While most of the world was sheltering in place due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March, a hundred families were uprooted from their lush, centuries-old village in western Guinea and relocated to a barren hilltop to make way for a sprawling bauxite mine, backed by the International Finance Corporation.
Residents of the Hamdallaye village say the Compagnie des Bauxites de Guinée, or CBG, moved them to an unfinished resettlement site that lacks adequate housing, water, and arable land to replace the farmland that the company has taken from them over the past decade.
Three months later, World Bank President David Malpass responded to the Black Lives Matter movement by committing to tackle racial injustice and inequality, including within the World Bank Group. A banner reading “#EndRacism” was draped across the façade of the bank’s headquarters in Washington.
If these words are to be more than just a hashtag, the bank should take a hard look at how it is deepening inequality by contributing to the plunder of African resources, at the expense of African lives, to help some of the wealthiest corporations accumulate more wealth.
One of the world’s largest bauxite miners, CBG is a joint venture of the Guinean government and three multinational mining companies — Rio Tinto, Alcoa, and Dadco — and supplies the raw material for aluminum in an array of consumer products, from Ford trucks and BMW luxury cars to Campbell’s soup and Coca-Cola cans.
In 2016, the company received a package of loans estimated at $795 million from IFC, the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation, and a syndicate of commercial banks to expand its bauxite production. The German government guaranteed a portion of the financing through its untied loan guarantees program.
Last year, the residents of Hamdallaye joined 12 other villages in filing a complaint with IFC’s independent watchdog, the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman, or CAO, saying CBG had grabbed their ancestral land, polluted their water sources, and caused long-term damage to their livelihoods with IFC’s acquiescence.
The company responded to the complaint, as well as others, by saying that it has adopted and adhered to IFC’s environmental and social performance standards over the past four years but that it “wishes to learn more about the concerns expressed in the complaint and initiate a process to resolve the disputes with the Complainants.”
The communities and the company were scheduled to begin mediations in April 2020 under the auspices of CAO. The people of Hamdallaye expected to have this opportunity to negotiate their resettlement terms on a fair footing. Mediations were postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic, yet CBG plowed ahead with the resettlement of the village regardless. The company has since issued a statement about this.
To help Hamdallaye and the other communities prepare for mediations, my organization, Inclusive Development International, supported them to conduct a participatory mapping exercise and to analyze Earth observation data from 1974 to 2019. This mapping documented and geolocated the impacts of CBG’s operations on 17 villages.
The results were staggering, suggesting that the residents of these villages — which make up only a small fraction of the roughly 230 villages affected by CBG’s expansion — collectively lost more than 100 water sources and more than 80 square kilometers of cropland to CBG’s mining activities. The company has yet to pay a cent in compensation for this land.
What’s worse, CBG is not rehabilitating most of the land it exploited. Bauxite mining strips vast areas of fertile topsoil to access the minerals underneath, creating “dead zones” that are useless for agriculture without proper rehabilitation. An analysis of satellite imagery indicates that over the lifetime of the mine, the company has rehabilitated only about 10% of the land that it has exploited, and large portions have been re-mined since the IFC-backed expansion began in 2016.
The land that CBG and other bauxite miners are destroying underpins the economic and food security of some 400,000 farmers in the Boké region. Far from bringing development to this corner of West Africa, this investment threatens to cause impoverishment on a massive scale.
So why is a member of the World Bank Group, along with the U.S. and German governments, fostering poverty in what is already one of the world’s poorest nations?
The project backers said that CBG’s expansion would benefit social development and stimulate economic growth in Boké. IFC acknowledged the investment’s significant risks but justified them on the basis of the environmental and social “additionality” that it would bring, pledging to “support the Company in areas such as biodiversity, resettlement and water management.” The loan package is predicated on CBG’s commitment to comply with its environmental and social performance standards.
CBG has not only failed to acknowledge and redress its 30-year legacy of harm, but it is still not complying with IFC’s standards as it expands its operations over vast new areas of land. That is not just our analysis but also the conclusion of the project’s independent environmental and social monitor.
