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Trees for Global Benefits: “Climate neutral” burgers in Sweden. Starvation in Uganda

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1 year ago

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The Swedish fast food chain Max Burgers AB claims to have had more than three million trees planted in the tropics. “Planting trees is an effective way to remove carbon dioxide,” the company states on its website. “Since 2018, MAX has been funding trees that capture the equivalent of 110% of our entire value chain’s greenhouse gas emissions.”

But a new investigation by Staffan Lindberg in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet reveals that some of the farmers in Uganda who planted trees for Max Burgers carbon credits are now cutting down the trees and making them into charcoal. The farmers faced starvation, because the trees were planted on their farmland.

Max Burgers buys carbon credits from a project in Uganda called Trees for Global Benefits, that has been running since 2003. The project is managed by a Ugandan organisation called Ecotrust.

Under the scheme, farmers plant trees on their land and receive income from the sales of carbon credits. It is certified under the Plan Vivo standard.

According to the Plan Vivo website,

The project operates as a market-based solution that reduces unsustainable exploitation of forest resources and the decline of ecosystem quality, while diversifying and increasing incomes for rural farmers and their families.

In 2013, the project won an award from SEED, which was founded by UNEP, UNDP, and IUCN. In a video produced by SEED, Pauline Nantongo Kalunda, the executive director of Ecotrust, says, “The main objective of this enterprise is to combine carbon sequestration activity with livelihoods improvements.”

Kalunda is on the Board of Trustees of Plan Vivo.

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The hunger forest

Lindberg calls the Ecotrust project the “hunger forest”. Ecotrust persuaded farmers to plant trees on land where they grew crops. But the farmers had only small areas of land. When the trees took over the land, the farmers could no longer grow food for their families.

The Aftonbladet investigation is not the first critique of the Trees for Global Benefits project. In 2017, Elina Andersson and Wim Carton from Lund University wrote a study that highlights problems with the project. “Our study shows that there is widespread confusion among farmers about what the project is basically about,” Andersson and Carton write.

Farmers did not know who was buying the carbon credits.

One farmer said,

They do not have many benefits, these carbon trees. They are not easily grown and they take time. I had to replace so many of them because they dried out. They started to dry from the top and then they refused to grow. I wouldn’t plant these trees again, but rather eucalyptus and maybe some fruit trees.

Farmers had to pay the full cost of replacing damaged and dead trees, regardless of whether the trees were damaged by fire, vandalism, insects, or wild animals.

Andersson and Carton write about the “flawed basis on which the local population had the opportunity to make informed decisions regarding participation” in the tree planting project.

Contracts were written in English which few of the villagers speak.

Almost all the farmers they spoke to said they did not know how much compensation they would receive from the project. One farmer told Andersson and Carton that,

People planted trees before they knew how much they would get. And they did not negotiate the price with the buyers. So they don’t know if they got all their money, or if they just got half of it. If you tell prices in terms of percentage, how can an old man understand? They are not giving the correct information. transparency is lacking. Most people don’t even know what they are selling.

Lack of land is a major problem in the project area, Andersson and Carton note, particularly among the poorest households.

“It cannot be ruled out that,” they write, “through the project, poor small farmers risk being locked into a type of land use for a long time that reduces their ability to adapt to deal with temporary crises as well as long-term changes, which in the worst case can mean long-term negative effects on their life situation.”

They also note that payments from Ecotrust are often greatly delayed or not received at all.

In 2019, an article in the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter took a critical look at the Trees for Global Benefits project.

And in 2022, Global Forest Coalition published a report about the project with the title, “A case study on the failures of carbon offsetting”. The researchers spoke to more than 100 community members. They write that,

The clear message from all communities was that the project was not delivering its promised benefits, and participants were growing increasingly bitter and desperate.

The lead author of the report was David Kureeba, a programme officer with Friends of the Earth Uganda.

The report concludes that the Trees for Global Benefits project “is one of a growing number of global greenwashing exercises that are not only failing to reduce the amount of carbon being released into the atmosphere but also inflicting adverse environmental, social, and economic impacts on the local communities involved”.

“A chance to earn money”

Aftenbladet’s journalist Staffan Lindberg and photographer Niclas Hammarström travel to the project area in Uganda. There they find farmers cutting down the trees, to sell them as charcoal.

A farmer called Samuel Byarugaba tells Lindberg that a man from Ecotrust turned up eight years ago. He said Ecotrust could offer the family a chance to earn money.

