decade or so unprecedented amounts of land have been concessioned, leased or sold by developing country governments at bargain basement prices to new investors with the support and funding of international financial institutions and hedge funds. “
    • Africa is the site of most of these new investments in land because land is cheaper in Africa than anywhere else. This is possible because it is customary land that is expropriated and whose prices are arbitrarily set by governments in negotiations with the investors which typically do not include any consultations with or prior informed consent of the affected communities. Again this is possible because landholders under customary tenure regimes are considered to be merely in possession of the land without any real legal status in most African countries.

    6 more annotations...

    • In May 2011, Green Scenery released a report on SAC's oil palm project in Sierra Leone, which highlighted inadequate compensation, corruption, and pressure on land owners and chiefs to sign agreements to give up their land.1
    • “Bolloré and Fabri are using a defamation suit to silence local opposition and to intimidate an NGO whose only crime is to defend the basic rights of local farmers whose land is being taken away.” says Frédéric Mousseau of the Oakland Institute.
    • Reading the news release on your company's website as can be seen in this link, http://heraklesfarms.com/docs/INTLHFNewYearsPressRelease.pdf all I gather is that the people whose ancestral lands you are desperate to grab are irresponsible, useless, and hungry and cannot afford to feed themselves. So you provide them with food stuffs in their desperate situation so that they will give their land to you and your Cameroonian surrogates. This is nothing less than re-colonization and re-enslavement of Africa under the guise of 'investment,' carried out by multi-national corporations like yours.
    • Reading through the website of Herakles Farms, I discovered that you are telling the world how you are helping to develop the continent of Africa by building hydroelectric power stations in Uganda, bringing internet cables to the continent of Africa, establishing palm plantations in Ghana and grabbing land in Cameroon. I learned, too, that your NGO, All For Africa, has a program, Palm oil Out of Poverty (POP). I think the acronym P.O.P. should stand for Palm oil On to Poverty because razing the forest for your proposed plantation and employing just 7000 - 8000 out of the 58,000 people who depend on that forest for their livelihoods, food, medicine and wood for fuel and building, will lead to increased poverty and early deaths.

    4 more annotations...

    • They said that if the World Bank could deny loan to Cambodia in 2011 when that government was displacing its farmers, there is no reason why the Ethiopian case should be different demanding the Bank to come clean and distance itself from the alleged crimes being committed by the present administration in that country.
    • We also realized the dramatic power imbalance prevailing in this conflict: a few hundred farmers and land owners on one side and the government of Sierra Leone and its police backing a firm which is a subsidiary of a giant multinational group.
    • Socfin SL is a subsidiary of Socfin (Société Financière des Caoutchoucs), an investment holding company, whose main shareholder is Vincent Bolloré, a prominent French businessman, who manages myriad of companies worldwide through his Bolloré Group.

    5 more annotations...

    • Studies by the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) revealed, ‘Many countries do not have sufficient mechanisms to protect local rights and take account of local interests, livelihoods, and welfare. Moreover, local communities are rarely adequately informed about the land concessions that are made to private companies. Insecure local land rights, inaccessible registration procedures, vaguely defined productive use requirements, legislative gaps, and other factors all too often undermine the position of local people vis-à-vis international actors.’[1]
    • The lack of land titles, of course, excludes the notion of compensation while in countries like Ethiopia, Mozambique and Tanzania, where land is nationalised, even legal recourse is difficult.

    7 more annotations...

    • Vandana Shiva, who dismisses the Western conception of property which respects only capital investment and not the fact that conception of non-western indigenous communities and cultures recognise that investment can also be of labour and nurturance“ (Shiva 2001: 44). Although Nyerere held this view, in practice his government acted to the contrary. Like the colonial state before him, more and more land, especially of the pastoralist communities was alienated.
    • his views are in many ways similar to those of Karl Polanyi on what he calls fictitious commodities.

    7 more annotations...

1 - 10 of 10
20 items/page
List Comments (0)