SPECIAL REPORTS AND PROJECTS
US government stops funding to WWF, WCS and other conservation organisations because of human rights abuses
Published
3 years agoon

By Chris Lang
In autumn 2019, the US government suspended US$12.3 million of funding to the Central Africa Regional Program for the Environment (CARPE). This followed a bipartisan congressional oversight investigation to examine whether US conservation funds were supporting eco-guards who committed human rights abuses.
CARPE is funded by money from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) transferred to the US Fish and Widlife Service (FWS).
The review of US conservation funding followed the year long investigation by BuzzFeed News into human rights abuses and WWF. The investigation was published in March 2019 and revealed that WWF had funded eco-guards who tortured and killed people.
Conservation organisations responses: “Not uniformly thorough or responsible”
In November 2019, the FWS sent an information request to some of the organisations that had received CARPE funding. A memo dated 18 September 2020 from Katherin MacGregor, the US Deputy Secretary of the Interior, states that,
While all grantees replied, the responses were not uniformly thorough or responsible, thereby raising further questions about the desire and capability of grantees and the ability of the FWS to adequately monitor allegations and prevent such abuses in the future. One organization, Virunga Foundation, replied with a statement that it would be closing down its operations in 2019, and would not be sending any further documentation.
Wildlife Conservation Society replied “stating that the Service’s request was overly burdensome and that they would only be able to produce a limited amount of information based on their internal document retention policy,” MacGregor writes. Meanwhile African Parks told the FWS that “three investigations into allegations of human rights violations were conducted in 2019 managed by the organization and closed without documented consultation or notice provided to the Service prior to this data call.”
Last week, Survival International put out a summary of the highlights of the Department of Interior’s memo, under the headline: “Atrocities prompt US authorities to halt funding to WWF, WCS in major blow to conservation industry”.
The following are REDD-Monitor’s notes of some of the key points of the memo.
US Government Accountability Office investigation
In late 2019, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) also started an investigation into the same issue. In August 2020, the Department of the Interior received a draft of GAO’s report.
In her memo MacGregor writes that the draft report “contained no recommendations and instead indicated that GAO could not properly perform an inquiry into the in-country monitoring component of the CARPE program – arguably one of the areas of greatest concern and vulnerability when reviewing real-time oversight controls – due to COVID-19 travel restrictions.”
Nevertheless, GAO’s report included “some interesting findings”, MacGregor writes:
For instance, interviews with U.S. government officials at multiple relevant agencies (State, USAID, and FWS) indicated widespread surprise by the allegations and concer that they were not notified previously through standard channels.
The State Department has relied on partner organisations, including WWF, to carry out its own internal investigation to determine whether US government-funded organisations were involved in human rights abuses. MacGregor writes,
The notion of an agency relying on an awardee to investigate itself to determine wrongdoing was highlighted during a Department briefing to House Natural Resources Committee staff conducted in July 2019. Staff from both the majority and minority expressed concern with this practice.
MacGregor notes that the review found that “information remains quite dispersed, buried in emails of former employees, spread across different Federal agencies, and in many instances, in the possession of awardees who have provided information in rolling productions that have not always been completed in a timely manner.” She adds in a footnote that,
WWF stated they were told by other federal parties not to provide internal reports that document findings of wrongdoing by auditors they hired to investigate long-standing allegations. Fortunately, these documents were ultimately made available to the Department and contributed to our analysis.
The reprehensible nature of the abuse
MacGregor writes that,
[I]t is important to make clear the reprehensible nature of the abuse that has been documented and must be guarded against in the future:
- Four women were beaten with a baton, lashed on their backs and legs, and raped by the eco-guards – two of the women were pregnant, and were still raped, even though a woman “begged them to spare her.”
- Three men were held by eco-guards for three days, during which the eco-guards beat them, “tied their penises with fishing thread, and hung them at the branch of a tree.”