Samuel signed the contract despite having only two acres of land, and the fact that all his land was being used to grow food. He didn’t receive a copy of the contract. The man from Ecotrust later showed him how to plant the trees, seven metres apart. That was the only education he received about tree planting.

After three years, the trees formed a canopy over the food crops. The trees took the light, the water, and the nutrients. Samuel’s sweet potatoes and bananas died. Nothing could grow under the trees. Samuel, his wife, and 15 children and grandchildren were without food.

He tells Lindberg,

“I used to be something called a model farmer. People came to me to learn about farming and I was proud to show our farm. We had enough food to eat our fill and were able to sell the excess. Now everything disappeared.”

The first payment from Ecotrust should have come in the first year. When it arrived, one year later, it was equivalent to a little more than US$100. Enough for a couple of weeks of food.

Samuel has only received two more payments of the same amount since then. He has been forced to beg from relatives for his family to survive.

Lindberg reports that now he’s cutting all the trees down. He will plant bananas and sweet potatoes again.

“My children have no food”

Rosset Kyampaire is a widow, and mother of four. She has only one acre of land. Ecotrust still persuaded her to sign the contract.

She planted 200 trees on her land. After two years, the beans and cassava withered. After three years, she had no harvest at all.

After eight years, she has received no money from Ecotrust. Instead she got excuses: “This is how white people work,” and “Have patience,” and “It will arrive later this year.”

To survive, she has to work as a day labourer on other people’s farms. She earns less than US$1.5 a day. It’s not enough.

“I am so stressed,” Rosset tells Lindberg. “My children have no food.”

She has already started cutting down the trees. “It’s my only chance,” she says.

Where is the food? Look around, where is it?

Jorum Baslina is a local leader in the village of Kigaaga. He also joined the project. “Ecotrust just wants to grow as many trees as possible,” he tells Lindberg. “They urge us: plant more!”

Jorum says there is no transparency. Ecotrust did not tell the farmers how much they would receive, or why the money has not been paid. He shows Lindberg a contract, written in English, and says that,

Many here can barely write their own names. And almost no one knows English. Why don’t we get the agreement in our own language? And why doesn’t it say how much we should get?

Jorum has acted as a spokesperson for other people involved in Ecotrust’s project. He says that of the 100 farmers he’s in contact with, only six or seven are happy with the project and they had unused land to plant on and were the first to join.

“The rest of us are much poorer than before,” Jorum tells Lindberg. “Almost everyone has started cutting down the trees or is planning to do so. Where is the food? Look around, where is it?”

“We are starving”

Ecotrust came to Herbert Rukundo’s farm nine years ago and promised that the trees would bring money, every year. Herbert tells Lindberg that,

We dreamed of being able to keep the children in school and maybe rebuild the house a little so that it was beautiful, even buying a motorcycle to drive to church. Instead we were forced to starve. Now we’ve chopped it all down and turned it into charcoal.

Last year, Herbert cut down all his trees. Not long afterwards, the coordinator from Ecotrust visited his farm and accused Herbert of breach of contract. The Ecotrust coordinator threatened that if Herbert did not replant all the trees he would have to face the police and prison.

Hubert replied that as things are, “We are starving.”

Hubert tells Lindberg that Ecotrust didn’t want to listen. “Now I can’t sleep at night,” he says.

Mauda Twinomngisha wanted to send her three daughters to university. “I wanted them to have a better life than me and my husband had. It was for their future that we signed up,” she tells Lindberg.

But when the food disappeared, she had to take the girls out of school. All three have been married off as child brides, aged 14, 15, and 16.

Two years ago, Mauda decided to cut down the trees. “Then a woman from Ecotrust came here,” she tells Lindberg. The woman was very angry. She told Mauda to remove her bananas and plant trees. “But we had no choice,” Mauda says.

Wilson Akiiza and Violet Mbabaazi planted 600 trees on their three acres of land. “Now we have no food”, Wilson tells Lindberg. “Ecotrust never explained how much money I would get, only that it would come every year. Now I am the coordinator for 89 farmers who are part of the project. Nobody has food.”

Robert Sunday has also cut down all his Ecotrust “carbon trees” and made charcoal with them. With the money from the charcoal, he will buy cassava plants.

In the 10 years since he planted the trees, he received two payments, of about US$50 each.

He has only one acre, from which he used to feed 10 people. “Ecotrust must have understood that the family would never make it,” Lindberg writes. “Nevertheless, they were pushed to plant.”

