By Witness Radio Team.
For over a decade now, a forest regulator, National Forests Authority (NFA) has donated tracts of land for indigenous and local communities to commercial tree growers/investors with funding from International Financial Institutions (IFIs) to offset carbon emissions in the global north.
With a lot of money for carbon offsets, individuals in NFA officials sacrificed the lives of poor communities. The land for the community is lost without following due process by NFA and its agents and investors. In all areas visited by Witness Radio – Uganda, non of the carbon offset projects have expressed views from victim communities, were never consulted, never sensitized, compensated, or offered alternative resettlement before forced eviction.
Since the early 2000s, NFA land giveaways are characterized by violence that has left hundreds of farmers tortured, arbitrarily arrested, and illegally imprisoned as others have lost lives. Evictions have been carried out by government soldiers, police, and security guards from private firms in the name of accommodating investors.
As a result of NFA land giveaways, hundreds of children have dropped out of schools and gotten into early marriage, evictees have to hire out land to bury their loved ones, some have been forced into refugee camps, and others have been reduced to laborers from landlords.
The latest victim of the NFA land giveaway is the 158 hectares of farmland belonging to over 1000 smallholder farmers which were given out to local investors for planting trees in the Llera ‘forest reserve’.
According to Odongo Martin, the Llera community chairperson said NFA violent forced evictions started in 2008 despite being resisted by the local communities.
“Our forefathers lawfully occupied and cultivated this land since 1930 but no one was informed about the existence of a forest reserve in the area until around 2008 when some unscrupulous people started saying that this is a forest reserve. Where was the government for all those 89 years?” Mr. Odongo Martin asked.
Before the Llera eviction, NFA since 2015 has violently evicted over 700 families off their 1174 hectares of land which was their source of food, shelter, and survival. The grabbed land by NFA is located in Yandwe village, Butuntumula Sub-County in Luweero district.
NFA said the evictees were encroaching the Mbale forest reserve. Some evictees told Witness Radio that their relatives lived on the land since 1915. The evictees remain dumped in destituteness, and their former land is turned into a eucalyptus forest belonging to some officials in NFA.
Around 2014, over 10,000 villagers were forcefully evicted by the NFA off their 500 hectares of land in 13 villages occupying the Bukaleba forest reserve in the Mayuge district. The NFA leased the land to the Norwegian Forest group, Green Resources. The evictees had occupied the land for over 30 years.
In the central region of Uganda, Namwasa and Luwunga ‘forest reserves’ in Mubende and Kiboga districts, close to 20,000 smallholder farmers got evicted by NFA. They allocated their land to New Forests Company, a UK-based company planting pine and eucalyptus trees. The evicted communities struggle to make ends meet up-to-date.
Section 5 of the NFA Act states that the Minister may, on the advice of the Board, after consultation with the local council and the local community in whose area the proposed forest reserve is to be located; and with the approval of Parliament signified by its resolution by statutory order, declare an area to be a central forest reserve. However, while gazetting communities’ lands, no consultations are carried out to seek landowners’ consent before land giveaways.
