The oil palm plantations of BIDCO, a company partially owned by Wilmar, in Kalangala Island, Uganda, generated devastating impacts. The company plans to expand to Buvuma Island, however, they keep confronting strong organized opposition! Watch a short video with testimonies of resistance from Buvuma Island.
In Uganda, oil palm is not native. It was in the 1990ies that the government, with support from the World Bank and the United Nations’ International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), started to set up a national Vegetable Oil Development Programme, where the main crop planted were oil palms.
The government of Uganda established a bidding process to select a company that could plant oil palms, build a crude palm oil mill, and carry out an outgrower program. The government was responsible for securing the land for the company among other benefits like several tax incentives. (1) In 2003, a public-private partnership agreement was signed between the government of Uganda and BIDCO, a company partially owned by multinational company Wilmar. Wilmar is the second largest international oil palm plantation operator in Africa, after Socfin, with abundant track records linked to human rights violations. (2)
Outgrower or smallholder programs, also known as contract farming, are used by plantations companies to gain more access and control over community lands. Peasant farmers grow oil palms on their land, and in turn, the company will buy all the oil palm fruit they produce. Governments usually support these schemes, which are presented as a win-win deal. But in fact, they are a trap. Peasant farmers accumulate debt right from the start, lose the freedom to decide who to sell their production to, face strict restrictions on planting other crops, give up autonomy and even their land, among other major consequences. (3)
The signed agreement mentions the promotion of 40,000 hectares of oil palm plantations in the country. Around the year 2005, BIDCO started its industrial plantations in the Kalangala island, with nearly 10,000 hectares of which almost two thirds are company plantations while the rest are under outgrowers program.
As it happens in most countries, oil palm plantations’ companies reach the communities with a lot of promises. As a way to convince people, the company invited community members to meetings and seminars where many promises were made and as a result many were tricked into sigining documents and consenting deals with the company that later were used to grab their land.
The experience from the people in Kalangala island is devastating. They have seen their lands grabbed, their forests destroyed, their water contaminated. People have been arrested and tortured when opposing the company, and women and children have been displaced and have nowhere to stay.
BIDCO was planning to start expanding its plantations in Buvuma island in 2012, however, securing land resulted very difficult for the government. They confronted strong organized opposition against the company and the governments’ plans to displace the communities. Still today, the company has not been able to advance as they initially envisaged. Communities resistance has been fertile!
Recently, the Informal Alliance against industrial oil palm plantations in West and Central Africa has launched a new summary edition of the booklet “Promise, divide, intimidate, and coerce: Tactics palm oil companies use to grab community lands”.
Recently, the Informal Alliance against industrial oil palm plantations in West and Central Africa has launched a new summary edition of the booklet “Promise, divide, intimidate, and coerce: Tactics palm oil companies use to grab community lands”.
This new edition consists of a collection of more than 20 tactics that oil palm companies use to grab people’s land for plantation expansion. It is the result of many years of experience of community activists and grassroots groups who have been struggling to resist the corporate takeover of community lands.
Although the focus is on the tactics of oil palm corporations, many similarities exist with other industries and sectors involved in land grabs and extractivism. The booklet is available in French here, and in English here. If you think the booklet would be useful in other languages too, do not hesitate to let us know!
The the long version, from 2018, is available here: French / English.
A total of 96 cases of people being detained or arrested for opposing the controversial East Africa Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) have been reported in the past nine months, with the number of arrests skyrocketing in recent months.
In December, Global Witness released a report ‘Climate of Fear’ documenting reprisals against land and environmental defenders challenging plans to build the world’s longest heated crude oil pipeline through both Uganda and Tanzania. At the time, 47 people had been arrested for challenging the pipeline in Uganda between September 2020 and November 2023. Double the number of incidents have since been reported in less than a year.
Reports of attacks and threats have continued despite the French oil major behind the project TotalEnergies “expressing concern” to the Ugandan government over arrests in May 2024. Since then, the state crackdown has stepped up against a civil society mobilising to protest the pipeline.
Global Witness is calling on TotalEnergies to meet prior public commitments to respect the rights of human rights defenders and to take immediate action to end the violent crackdown on climate campaigners in Uganda.
Hanna Hindstrom, Senior Investigator at Global Witness’s Land and Environmental Defenders campaign, said:
“The tsunami of arrests of peaceful demonstrators fighting EACOP has exposed the limits of TotalEnergies’ commitment to human rights.