Auditor: “Food security not an issue”

Aftonbladet’s research team visited nine farms in two districts, Hoima and Kikuube. All of them planted trees for Ecotrust on land that they previously used for growing crops. Hunger was the result.

One family received no money at all. All of the others received fewer payments than the contract promised. Ecotrust has not explained to any of them why the money has not been paid out.

None of the nine families has received enough money to cover the cost of food lost to the “carbon trees”.

None of the families could explain how carbon trading works, who bought the carbon credits, or how much money they should have received. Most of them did not receive a copy of the contract they signed.

Two of the families told Lindberg that they were forced to marry off underage daughters.

One eight of the farms, all or some of the trees have now been cut down to make way for food crops. The timber has been sold as charcoal.

Lindberg acknowledges that the Aftonbladet research is not comprehensive. Several thousand farmers are involved in the project, spread over a large area.

But David Kureeba, the lead author of Global Forest Coalition’s 2022 report about the project, tells Lindberg that the problem is widespread and systemic. “We are 45 million people crowded in Uganda,” Kureeba says, “and the vast majority are already living on the verge of starvation. They have no land to spare.”

The Global Forest Coalition report is based on interviews with more than 100 farmers. That report came out 18 months ago. “Since then the situation has worsened further,” Lindberg writes. “Why haven’t those responsible reacted?”

Under Plan Vivo’s rules, the project has to be inspected every six years. The most recent audit was in 2019, carried out by Environmental Services, Inc, a US-based company.

The lead verifier was Guy Pinjuv, who has since moved on to become Senior Advisor for Carbon and MRV (Measurement, Reporting, and Verification) at Conservation International.

A 2017 article describes Pinjuv’s US$600,000 house that he built in Nevada on a one acre plot of land that he bought for just US$150,000 in 2014. In the article, Pinjuv describes his work:

“If someone wants to slow down deforestation, I’m the guy who goes and checks to make sure they calculated everything correctly. And if there’s a tribe there, I’m the guy who goes and meets the chief and makes sure they’re not planning a revolution . . . that sort of stuff.”

The 2019 Environmental Services audit report states that, “In general food security does not appear to be an issue and project activities are maintaining or increasing food production.” There is no mention of the systemic hunger that, as Lindberg writes, “seems to be integrated into the core of the project”.

“Africa’s poor, who did the least to cause the climate crisis, will pay the price when we have to change,” Lindberg writes.

Lindberg highlights the inequity of the situation. “At Swedish hamburger restaurants, guests order from climate-neutral menus. In the hunger forest, the children wait in vain for food.”

Source: reddmonitor.substack.com

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Bridging the access to justice gap: Witness Radio trains paralegals ahead of Uganda’s general election.

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2 days ago

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May 29, 2025

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By Witness Radio team.

Kiryandongo, Uganda—Communities across Uganda are currently in the midst of a pressing and severe crisis due to the impacts of land-based investments. These include forced evictions, lack of consultation, and concealed project information. These injustices persist due to a widespread lack of legal awareness and limited access to justice among affected communities.

As Uganda enters the general election period, more farming communities’ land will continue to be forcibly taken from them by multinationals and individual investors, and the number of community land rights and environmental defenders will likely increase. This is because citizen’s liberty is at stake during electoral periods and all justice institutions quite often prioritize electoral justice during this period. Besides, perpetrators of forceful land evictions may use merits of electoral violence to criminalize land and environmental rights defenders in order to silence their activism.  Community land rights and environmental defenders work to protect the rights of communities to their land and natural resources. Witness Radio has documented and provided legal representation to dozens of them whose work has been criminalized by wealthy individuals and multinationals.

“We are often evicted from our land without prior consultation, compensation, or meaningful resettlement,” said Benon Beryaija, a community representative from Kiryandongo district. “The evictors tell us they have ultimate power over our land and that we have no right to resist. These evictions happen without following the law.”

Beryaija is among the thousands of people in Kiryandongo whose land was grabbed by a group of multinationals without compensation or resettlement. According to Witness Radio, Agilis Partners Limited is among the multinational companies alongside Kiryandongo Sugar Limited and Great Seasons SMC Limited that have forcibly displaced over 35,000 people to pave the way for large-scale agricultural operations since 2017.

“But all this violence continues because we are ignorant about the law,” Beryaija added. “We don’t know what to do, what to ask for, or how to demand accountability. The companies use this gap to take advantage.”