CBG’s unwillingness to remediate and avoid further harm may have been tolerated by the lenders so far, but it is causing enormous frustration among the local population. In 2017, Boké saw large-scale riots by thousands of young people protesting bauxite mining in the region, resulting in multiple deaths of protestors at the hands of security forces. The protesters weren’t saying no to mining; they were simply demanding a fair share of the benefits.
CBG’s multinational owners do not actually need IFC’s advice on how to mine bauxite more responsibly. After a lengthy legal battle, Rio Tinto reached an agreement with Indigenous landowners to lease the site of its Gove mine in Australia’s Northern Territory. Rio agreed to pay the communities between $15 million and $18 million a year in rent over a 42-year period, along with a range of other development and employment benefits.
The people of Guinea deserve nothing less. And we expect no less from a “development” project that has benefited greatly from the largesse of our public tax dollars.
The scale of the issue, as revealed in Witness Radio’s recent report, is staggering and demands immediate attention: Over 5,000 hectares are targeted weekly by local and foreign investors, leading to the displacement of hundreds of Indigenous and local communities. This urgent situation threatens their food sovereignty and environmental stewardship, necessitating immediate and decisive action.
The forced land evictions are not just numbers; they are exacerbating inequality and directly undermining the efforts of local farmers to safeguard food systems and the environment.
Disturbing findings from the Daily Monitor: Uganda is grappling with a surge in malnutrition cases, with over 260,000 children suffering from acute malnutrition, as reported by UNICEF and WHO.
When evicted from their land, which is the source of livelihood, survival becomes very difficult, resulting in unwanted deaths, sicknesses, and poverty. These are not just statistics, but the harsh realities the affected communities face. It’s crucial to remember that there’s a human story of struggle and loss behind every statistic, and it’s these stories that should drive our actions.
Witness Radio’s recent report, which covered the first half of 2024, revealed that Ugandans face forced land evictions daily to give way to land-based investments, with 723 hectares of land at risk of being grabbed daily.
Furthermore, over 360,000 Ugandans were displaced, with a daily average of 2,160 people losing their livelihood. Land is targeted for oil and gas extraction, mining, agribusiness, and tree plantations for carbon offsets. While some investments have taken shape on the grabbed land, other pieces of grabbed land are still empty but under the guardship of military and private security firms.
The report pointed out that the leading causes of forced land evictions were the lack of legal documents for land ownership and transparent mechanisms to regulate an influx of “investors.” This lack of legal ownership is not just a symptom but the root cause of the problem, highlighting the urgent need for legal reform to protect the rights of Indigenous and local communities.
Since the Uganda government announced an industrial policy that commoditized its land to fight its unemployment, which will give Uganda a middle-income class status from a low-developed country, there has been an increase in forced land eviction cases. This policy shift, encouraging large-scale industrial projects, has raised questions about the government’s responsibility and accountability in these evictions.
Many investors fraudulently acquire communities’ land and do not conduct feasibility studies to establish whether the targeted land has interests. On many occasions, communities are not consulted about their land, and no compensation is offered.
According to the Lands Ministry’s 2016 annual report, about 23 percent of Uganda’s land is registered. The registration is mostly with freehold (where the land is owned outright), mailo (a form of land tenure in Buganda, a region in Uganda, customary tenure), and lease (where the land is leased for a specific period) tenure systems.
Go-betweens and blockers use this gap with support from some government officials to acquire land titles fraudulently and later evict bonafide land occupants (Indigenous and local communities) to give way for land-based investment.
The Appellate Division of the East African Court of Justice (EACJ) has rejected a request by the Tanzanian government to dismiss an appeal filed by four East African civil society organizations (CSOs) seeking compliance with the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) with regional and international human rights standards.
Tanzania’s Deputy Solicitor General, Mr. Mark Mulwambo, requested the judges dismiss the Appeal, arguing that the record of proceedings from the hearings held at the First Instance Division was missing. The record of proceedings includes the CSOs and respondents’ submissions. He added that, without it, the judges at the Appellate Division could not determine whether the First Instance Court erred in the ruling that they made.
