Land grabs

World Bank – IMF Guilty Of Promoting Land Grabs, Increasing Inequality

October 9, 2018 Staff, Viacampesina.org Resist! IMF, Inequality, Land, Land grabs, World Bank

07 OCTOBER, BALI: At a meeting of La Via Campesina facilitated by Serikat Petani Indonesia (SPI) in Bali, peasant organizations from Asia, Africa, Americas, and Europe have unanimously held World Bank and IMF responsible for facilitating large-scale land grab, deforestation and ocean grabbing around the world, which has led to inequality, poverty, and global hunger. Peasants pointed to several decades of neo-liberal push from the World Bank and IMF for privatization and de-regulation in developing countries, as among the major factors that have led to increased cost of living for peasant communities. Over the last 30-40 years, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and more recently the WTO has forced countries to decrease investment in food production and to reduce support for peasant and small farmers.

African Peasants Highlight Interconnected Struggles At Via Campesina Global Conference

August 3, 2017 Boaventura Monjane, www.towardfreedom.com Organize! Africa, Africans, Land, Land grabs

By Boaventura Monjane for Toward Freedom - (Derio, Basque Country) Peasants across Africa are intensifying their struggles against land grabs and other harmful policies that promote industrial agriculture. At a recent international conference organized by the world’s largest peasants movement, Via Campesina, African peasants had opportunities to share their experiences of struggle and to learn. “It is amazing to see how linked our struggles are”. With a countenance showing enthusiasm and eagerness, Nicolette Cupido could not conceal her emotions. There are two main reasons for her excitement. It was the first time she attended a global conference of peasants’ movements starting July 16 in Derio, in the outskirts of Bilbao, Basque Country. Her movement, the Agrarian Reform for Food Sovereignty Campaign (FSC), South Africa, was among the new organizations accepted into membership of Via Campesina. A community organizer and a member of the FSC, Nicolette engages in food production at home and community gardens in Moorreesburg, a village in Western Cape, 120Km away from Cape Town. She grows a variety of vegetables, that is the way she contributes in building food sovereignty. “I plant tomato, unions, beetroot, cabbage and carrots. The struggle for food sovereignty has to be practical, too”, she said. Like Nicolette, about 20 other African peasants representing movements from Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Niger, Mali, Senegal and Ghana attended the conference.

Citizens Begin Reclaiming Coal Country After Decades Of Corporate Land Grabs

July 24, 2017 Emma Eisenberg, www.yesmagazine.org Create! Coal, Corporations, Land, Land grabs

By Emma Eisenberg for Yes! Magazine - “Land is the most important thing to us, yet it’s not clear at all who owns it,” says Karen Rignall, assistant professor of community and leadership development at the University of Kentucky. “Without broad-scale knowledge of the patterns of land ownership this region cannot work together to move forward. But who owns it on paper is not always who owns it in actuality. That takes time and money to find out.” The coal industry of central Appalachia has been on the decline for more than 30 years, with West Virginia and Kentucky losing more than 38,000 coal jobs in that time. As coal companies pulled out, they took with them the dollars that small towns used to use to fund their schools and infrastructure, and left behind abandoned mines, polluted rivers and vast swaths of vacant land. All over Appalachia, communities and organizations are working around the clock to come up with a way to “justly transition” the Appalachian economy to whatever comes next. Rignall and postdoctoral researcher Lindsay Shade are collaborating with a growing group of citizens that think a part of the answer to a post-coal economy may lie with an old land ownership study—and have been inspired by it to do a new one.

Ranchers Mutilate Indigenous People Demanding Land Back

May 7, 2017 Staff, www.survivalinternational.org Resist! Brazil, Indigenous Rights, Land grabs, Violence

By Survival International. Brazil - Thirteen Brazilian Indians have been hospitalized after a brutally violent attack by men armed with machetes in the Amazon. One man appears to have had his arms severed in disturbing photos released to Survival International. The attack was in retaliation for the Gamela Indians’ campaign to recover a small part of their ancestral territory. Their land has been invaded and destroyed by ranchers, loggers and land grabbers, forcing the Gamela to live squeezed on a tiny patch of land. The Gamela are indigenous to the area in Maranhão state in northern Brazil. Powerful agribusiness interests – reportedly including the Sarney landowning family – have been in conflict with the tribe for some time. The family includes a former president of Brazil and a former governor of Maranhão state.

Zuckerberg Suing Native Hawaiians For Ancestral Lands

January 22, 2017 Staff, www.indiancountrymedianetwork.com Educate! Facebook, Hawaii, Indigenous Rights, Land grabs

By Indian Country Media Network. In an effort to make the 700 acres of beachfront property he purchased in 2014 on the North Shore of Kauai as secluded as possible, three companies controlled by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg are suing more than 300 people—living and passed on—with ancestral links to the land. The Honolulu Star Advertiser reports there are close to a dozen small parcels within the estate purchased by Zuckerberg that are owned by Hawaiian families who have rights to be on the property. The legal action Mark Zuckerberg is trying to push is called “quiet title and partition,” and according to the Star Advertiser it isn’t uncommon in Hawaii.