To address this critical gap in legal knowledge, Witness Radio Uganda, in collaboration with the European Union, Dan Church Aid (DCA), and the National Coalition for Human Rights Defenders in Uganda (NCHRD-U), conducted the first-ever paralegal training for selected community activists against irresponsible Land-Based Investments (LBIs) and Land and Environmental Defenders (LEDs) in the Midwestern Subregion of Uganda. This initiative aims to equip grassroots defenders with basic legal tools to resist human rights violations and abuses as well as land injustices and environmental destruction and to advocate for their communities, instilling a sense of empowerment and hope.

“Community defenders are at the forefront of the fight for land rights and environmental justice and should provide that first-hand legal support, but they often lack the tools to engage with legal systems or resolve disputes effectively. We are currently emphasizing the importance of equipping communities with legal knowledge on land and environmental rights, a clear understanding of what to do when a defender is arbitrarily arrested and detained or disappears, what to do when an investor comes to communities’ land, how to effectively to document human rights violations/abuse, and practical ways to speak to power and hold perpetrators to account for their deeds,” said Mrs. Bulyerali Joan, Witness Radio’s Head of Community Empowerment.

The three-day training, held last week from May 19th to 21st in Uganda’s mid-western region, brought together 20 participants from eviction-prone districts, including Kiryandongo, Hoima, Masindi, Kibale, Kagadi, and Buliisa. This training, which covered key topics, was a significant step in the fight against land evictions, as highlighted in a 2024 Witness Radio report on land evictions. The report, based on extensive research and interviews with affected communities, revealed the alarming rate of land evictions and the urgent need for legal empowerment among these communities.

The training covered key topics, including understanding the criminal justice system and how it operates, how to represent others and oneself in interactions with the police or in court, understanding land and environmental rights, documenting violations, legal processes for seeking redress, community mediation techniques, and how to demand accountability from perpetrators.

“Our goal is to empower them with the legal knowledge necessary to act as first responders in their communities, especially during this upcoming general election, to stop arbitrary arrests and detention, empower communities to push back illegal land evictions, and guide others even without the immediate presence of lawyers or our organization.” Ms. Buryelari added, underlining the crucial role of the paralegals in the upcoming elections.

Oyungi Jovia, one of the Land and Environmental Defenders (LEDs) who participated in the training, described it as impactful and an eye-opener, particularly in addressing pressing community concerns and understanding their role in mitigating harm. The training has not only equipped her with the necessary legal knowledge but also boosted her confidence in supporting those who seek her help.

“We didn’t know the legal processes to follow. Now we know where to start, what documents are required, and how to collect and present evidence in land-related cases,” she shared. “I have learned how to guide community members in legal matters, and now more confident in my ability to support those who come to me for help.”

Before the training, Jovia admitted that she and others often struggled to respond to community concerns due to their limited understanding of the law. “People would come to us for advice, but we barely knew what to tell them. This training has changed everything.” She added.

As land-based conflicts continue to rise in Uganda, particularly in regions targeted by large-scale agribusiness projects, Witness Radio’s paralegal initiative represents a significant step toward community-led access to justice and legal empowerment.

“We are building a network of informed grassroots leaders,” Mrs. Bulyerali emphasized, “who can defend their peers, community land rights, document violations, and help others seek justice, even in the absence of Witness Radio.”

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Ugandan Communities Say Total’s Oil Project Is More of a Land Grab than a Development Opportunity

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2 days ago

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May 29, 2025

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Fred Balikenda and his family were forcefully evicted from their home in Kirama village, Buliisa district on May 13, 2024 to make way for the Tilenga project. Photo by Diana Taremwa-Karakire.

When Jealousy Mugisa Mulimba, a 52-year-old father of nine in Uganda’s oil-rich Buliisa district, was informed he would need to move his family from his ancestral home because French oil giant TotalEnergies needed his three acres to build their central processing facility in the region, he was reasonable. He didn’t put up a fight. Instead, he asked that the company give him three acres nearby; somewhere out of the way of the facility, but still near the place he’d always called home, the health facilities he and his family rely upon, and his kids’ schools.

He was instead shown land far away, isolated and distant from everything and everyone he’d ever known. After a five-year legal battle, a Ugandan court expropriated his land anyway in 2023, along with that of 41 other affected people.