However, the court could not grant his request. Instead, it ordered the four CSOs that filed the Appeal to file supplementary information so that the judges could hear the case.
The Appeal will be heard by a panel of judges from the Appellate Division of the EACJ, including Justice Nestor Kayobera, the division’s president; Justice Anita Mugeni, the Vice President; Justice Kathurima M’Inot; Justice Cheboriona Barishaki; and Justice Omar Othman Makungu. These judges, with their expertise in regional and international law, will review the Appeal and make a final decision.
The Appeal was filed by four CSOs, including the Africa Institute for Energy Governance (AFIEGO) from Uganda, the Centre for Food and Adequate Living Rights (CEFROHT) from Uganda, the Natural Justice (NJ) from Kenya, and the Centre for Strategic Litigation (CSL) from Tanzania, in December 2023. This was in response to the dismissal of their case, which sought compliance with the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) with regional and international human rights standards, by judges at the First Instance Division of the EACJ in November 2023.
During the dismissal, the court ruled that the applicants filed the petition out of time, stating that the petitioners should have filed the petition as early as 2017 instead of 2020. The court also ruled that it did not have jurisdiction to hear the case, meaning it did not have the legal authority to decide on this matter. These decisions were based on legal precedents and the specific circumstances of the case.
The CSOs were ordered to file the record of proceedings by Justice Nestor Kayobera by November 29, 2024.
The court session was attended by EACOP-affected communities from both Uganda and Tanzania. Among them was Mr. Gozanga Kyakulubya, an affected person from Kyotera District in Southern Uganda, who traveled to Arusha to participate in the hearing. His personal story underscores the profound impact of the EACOP on the lives of these communities.
He shared his grievance, stating, “I came to the court because I have a lot of pain. My land was taken for the EACOP, and before I was paid, it was fenced off. The government of Uganda also sued me because I rejected the low compensation offered by EACOP. We need at least one court to be fair to EACOP host communities, and we hope the East African Court of Justice will be that court.”
The EACOP has been designed, constructed, financed, and operated through a dedicated Pipeline Company with the same name. The shareholders in EACOP are affiliates of the three upstream joint venture partners: the Uganda National Oil Company (8%), TotalEnergies E&P Uganda (62%), and CNOOC Uganda Ltd (15%), together with the Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation (15%).
The 1,443km pipeline will eventually transport Uganda’s crude oil from Kabaale—Hoima to the Chongoleani peninsula near Tanga Port in Tanzania.
Climate activists and civil society organizations, however, continue to oppose the project, claiming that it will harm several fragile and protected habitats irreversibly and violate key agreements and treaties.
The potential environmental damage is a cause for concern among these groups.
Newly unearthed documents contain warning from head of Air Pollution Foundation, founded in 1953 by oil interests.
Major oil companies, including Shell and precursors to energy giants Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP, were alerted about the planet-warming effects of fossil fuels as early as 1954, newly unearthed documents show.
The warning, from the head of an industry-created group known as the Air Pollution Foundation, was revealed by Climate Investigations Center and published Tuesday by the climate website DeSmog. It represents what may be the earliest instance of big oil being informed of the potentially dire consequences of its products.
“Every time there’s a push for climate action, [we see] fossil fuel companies downplay and deny the harms of burning fossil fuels,” said Rebecca John, a researcher at the Climate Investigations Center who uncovered the historic memos. “Now we have evidence they were doing this way back in the 50s during these really early attempts to crack down on sources of pollution.”
The Air Pollution Foundation was founded in 1953 by oil interests in response to public outcry over smog that was blanketing Los Angeles county.
Researchers had identified hydrocarbon pollution from fossil fuel sources such as cars and refineries as a primary culprit and Los Angeles officials had begun to proposal pollution controls.
The Air Pollution Foundation, which was primarily funded by the lobbying organization Western States Petroleum Association, publicly claimed to want to help solve the smog crisis, but was set up in large part to counter efforts at regulation, the new memos indicate.