- Eco-guards were falsely informed that a farmer’s family was in possession of a weapon, so in the middle of the night the eco-guards burst into the farmer’s home, beat all the members of the household, raped his wife in the bushes, and imprisoned the farmer and his father.
- A woman was detained by guards, forced to cook for and serve the guards, and was tortured for four days after guards were falsely informed that her husband was in possession of a weapon of war. She was only released when her husband found her and took her place. He was imprisoned without a trial.
These abuses of human rights are from reports commissioned by conservation organisations themselves. The first, second, and fourth in the list are from a report commissioned by WWF to investigate human rights abuses in the Salonga National Park. REDD-Monitor wrote about these abuses and WWF’s failure to make the report public, here:
UNDP’s draft investigative report
MacGregor also refers to UNDP’s 2020 draft investigative report that confirms that WWF-funded eco-guards beat up indigenous peoples in the Republic of Congo. MacGregor writes:
- Reports of abuse of indigenous populations were ignored for several years by WWF and initially UNDP staff, until being investigated following a formal complaint submitted by Survival International in July 2018.
- “These beatings occur when the Baka are in their camps along the road as well as when they are in the forest. They affect men, women, and children. … There are reports of Baka men having been taken to prison and of torture and rape inside prison. The widow of one Baka man spoke about her husband being so ill-treated in prison that he died shortly after his release. He had been transported to prison in a WWF-marked vehicle.“
- WWF staff in Congo “acknowledged the evidence of abuse against the Baku” by the eco-guards … but appeared to view them as isolated incidents.
REDD-Monitor wrote about the draft UNDP report in February 2020:
WWF used funds to pay for firearms and ammunition
A 2019 internal WWF report about the proposed Messok Dja Protected Area in the Republic of Congo, written by the Forest Peoples Programme, states that by continuing to work with or supporting governments that fail to protect human rights, WWF was “contributing to human rights violations, in contravention of its own policies and of international law.”
WWF submitted materials to the Department of Interior that “even appear to imply that the organization used funds to support potentially prohibited activity, including paying for firearms and ammunition,” MacGregor writes. She adds that, “The same document contained statements that implied future FWS funds would continue to be leveraged for the effort’s biggest perceived need – firearms and ammunition.”
The reports investigating human rights abuses that have been commissioned by the conservation organisations are internal – they are not made available publicly, or even to the US government. MacGregor writes that,
As evidenced in this programmatic review, allegations of human rights abuse have been consistently handled internally by awardees, even when those allegations implicate the organization’s employees and taxpayer funding. Subsequent investigations resulted in findings of misconduct, but were then relayed to the organization in confidential reports and not made available to the U.S. Government either at all or in a timely manner.
Proposals on future conservation funding
MacGregor’s memo includes proposals to avoid funding “where the FWS cannot ensure future human rights violations will not occur.”
These include the following:
- Free, informed, and prior consent by the indigenous population must be obtained before a program is established or expanded, with approriate criteria developed to document the engagement and corresponding consent.
- To the extent consistent with all legal obligations or to mitigate risks associated with particular programs and/or recipients, the FWS will no longer provide funding for subgrantees.
- The FWS will not award grants to conduct high-risk activities such as eco-guards, law enforcement activities and supplies, community patrols, and other similar or related activities. This includes activities related to relocating communities, voluntarily or involuntarily, either through direct engagement or support to local government entities seeking to do the same.
- Grant awardees will certify that no activities will be conducted in violation of U.S. law, rules or regulations and that they are taking steps to protect human rights during the implementation of the grant.
- Consistent with applicable laws, impost minimum bonding and/or insurance requirements for the purposes of addressing harm or liability resulting from actual or potential human rights violations and other risks related to activities or operations in which such violations are possible. (FWS shall work with SOL to advise on maximum bond and insurance amounts authorized under the law).
- Grantees will provide for a whistleblower capability to both alert the FWS of potential human rights abuses and ensure thorough investigation of such allegations.