“They are inhuman,” he said during a recent interview. “This is my land on which my ancestors are buried. I will not just leave like they want, I will continue fighting.”

Together with other affected people, Mr. Mulimba plans to appeal the decision of the Hoima court in Uganda’s high court.

A resettlement house built by TotalEnergies for project affected persons PAPS . Some PAPs have expressed concerns that these houses are isolated compared to the communal settings they were accustomed to. Photo by Diana Taremwa-Karakire.

A resettlement house built by TotalEnergies for project affected persons PAPS . Some PAPs have expressed concerns that these houses are isolated compared to the communal settings they were accustomed to. Photo by Diana Taremwa-Karakire.

Although the Ugandan government promises that oil projects will lift the country out of poverty and put Uganda’s natural resources to work for the betterment of Ugandan citizens, activists are concerned not only about the hundreds of millions of tons of carbon dioxide these projects will generate, but also about the more immediate impacts. These range from the potential for spills and the impact on animals and birds in biodiverse regions, to the way the country’s burgeoning fossil fuel industry is displacing various communities, bringing them not the promised riches of an oil boom, but sending them ever deeper into poverty.

Uganda first discovered commercial quantities of oil nearly 20 years ago, but it wasn’t until TotalEnergies and the Chinese National Offshore Oil Company CNOOC inked a deal to exploit the resources in the Lake Albert region in 2022 that the country’s fossil fuel industry began in earnest. The region, which lies on the country’s western border with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is estimated to hold over 6.5 billion barrels of oil, with 1.4 billion barrels economically recoverable. TotalEnergies is the major operator for both the Tilenga oilfields, a $6 billion project covering Buliisa and Nwoya districts near the shores of Lake Albert, and the East African Crude Oil Pipeline, or EACOP, project that will transport that oil from Uganda to an export port in Tanzania. Other partners are CNOOC and the state-owned Uganda National Oil Company, as well as Tanzania’s state-owned Tanzania Petroleum Development Corporation.

Getting all that oil and gas to customers requires infrastructure, which is where EACOP comes in. The plan calls for a 900-mile pipeline stretching from the small town of Kabale, in western Uganda, to the Tanzanian port of Tanga. If completed, it will have the capacity to carry up to 246,000 barrels of crude a day to a storage terminal and loading jetty in Tanga. The waxy nature of Uganda’s crude will require the pipeline to be heated constantly for the crude to keep flowing. Experts say that this is the largest heated oil pipeline to be constructed.

Meanwhile, the Tilenga oilfields lie in one of not just Uganda’s but Africa’s most biodiverse regions. According to state environment regulator National Environment Management Authority NEMA, the Albertine region hosts 14 percent of all of African reptiles, 19 percent of Africa’s amphibians and 52 percent of the continent’s birds, as well as 35 percent of all of Africa’s butterflies and 39 percent of all African mammals.

The project includes the development of 6 oil fields and the drilling of about 426 wells, with 10 wellpads located inside Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda’s largest national park. It also includes an industrial area with a lake water abstraction facility and a central processing facility capable of processing up to 200,000 barrels of oil per day. Currently, the project aims to produce up to 190,000 barrels of oil daily to meet global demand. Drilling activities are ongoing at Tilenga with over 110 wells drilled so far.

Land Grab

The completion of the Tilenga and EACOP projects will not only displace animals, birds and amphibians, but also people. The projects require a land acquisition program covering some 6,400 hectares. This means relocating 775 primary residences, and affecting a total of  19,262 stakeholders, landowners, and land users.

TotalEnergies is responsible for overseeing the land acquisition process, including all administrative costs and compensation payments. However, the company contracted Atacama Consulting, a Ugandan firm, to carry out the implementation of this process.

While land and property rights in Uganda are safeguarded under Article 26 of the Constitution and the Land Act of 1998, the land acquisition process for these projects is guided by government-mandated Land Acquisition Resettlement Framework and Resettlement Action Plans (RAPS) that are part of assessments carried out by TotalEnergies. The compensation rates for land, permanent buildings, rates for crops and temporary structures are determined based on market analysis approved by the chief government valuer.

The Tilenga RAP stipulates that the project will re-establish the livelihoods of affected persons to an equal or greater level than before the project activities. Most of the land has been acquired from the 5,576 landowners or project affected people under the Tilenga project.

However, many of the people in question, like Mulimba, report unresolved disputes and claim that these projects have left them worse off than before, driving them deeper into poverty.

