By the Witness Radio team,
Barely a few months after receiving new funding from the International Finance Corporation (IFC) of the World Bank, Agilis Partners Limited, an awardee of the United States Award for Corporate Excellence in 2019, with its subsidiaries is inappropriately using the funds meant to uplift the livelihoods of the local communities instead to render them landless.
In March 2023, Agilis Partners secured over $999,900.00, equivalent to over 3.5 billion Uganda Shillings for a Grain Development Project.
According to the IFC disclosure seen by Witness Radio, the financing is to create a sustainable business model for 6,000 smallholder farmers to access knowledge, inputs, and a market for their maize production, thus maximizing both quality and volume currently supplied to Agilis over three years.
Three months after securing a loan from IFC, local communities lawfully occupying their land and resisting forced eviction by Agilis Partners Limited are reporting increased violent land evictions and violence. Accordingly, the company has established a new detachment of police and army officers whose role is to guard tractors and company workers while plowing farming fields and evicting poor people off their land at the expense of the World Bank finances. Local communities this morning have revealed that the company is targeting first families headed by vocal land rights defenders in a community of hundreds of local persons negatively affected by the investment.
Samuel Kusiima, a community and rights defender, is one of the affected people. On Sunday, the 16th of July, 2023, an Agilis company tractor guarded by three armed men and an armed police officer attached to the Criminal Investigations Department at Kiryandongo district police descended on the defender’s farming fields, plowed down his 3 acres of maize and cassava plantations.
“They are warning to bring my house down because I speak against brutal actions of evictions, and they destroyed all crops that I was about to harvest. Now, my family is being exposed to hunger.” The defender said.
He added that anonymous people threatened him with arrests several times last week alone.
Agilis Partners Limited spokesman Onyango Emmanuel, when contacted, he denied the incident. He said he was not aware of the forced evictions.
Agilis Partners Limited is owned by American twin brothers Philipp Prinz and Benjamin Prinz. It owns Agilis Ranch 20 and 21 Limited, Asilis Farms Limited, and Joseph Initiative Limited, a beneficiary of the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) financial support and Common Fund for Commodities (CFC) based in the Netherlands. The company via its website boasts as one of the suppliers of food grain to the United Nations’ World Food Program.
Since 2017, the company has illegally evicted over 2500 residents that were lawfully occupying and cultivating more than 2000 hectares without a court order, no fair compensation, and did not provide an alternative settlement to the poor families.
Agilis Partners Limited is one of the three multinationals that have grabbed land for more than 35,000 locals for their agribusiness projects in the Kiryandongo district. Other companies are Great Seasons SMC Limited and Kiryandongo Sugar Company.
The World Bank and its sector arms have been criticized for financing harmful projects all over the World. According to various reports including the 2015 report of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, over 4 million people have negatively been impacted by projects financed by the World’s largest funding group.