“The company cannot in good conscience press ahead with the pipeline while peaceful protesters are being attacked for exercising their right to free speech. It must adopt a zero-tolerance approach to reprisals.”
On 9 August, 47 students and three drivers were intercepted on their way to protest the pipeline and diverted to a police station. Just six weeks earlier, 30 people were arrested outside the Chinese embassy. In early June, environmental campaigner Stephen Kwikiriza was abducted and detained by the army, who reportedly beat him and dumped him on the side of a road a week later.
NGOs working on environmental conservation and oil extraction have also reported that their offices have been raided, and their staff intimidated and harassed, which has deterred many from speaking out about the pipeline.
Hindstrom added:
“Climate activism is under threat around the world, while fossil fuel companies quietly benefit. European oil companies cannot absolve themselves from responsibility while their investments fuel climate destruction, reprisals and violence overseas.”
Members of the Landless Workers’ Movement of Brazil (MST) march for agrarian reform. [Image for illustrative purposes only] Credit: MST BA
The International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems recently released a report highlighting escalating pressures on farmland. It identified four primary drivers: deregulation and financialisation, which treat land as a speculative asset; expanding conservation and carbon offset projects competing for land; mining, urban sprawl, and infrastructure developments encroaching on agricultural areas; and industrialised food systems favouring corporate chains over smallholders. These factors threaten equitable land access for farmers. Nettie Wiebe, a founding member of La Via Campesina and report co-author, emphasized these challenges in an interview with Think Ink, stressing the urgent need for policy reforms to protect agricultural lands and support small-scale farmers.
Here is an excerpt from the interview:
Land is just such an enormously important component of food systems, food security, food sovereignty. It’s also a key component of climate action and biodiversity. So who owns the land and what we do with the land on which we all depend are key components of our possible futures.
[The report] tries to clarify some trends, expose some assumptions, and come up with leverage points where we could make changes that would bring us to a place of greater equality, better protection of environments, and greater food security and sovereignty. […]
Land inequality is an old topic. It’s linked to colonialism, racism, patriarchy: I mean, it’s only relatively recently, in my generation, that women got equal access to land in the Prairies. These are deep seated issues that have troubled rural communities for a long time.
But there are some new trends. Land grabbing is one of those, which became pretty intense in the 2008 crisis and seemed to taper off. But it is rolling along as we speak and in fact intensifying. We looked not just at traditional land grabbing but there are new things like the deregulation of financial markets and the increasing financialisation of land transfers and land accumulation.
Green Grabbing is a relatively new trend that is perversely labelled as environmentally better and hence very difficult for environmentalists and those of us who care about climate change to push against. But for the most part, it is a pernicious diversion from real solutions.
Then there’s the increasing encroachment of urbanisation and mining. Here in Canada, the mining is in the north for the most part, which is not agricultural land. But elsewhere in the world, particularly in South and Central America and in Africa, extractive industries are a real assault on many communities, including small scale farming.
Then, of course, we talked about the assumptions around agriculture as just a productive asset, the bias towards productivism and maximising the production of very few major crops, very few species of animals, and the push to expand those everywhere, at the expense of biodiversity and diverse diets for people.
[…] Everywhere in the world, the increased pressure on the price of land spells displacement for small scale farming. That’s here in Saskatchewan, as well as in Honduras, Brazil, or Zimbabwe. Wherever we look, there’s pressure on land prices from the intrusion of major investors with deep pockets, sometimes governments, often agribusiness.
The report details that there’s a huge expansion in funds that are specifically allocated to grabbing land because it’s a physical asset, a capital asset, which is deemed to be more secure than bonds and other financial instruments.
And the deregulation of the financial market has encouraged, or at least permitted, a lot more of this to go on. That’s a policy issue. A governance issue.
It’s also a values issue. If we see land as just a productive asset to extract value from rather than seeing it as part of our identity, the place where we live, our source of culture and food, our web of life… Land isn’t just bushels per acre and the more you confine it to that domain, the more open it is to financial exploitation. This is a dangerous trend on many levels.
When we say that 70% of farmland is controlled by 1% of the world’s largest farms, that’s a dangerous trend because they don’t love the land. Land is like family: if you don’t love it, you will exploit it and destroy it. That’s what we’re seeing around us.