On December 8, 2023, the High Court in Hoima ruled that 42 households be evicted before compensation to make way for the Tilenga Project. The court allowed TotalEnergies to deposit compensation funds in court and take the land, even by force if needed. While the company made compensation payments after resolving disputes, many affected families still argue that the compensation was inadequate.

The Ugandan project, along with the vast natural gas fields of Mozambique, are at the center of TotalEnergies’s Africa strategy, which it says is to “develop responsible, low cost, low emission oil and gas production.” This strategy fits well into the plans of Uganda’s long-time leader, Yoweri Museveni, who has made the development of the $10 billion hydrocarbon industry a cornerstone of his plan to transform this impoverished East African nation.

At an event to announce the final investment decision for the $10bn project in February 2022, TotalEnergies chief executive Patrick Pouyanné said that he had travelled to Uganda more than any other country since 2018 to push through the project.

“The development of Lake Albert resources is a major project for Uganda and Tanzania, and our ambition is to make it an exemplary project in terms of shared prosperity and sustainable development. We are fully aware of the important social and environmental challenges it represents,” he said.

But allegations of rights violations to local communities have dogged the oil giant. Activists say the Tilenga project’s land acquisition process has been marked by delayed, inadequate and unfair compensation as well as the use of threats, intimidation, and other tactics to coerce many poor families into accepting bad deals for their land. This has led to resistance to the project’s efforts to fence off land in some areas, despite the company’s insistence that it sought consent and is following social safeguards.

“TotalEnergies has failed to respect the rights of local communities. It has failed to gain the informed consent of affected communities for the project as is legally required,” said Benon Tusingwire, the executive director at Navigators of Development Association NAVODA, a local rights group working in the project area. He also noted that officials from Atacama have been coercing and tricking affected people into signing consent forms for the acquisition of their land.

TotalEnergies did not reply to multiple requests for comment.

As the deadline for the production of first oil approaches, the actions of both TotalEnergies and government officials have become more aggressive, residents claim.

On the morning of May 13, 2024, Fred Balikenda (pictured in the photo at the top of this story), a local peasant farmer living on the margins of one of TotalEnergies oil wells, suffered one of the most brutal evictions to date. A group of gun-toting policemen in Toyota Pickup trucks bumped into the fenced enclosure of Balikenda’s home and ordered him and his wife out of their 4 bedroom house. As they waited in the yard, the officers, backed by around a dozen un-uniformed men, started demolishing the house.

Balikenda, along with other landowners, including Mulimba, lost the suit in April 2024 in which they had sought to halt their evictions. The Judge in Hoima city, near the oil fields, ruled that money meant for the expropriation compensation should be deposited with the court and that the government could evict locals so that TotalEnergies construction activities could go ahead.

“They threw out some of my belongings through the windows,” Balikenda said, gazing into the distance. “We are now living a life of destitution, we have lost so much land to the project and yet what we were being compensated isn’t equal to what is being taken. We no longer have access to community grazing land, all my cows and pigs have died.”

Even before this eviction, Balikenda was effectively living in an open-air prison for months after TotalEnergies fenced in his home and a 1-acre piece of land that he had refused to vacate before his replacement house was complete. His pigs starved to death because he could no longer get out of the enclosure to get them fodder, he says. Court is yet to rule on their appeal.

“We are really going through some of the roughest times,” Balikenda said.  “Our families are traumatized”

The Petroleum Authority of Uganda, or PAU, the state regulator for the oil and gas sector, says that recent evictions of Tilenga affected persons followed the due legal process.

“The Tilenga Project prioritizes minimizing disruption to affected communities and ensuring that all PAPs [project-affected persons] are adequately compensate for their losses and inconveniences. Despite the comprehensive compensation and resettlement efforts, the final PAPs’ repeated refusal to relocate necessitated legal action by the government,” says a statement from PAU.

However, lawyers representing Balikenda and others insist that the court process was flawed. In a country where the justice system mostly rules in favor of the government, affected people remain helpless.

“If it were not for the harassment, intimidation, arrests, detentions and other threats that they face, they would never have accepted the low compensation,” said Tusingwire.

Pump Station 1 (PS1) of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline project in Hoima district, a critical part of the EACOP infrastructure, receiving crude oil from feeder pipelines from the Kingfisher and Tilenga oil fields and transporting it to port Tanga in Tanzania. Photo by Diana Taremwa-Karakire.