Ute Tribe: Utah Republican Pushes Modern Day Indian Land Grab

September 20, 2016 Staff, www.indianz.com Organize! Congress, Land grabs, Utah

By Staff of Indianz - In the next few weeks Congressman Rob Bishop will attempt to push through the U.S. House of Representatives the first Indian land grab in over 100 years. H.R. 5780, the Utah Public Lands Initiative, proposes to rollback federal policy to the late 1800’s when Indian lands and resources where taken for the benefit of others. In a startling lack of transparency, Congressman Bishop plans only one hearing on this 215-page bill with about 129 other land management proposals in the obscure Subcommittee on Federal Lands.

Communities Strengthen Resistance Against Mining

February 7, 2016 Staff, www.educaoaxaca.org Organize! Corporatism, Environment, Land grabs, Mining

By EDUCA Oaxaca. Mexico - In the community of Cerro de las Huertas, Ejutla de Crespo (Oaxaca) representatives of 48 communities and 30 social organizations participated on January 29 and 30 in the Conference of Communities and Organizations against Mining, in which they demand the state and federal governments for cancellation of all mining projects in Oaxaca. The goal, according to the “Colectivo Oaxaqueño en Defensa de los Territorios” and the organizing communities, was to create a space for reflection at the national level about the advancements and obstacles of the anti-mining movement in order to strengthen the resistance and defense of communities and organizations.

The Blood Of The Earth: Agriculture, Land Rights, And Haitian History

January 14, 2016 Beverly Bell, www.otherworldsarepossible.org Educate! Food and Agriculture, Haiti, Land grabs, Mining, Trade

By Beverly Bell for Other Worlds - Today we live in a crucial moment in which peasants are confronting challenges as they grapple with global warming, with the power of multinational companies over what they eat and how they live, and with an agricultural model that can’t provide them livelihood. Among the risks and catastrophes the peasants confront are lack of quality and quantity in food production, and their right to live as human beings. They also face a challenge in accessing the basic resources they need to produce, especially seeds and water.

Children Traumatized By World Bank

October 11, 2015 Jocelyn Zuckerman and Michael W. Hudson, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Human Rights, Land grabs, Palm Oil, World Bank

By Jocelyn Zuckerman and Michael W. Hudson for the Huffington Post. Sungai Beruang, Indonesia -- Revan Pragustiawan loved his home by the river. The little boy’s ancestors built the place in a rainforest on the Indonesian island of Sumatra, using local bark and leaves in the traditional style of the Batin Sembilan tribe. Over the years, his dad had improved the house with wood and a metal roof. Revan felt safe there, sleeping on a plastic mat huddled up with his family, and spending his days playing with his sister and helping with chores. By the summer of 2011, he was 5 years old, big enough to help his mother fetch drinking water from the river and look forward to helping with a new garden his dad and some neighbors were planning to sow along the riverbank. Everything changed for Revan on the morning of August 10, 2011.

Indigenous Leaders To Pope: Rescind Doctrine Of Discovery

September 27, 2015 Julian Brave Noisecat, www.huffingtonpost.com Resist! Indigenous Rights, Land grabs, Pope, Religion

By Julian Brave Noisecat in Huffington Post. Ahead of Pope Francis’ arrival in Philadelphia, indigenous leaders from across the Americas -- from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in upstate New York to the Qom Nation in Argentina and many places in between -- have gathered in the city to urge the pontiff to rescind the Doctrine of Discovery, a series of papal bulls from the 15th century that justified European colonization of newly "discovered" lands. One particular papal bull, issued by Pope Nicholas V in 1455, authorized Christian nations "to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all ... enemies of Christ," take their land and "reduce their persons to perpetual slavery." The doctrine played a central role in centuries of colonization the world over and resulted in immense loss of land and life by indigenous peoples across the Americas.

World Bank’s Sham Conference On Land And Poverty

February 11, 2015 The Oakland Institute, www.popularresistance.org Organize! Land grabs, Neoliberalism, Poverty, World Bank

Every year for the last fifteen years, the World Bank has organized “The Conference on Land and Poverty,” ostensibly to discuss how to “improve land governance.” And every year, the World Bank Group has been accused of financing projects that support often brutal grabbing of land and other resources from local communities. This year, the 16th such gathering will take place in Washington DC, March 23 to 27. And yet again, the hypocrisy of their claims to be leaders of just and fair land reform will be called out, with opponents pointing to the impact of some of their recent investments in places like Uganda (2011), Honduras (2012), and Cambodia (2014). The big question is whose interests the World Bank really serves. While they spend considerable time and money painting themselves as champions of the poor, the Bank has a battery of practices and policies that suggest a very different truth.

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