The land grabbers are here

Last week, a new report on palm oil land grabs in Nigeria by Asia’s leading agribusiness group exposed the need for a binding treaty to regulate corporate human rights abuses.
Global palm oil trader, Wilmar International Ltd. has come under scrutiny for a large-scale land acquisition in Cross River State, where it destroyed areas of high conservation value, including community food-producing areas and water sources essential to local communities.
The report, Exploitation and Empty Promises: Wilmar’s Nigerian Land Grab, is coming three weeks after the Cross River government suspended the board of the state forestry commission over disagreement on opening up the state forest for commercial activities.
The Cross River State forest covers over 312 square kilometres (120 sq m). It is one of the largest forest blocks remaining in the country. It is home to Cross River gorillas and other highly valuable biodiversity.
 “It is a disgrace that Wilmar is painting a picture to its financiers and buyers that they have improved their operations when the reality on the ground shows that they are still bulldozing away people’s lives. Wilmar should address these evictions and human rights violations or pack and go,” said Godwin Ojo, executive director of Environmental Rights Action in Nigeria.
“Voluntary codes of conduct like Wilmar’s simply do not hold sufficient weight to solve problems of the company’s own making. The company’s failure to respect human rights in Nigeria is yet another example that transnational corporations like Wilmar cannot be trusted to police themselves,” said Anne van Schaik, Sustainable Finance campaigner with Friends of the Earth Europe.
The report cited academic and community-based research showing that Wilmar’s Nigerian operations may displace subsistence food production by thousands of local farmers.
“Wilmar’s Nigerian land grab is a prime example of how leading palm oil producers – even those like Wilmar that are in the global spotlight – exploit vulnerable communities and failures in governance to grab land to fuel their profits,” said Jeff Conant, Senior International Forests campaigner with Friends of the Earth-US.
Another report published by ActionAid entitled, New Alliance, New Risk of Land Grabs. Evidence from Nigeria, Malawi, Senegal and Tanzania, revealed that 10 African countries had signed up to the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition – the G8 countries’ main strategy for supporting agriculture in Africa that was launched in 2012.
As the New Alliance has been under way for three years, some of its likely impacts are becoming clearer as some large companies are already accused of taking part in land grabs in some countries.
The report also showed that the initiative was further increasing the risk of rural communities losing their access to and control over land to large investors, largely through policy commitments.
Implicated in these reforms and risks of land grabs are the G8 donor countries bankrolling the New Alliance (the US, the UK, France, Italy, Canada, Japan, Germany and Russia) and the European Union.
G8 states have committed $4.4 billion to the 10 countries of the New Alliance. The largest funders are the US and the European Union, but the UK, France and Italy also play important roles. The G8 support for the New Alliance is part of a drive to secure larger agricultural markets and sources of supply in Africa for multinational corporations.
New Alliance partners such as Monsanto, Diageo, SABMiller, Unilever and Syngenta have major commercial interests in Africa and close connections with northern governments.
The research showed that the four African countries under review are offering vast areas of land to large-scale investors under their New Alliance commitments. Collectively, this amounts to 1.8 million hectares of land.
“Nigeria, whose New Alliance lead partner is the UK, is allocating 350,000 hectares of land to eight New Alliance companies. There are accusations that three of these New Alliance companies – Dominion Farms, PZ Wilmar and Okomu Oil Palm Plc – are involved in land grabs in Nigeria. The government is also promoting staple crop processing zones (SCPZs), supported by the Department for International Development (DFID), where investors are “guaranteed land acquisition,” benefit from “low average wages” and are given tax holidays,” the report added.
One of the strategic activities under the New Alliance in Nigeria is the promotion of a systematic land titling and registration (SLTR) process, also funded by DFID, which envisages formally registering land across the whole country. It is unclear who will really benefit from this programme.
The project documents publicly available suggest that the major beneficiaries would be small and medium-size enterprises, and may include larger ones. It is, however, not clear that small-scale food producers are to benefit from the SLTR process. And the project is described as part of a process to “make it easier to do business in Nigeria.”
However, the DFID claimed in a recent letter that the project is “specifically aimed at protecting the rights of farmers at risk of involuntary relocation.”
Farmers in Nigeria’s Taraba State are already being forced off lands they have farmed for generations to make way for US Company Dominion Farms to establish a 30,000 hectares of rice plantation. The project is backed by government and the G8’s New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in Africa.
In 2010, Dominion Farms made its appearance in Gassol, Taraba State, seeking the allocation of lands, water resources, fishing ponds and grazing areas used by the community for the construction of a large scale rice farm. The allocation of these lands to Dominion Farms clearly undermines the capacity of local farm communities to produce food and earn livelihoods.
Considering that most Nigerians depend on their land for survival, it will not be a bad idea for the President Mohammed Buhari-led government to take a look at the motives, as well as the implementation of the New Alliance project in the country before the arable land, which the poor in the society fall back on, is completely grabbed from them.