Pump Station 1 (PS1) of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline project in Hoima district, a critical part of the EACOP infrastructure, receiving crude oil from feeder pipelines from the Kingfisher and Tilenga oil fields and transporting it to port Tanga in Tanzania. Photo by Diana Taremwa-Karakire.

The Pattern Continues in Mozambique

More than 2000 kilometers to the south, TotalEnergies’ $20 billion natural gas project in northern Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado province was saved in 2021 by a well-timed donation from France to Rwanda, which was followed just a few weeks later by the deployment of some 2,500 Rwandan peace-keeping troops to fight Jihadist fighters in the region. The deployment happened months after TotalEnergies had declared force majeure on the project due to an offensive by Islamic State-linked insurgents.

The insurgency, which has been raging since 2017, is mainly spearheaded by angry young men who resent security force abuses and believe elites monopolize the region’s natural resources while local communities starve. As in Uganda, the company’s approach to land acquisition and community outreach has not served to quell that anger; relocation efforts have often resulted in the displacement of communities far from their traditional and familial roots, with farmers being moved to non-arable land or fishermen to new villages far from the sea.

Critics of the gas project argue that while the insurgency is rooted in Cabo Delgado’s complex political and religious history, so far Total’s operations follow a familiar pattern of extracting wealth from the province with little benefit to local residents.

According to the International Crisis Group, the insurgents are fighting for a “meaningful role in the Cabo Delgado economy, so they can benefit from the opportunities created by major mining and gas projects.”

TotalEnergies has been forced to shore up more security measures, signing a security pact contracting Isco Segurança, a security company backed by  Rwanda’s ruling party, to secure the gas fields. But analysts believe that such security arrangements will not leave a lasting solution since the grievances are felt deeply by large sections of the region’s impoverished population.

“Thousands of Livelihoods Devastated”

A 2023 report by Human Rights Watch indicated that the EACOP project has devastated thousands of livelihoods in Uganda and risks locking in decades of greenhouse gas emissions, contributing to the global climate crisis. More than a dozen banks and insurance companies have shunned investment in EACOP, citing environmental and human-rights concerns.

With so many lenders on the sidelines, China has been willing to show support for the project. Last year, Ruth Nankabirwa, the Minister of Energy and Mineral Development, told state media that China would provide more than half of the $3.05 billion in debt financing needed, with smaller lenders taking up the rest of the slack.

According to the government, the oil industry is projected to bring a $40 billion boost to Uganda’s economy. When production is at its peak, the government will receive an anticipated $2 billion a year in revenue from the development.

Irene Batebe the permanent secretary at the Ministry of Energy and Mineral Development says that the government is committed to ensuring that the oil and gas sector is exploited without breaching environmental guidelines. Commercializing Uganda’s  oil and gas will provide funds to spur  development and investment in more renewable energy sources. The industry will also produce Liquified Petroleum Gas, which Batebe says will provide a cleaner cooking energy source and help to save crucial forest cover.Uganda is set to produce 100,000kg of liquified petroleum gas annually at the peak of oil production which is set to be used for cooking in homes, transport and heating.

From 2001 to 2023, Uganda lost 1.10 Mha of tree cover, equivalent to a 14% decrease in tree cover since 2000 according to figures from Global Forest Watch.

Forest cover has been shrinking at a rate of 15 percent each year over the past decade, due largely to the country’s over-reliance on charcoal and firewood for cooking.

“The real problem is not EACOP or fossil fuels , the real problem is, you have at least 57%of households having access to a source of electricity meaning the bulk of us are depending on rudimentary biomass,about 80% of our population is burning fuel wood and charcoal,” Batebe says.

But not everyone agrees on what constitutes “betterment” and for which people. In an interview, Dickens Kamugisha, the Chief Executive Officer of Africa Institute for Energy Governance, contends that the Ugandan government appears bent on maximizing proceeds from the industry without regard for Indigenous communities and the environment.

“The longer we wait to reduce emissions, the greater our collective suffering will be,” said Mr. Kamugisha , who spent weeks in detention in 2021 over charges related to his environmental advocacy work around EACOP “We must reduce and eventually eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels if we are serious about halting global warming.”

Source: drilled.media

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A decade of bloodshed: 1,088 Human Rights defenders killed for resisting corporate abuse

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3 days ago

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May 28, 2025

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A crowd gathers at a vigil for human rights defenders Antonio Díaz Valencia and Ricardo Arturo Lagunes Gasca, who were forcibly disappeared on January 15, 2023, in Mexico. Photo Credit: Gustavo Vilchis.