It’s a commonlyused tactic today, said Geoffrey Supran, an expert in climate disinformation at the University of Miami.
A gas flare from the Shell Chemical LP petroleum refinery burns against the sky in Louisiana. Photograph: Drew Angerer/Getty Images
“The Air Pollution Foundation appears to be one of the earliest and most brazen efforts by the oil industry to prop up a … front group to exaggerate scientific uncertainty to defend business as usual,” Supran said. “It helped lay the strategic and organizational groundwork for big oil’s decades of climate denial and delay.”
Then called the Western Oil and Gas Association, the lobbying group provided $1.3m to the group in the 1950s – the equivalent of $14m today – to the Air Pollution Foundation. That funding came from member companies including Shell and firms later bought by or merged with ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Sunoco and ConocoPhillips, as well as southern California utility SoCalGas.
The Air Pollution Foundation recruited the respected chemical engineer Lauren B Hitchcock to serve as its president. And in 1954, the organization – which until then was arguing that households incinerating waste in backyards was to blame – asked Caltech to submit a proposal to determine the main source of smog.
In November 1954, Caltech submitted its proposal, which included crucial warnings about the coal, oil, and gas and said that “a changing concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere with reference to climate” may “ultimately prove of considerable significance to civilization”, a memo previously uncovered by John shows. The newly uncovered documents show the Air Pollution Foundation shared the warning with the Western Oil and Gas Association’s members in March 1955.
In the mid-1950s, climate researchers were beginning to understand the planet-heating impact of fossil fuels, and to discuss their emergent research in the media. But the newly uncovered Air Pollution Foundation memo represents the earliest known cautionary message to the oil industry about the greenhouse effect.
The Air Pollution Foundation’s board of trustees, including representatives from SoCalGas and Union Oil, which was later acquired by Chevron, approved funding for the Caltech project. In the following months, foundation president Hitchcock advocated for pollution controls on oil refineries and then testified in favor of state-funded pollution research in the California Senate.
Hitchcock was reprimanded by industry leaders for these efforts. In an April 1955 meeting, the Western Oil and Gas Association told him he was drawing too much “attention” to refinery pollution and conducting “too broad a program” of research. The Air Pollution Foundation was meant to be “protective” of the industry and should publish “findings which would be accepted as unbiased”, meeting minutes uncovered by John show.
After this meeting, the foundation made no further reference to the potential climate impact of fossil fuels, publications reviewed by DeSmog suggest.
“The fossil fuel industry is often seen as having followed in the footsteps of the tobacco industry’s playbook for denying science and blocking regulation,” said Supran. “But these documents suggest that big oil has been running public affairs campaigns to downplay the dangers of its products just as long as big tobacco, starting with air pollution in the early-to-mid-1950s.”
In the following months, many of the foundation’s research projects were scaled back or designed to be conducted in direct partnerships with lobbying groups. Hitchcock resigned as president in 1956.
Last year, the largest county in Oregon sued the Western States Petroleum Association for allegedly sowing doubt about the climate crisis despite longstanding knowledge of it.
DeSmog and the Climate Investigations Center previously found that the Air Pollution Foundation underwrote the earliest studies on CO2 conducted in 1955 and 1956 by renowned climate scientist Charles David Keeling, paving the way for his groundbreaking “Keeling Curve,” which charts how fossil fuels cause an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Other earlier investigations have found that major fossil companies spent decades conducting their own research into the consequences of burning coal, oil and gas. One 2023 study found that Exxon scientists made “breathtakingly” accurate predictions of global heating in the 1970s and 1980s, only to then spend decades sowing doubt about climate science.
The newly unearthed documents come from the Caltech archives, the US National Archives, the University of California at San Diego, the State University of New York Buffalo archives and Los Angeles newspapers from the 1950s.
The Western States Petroleum Association and the American Petroleum Institute, the top US fossil fuels lobby group, did not respond to requests for comment.
