Sierra Leone Farmers Against Corporate land Grab

On December 9, 2013, a meeting was called in Pujehun District over the lease of 6,500 hectares of prime farmland in this southeastern part of Sierra Leone. Local sources said elders called the meeting to allow people to again express their grievances to the Paramount Chief over the lease of land to the Socfin Agricultural Company.

Hundreds were waiting in the village of Libby Malen for the chiefdom authorities to arrive when they learned that nine of their fellow villagers had been beaten and arrested by the police en route to the meeting. More than three hundred people immediately left the meeting to go to the police station in nearby Sahn and demand the release of the villagers.
 They were met along the way by an armed contingent of police who fired tear gas and live bullets into the crowd, leaving many people with serious injuries. One person was shot in the neck and at least 57 people were arrested and badly beaten. Shortly afterwards, a group of thugs, who witnesses report may have been police and/or company representatives, attacked villagers in Libby Malen itself, forcing people to flee into the bushes.

For some time now, those working with the local communities have warned the government and the company over the deteriorating situation in Pujehun.
“The community people are starving at the moment," Frank Williams, networking officer for the NGO Green Scenery, told GRAIN in a November interview. Williams is also the coordinator of ALLAT – “Action for Large scale Land Acquisition Transparency’’ – a civil society coalition formed in 2012 as a watchdog on land issues. "They don't have enough land to do their farm work. Their lands have been taken away from them. The jobs which the company has offered them... they are being paid less than $50 a month. [...] So these are all issues for the community people. We see future conflicts if the government does not come in at once to address these matters.”

Pujehun District, in southeastern Sierra Leone, was badly affected by the civil war which ended in 2002. Today, the district is one of several parts of the country where the government is seeking to attract foreign investment to set up industrial oil palm plantations. But local communities are rejecting the handing over of large tracts of land to foreign companies.
Two companies – Socfin, the local subsidiary of a Luxembourg-headquartered corporation controlled by the Bolloré group, and India-based Siva Group/Biopalm Star Oil – have between them acquired rights to an area of nearly 90,000 hectares across five chiefdoms in the district.
The affected villagers say no proper consultations were held to enable community members to understand the deal before they were required to sign documents, and many are refusing to give up their lands.
The incident in December is only the latest in a series of hostile and increasingly violent reactions by the authorities to communities' resistance to the loss of their land.

In December 2012, 101 members of land-holding families in the Pujehun district wrote to Sierra Leone's Human Rights Commission complaining about the lack of consultation, the destruction of crops and land, and persistent harassment by the district's Paramount Chief, the police and Socfin personnel. Local NGO Green Scenery also carried out a fact-finding mission into the land deals in the District and published a report.
Socfin's local subsidiary responded by filing a suit for defamation against the NGO.
And then in October 2013, says Williams, the company accused several community members of destroying palm trees belonging to it.
“Six people were arrested,” says Williams. “The charges against them – one is incitement, two is conspiracy and three is destruction of company properties. Those are the complaints made against those six arrested by the Socfin company.”
They were held for several weeks before being granted bail at the end of November. One of the six was among those arrested outside the police station in Sahn on December 9th.
Williams says that the community members are committed to stopping the company, despite the violence and intimidation they face. He shares the story of Safiya Vandi, who refused to allow her land – sold without her consent – to be destroyed to make way for a vast oil palm plantation.
“With strong heart and strong mind, the woman stood in front of the bulldozer so that they could not clear her land,” Williams said. “And her interruption stopped the work for that day. And cases like this may likely come up frequently, because community members' complaints are not being listened to.”


This is the third of a series of interviews about resistance to the expansion of industrial oil palm plantations in West and Central Africa.
Members of communities affected by these monoculture plantations and civil society organisations from Africa, Europe, the Americas and Asia met in Calabar, Nigeria from 2–5 November 2013. They shared testimonies and analysis of the consequences of the rapid and brutal expansion of monoculture oil palm plantations by multinational companies in different communities and countries.

From Grain here

This Land Is Whose Land? Reclaim The Commons

There was a time when 'land' used to refer to those parts of our habitat that were cultivated for food, grazed by animals for hide, wool, meat, milk and fertilisation, forests from which timber, firewood and food were collected and where communities lived sharing the common wealth. Now, as with everything else one can imagine, land is just another commodity to be bought and sold at the best possible price, to be acquired whatever the consequences for long-term incumbents. As land is a commodity so too is everything it can offer – food, fuel, minerals and water – with the added bonus of investment and speculation.

The phenomenon of 'land-grab', well known now, was originally seen as a way for food insecure and rich countries such as Saudi Arabia and China to gain access to foreign farmland in order to meet the food needs of their own populations. Then came the big push for biofuels following targets agreed by governments at a succession of meetings on climate change. In a recent report from Worldwatch Institute rural populations have been pushed off prime land in 25 sub-Saharan countries for the production of biofuel crops for foreign nations. In other examples food is grown on an industrial scale solely for export, disenfranchising local populations and turning them into wage labourers if they are lucky and forcing them into urban areas and likely penury if they are not.

The most exciting opportunity now for big money seeking even bigger money is that of investment and speculation in both food and land. Pension schemes, universities, bankers and large investors are jostling to invest in land for speculation. According to one spokesperson for a large company fund it doesn't matter if nothing is grown for ten years, you'll still 'turn a good profit.' Pension funds globally run to around $23 trillion. Their investment in land and agriculture is relatively recent but growing fast and admitted by some investment bankers and civil society organisations to be a major cause of rising food prices globally.

At the World Social Forum in Dakar, Senegal an appeal against land-grabbing was launched. By the following September over 650 organisations had endorsed it. Estimates of land the size of western Europe (227 million hectares) have been sold, leased or licensed in the last decade. One Oxfam case study found at least 22,500 people lost both homes and land in Uganda when they were evicted in favour of a British company, the New Forest Company. There were conflicting versions from the company and the evicted but a high court order to restrain evictions was sidestepped and the company put the responsibility onto the Ugandan National Forest Authority. There are numerous accounts of promised benefits to displaced persons and communities not materialising even after several years of waiting. Efforts to draw up and implement regulations for the protection of local populations, even voluntary ones, have been less than robust.

The countries of Africa have been a major target for land-grab with agriculture on an industrial scale reaping substantial profits for investors. Corporate agriculture, however, is not about food production or satisfying the needs of the undernourished or downright starving but about producing profit. How long can it be at this rate before its limits are reached – disenfranchised millions starved to death in favour of a tidy accumulation for the few? A lengthy study by the Oakland Institute in Tanzania, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone, Mali, Mozambique, Zambia and South Sudan looked at the viability of industrial scale farming compared with small family farms. What they found was that where 100,000 hectares of plantations would employ 1,000 workers traditional agriculture of the same area would sustain 50,000 families, that is between 200-250,000 people. In addition a 2009 UN report concluded that industrial agriculture is responsible in large part for climate change, species extinction, poisoning of the environment, water shortage, disease and poverty.

This land is our land. Reclaiming the commons for the peoples of the world is a necessary step in the pursuit of socialism. Join us for a revolution.

JS