By Witness Radio team.

Challenging corporate harm caused by business-related activities is a ticking time bomb, as many who dared to speak out have been silenced forever. Yet, their courage in the face of such danger is a testament to their unwavering commitment to justice.

In the last ten years, close to 1,100 human rights defenders across the globe have been murdered for speaking up against destructive corporate practices. This is not a localized issue but a global crisis that demands our attention and action.

These staggering statistics are captured in a new report titled “Defending Rights and Realising Just Economies: Human Rights Defenders and Business (2015–2024)”, published by the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre. The report paints a disturbing picture, with over 6,400 attacks on human rights defenders (HRDs) documented worldwide since 2015, and among those, 1,088 were fatal.

On average, that means every year, more than 100 people are killed simply for defending their land, water, forests, or the rights of their communities.

“Human rights defenders are on the frontlines of justice – challenging abuse, protecting our planet, and envisioning a better future for us all. Yet they continue to face relentless and often deadly retaliation simply for their defense of human rights. Said Christen Dobson, Co-Head of the Civic Freedoms and Human Rights Defenders Programme at the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre.

Most of the violence targets defenders confronting the fossil fuel, mining, and agribusiness industries — sectors notorious for land grabs and environmental degradation.

According to the report, nearly one-third of those killed were Indigenous defenders deeply connected to their land and culture. Latin America remains the deadliest region, followed closely by the Philippines, among others.

While governments have a duty to investigate these murders, the report says the majority of attacks – both lethal and non-lethal – go uninvestigated and unpunished, fostering a culture of impunity that only strengthens further violence.

“We commemorate the lives, courage, and vital work of these HRDs and their communities. While governments have a duty to investigate these murders, the majority of attacks, both lethal and non-lethal, go uninvestigated and unpunished, fostering a culture of impunity that only emboldens further violence,” the report revealed

Beyond killings, the report also details countless cases of threats, criminal charges, surveillance, and smear campaigns used to discredit and break down defenders. It demonstrates how legal systems are being increasingly weaponized to silence dissent further.

In 2024 alone, 89% of the HRDs attacked were land and environmental defenders. In addition, 96% of local community defenders experiencing attacks over the past decade were advocating for land and environmental rights, highlighting their leadership in protecting natural resources and the planet.

Some of the projects linked to the highest number of attacks over the last ten years include the Lake Albert oil extraction and development project (which consists of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline) (Uganda and Tanzania), Inversiones los Pinares (Honduras), Dakota Access Pipeline (USA), Las Bambas Mine (Peru) and Line 3 Pipeline (USA and Canada).

Many governments have aligned with the perpetrators by weaponizing legal systems to attack HRDs, setting a path for private actors to follow suit, thereby neglecting their core responsibility of protecting human rights.

The report also puts a spotlight on Uganda, where defenders resisting oil development in the Albertine region have faced an intense wave of repression. In particular, it highlights attacks related to the Lake Albert oil extraction and development projects, which include the East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP). This project, operated by a consortium of powerful actors, has been a source of conflict and human rights abuses in the region.

These projects are operated by a consortium of powerful actors: TotalEnergies, which owns the majority stake and operates the Tilenga project; the China National Offshore Oil Company (CNOOC), which runs the Kingfisher project; and the Uganda National Oil Company.

But while the Ugandan government promotes these developments as a path to economic transformation, local communities tell a different story — one of forced evictions, sexual and gender-based violence, loss of farmland, polluted water sources, and shattered livelihoods.

According to the report, at least 102 attacks have been recorded against Ugandan defenders who have spoken out against these oil projects. These include cases of judicial harassment, arrests, and threats, among others.

The report concludes with a call to action: for governments to fulfill their duty to protect human rights defenders by investigating and prosecuting attacks against them; for corporations to respect human rights by conducting their business in a way that does not infringe on human rights; and for global solidarity to rise in defense of those who risk everything for justice, by supporting and advocating for the rights of human rights defenders.

Related posts:

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EU vote on corporate sustainability due diligence fails to fully recognise key role of human rights defenders EU stands behind the empowerment of Human Rights Defenders Breaking: Over 600 attacks against defenders have been recorded in the year 2023 globally- BHRRC report. Attacks fueled by governments’ double standards fail to deter human rights defenders Human Rights Defenders not safe in Uganda – Unwanted Witness report
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