- Awardees will satisfy appropriate reporting requirements, including mandating immediate notification of any internal investigations conducted on human rights abuses in which federal dollars may have been involved.
Original Post: Redd Monitor
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Sovereign wealth funds invested in farmland/food/agriculture (2023)
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|||
Country
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Fund
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Est.
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AUM (US$bn)
|
China
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CIC
|
2007
|
1351
|
Norway
|
NBIM
|
1997
|
1145
|
UAE – Abu Dhabi
|
ADIA
|
1967
|
993
|
Kuwait
|
KIA
|
1953
|
769
|
Saudi Arabia
|
PIF
|
1971
|
620
|
China
|
NSSF
|
2000
|
474
|
Qatar
|
QIA
|
2005
|
450
|
UAE – Dubai
|
ICD
|
2006
|
300
|
Singapore
|
Temasek
|
1974
|
298
|
UAE – Abu Dhabi
|
Mubadala
|
2002
|
284
|
UAE – Abu Dhabi
|
ADQ
|
2018
|
157
|
Australia
|
Future Fund
|
2006
|
157
|
Iran
|
NDFI
|
2011
|
139
|
UAE
|
EIA
|
2007
|
91
|
USA – AK
|
Alaska PFC
|
1976
|
73
|
Australia – QLD
|
QIC
|
1991
|
67
|
USA – TX
|
UTIMCO
|
1876
|
64
|
USA – TX
|
Texas PSF
|
1854
|
56
|
Brunei
|
BIA
|
1983
|
55
|
France
|
Bpifrance
|
2008
|
50
|
UAE – Dubai
|
Dubai World
|
2005
|
42
|
Oman
|
OIA
|
2020
|
42
|
USA – NM
|
New Mexico SIC
|
1958
|
37
|
Malaysia
|
Khazanah
|
1993
|
31
|
Russia
|
RDIF
|
2011
|
28
|
Turkey
|
TVF
|
2017
|
22
|
Bahrain
|
Mumtalakat
|
2006
|
19
|
Ireland
|
ISIF
|
2014
|
16
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Canada – SK
|
SK CIC
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1947
|
16
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Italy
|
CDP Equity
|
2011
|
13
|
China
|
CADF
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2007
|
10
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Indonesia
|
INA
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2020
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6
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India
|
NIIF
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2015
|
4
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Spain
|
COFIDES
|
1988
|
4
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Nigeria
|
NSIA
|
2011
|
3
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Angola
|
FSDEA
|
2012
|
3
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Egypt
|
TSFE
|
2018
|
2
|
Vietnam
|
SCIC
|
2006
|
2
|
Gabon
|
FGIS
|
2012
|
2
|
Morocco
|
Ithmar Capital
|
2011
|
2
|
Palestine
|
PIF
|
2003
|
1
|
Bolivia
|
FINPRO
|
2015
|
0,4
|
AUM (assets under management) figures from Global SWF, January 2023
|
|||
Engagement in food/farmland/agriculture assessed by GRAIN
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SPECIAL REPORTS AND PROJECTS
Ugandan communities battle to benefit from mining on their land
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Communities in Karamoja face an uphill task organising to beat international capital and authoritarian politics.
Rupa, Uganda – A handful of artisanal miners stand shirtless in an open pit, breaking boulders that glint white in the sun. Nearby, soldiers stand sullenly at the gate of the Sunbelt Marble Mine and Factory, owned by Chinese businessmen who have sunk $13m into the project.
These are the two faces of the mining rush in the Karamoja region of northeast Uganda: small-scale freelance miners, toiling with basic equipment for scant reward, and a mix of wealthy foreign and local investors protected by the state.
Here in Rupa, a sub-county of Moroto district, the locals have seen companies come and go, buying up land and dividing communities. So in 2017, when they got wind that a Chinese company was coming, they were determined to do things differently: this time, they were going to organise.
It was a pioneering attempt to ensure that local people benefitted from mining, building on customary ownership and exploiting little-used provisions of Ugandan land law.
But the story of how it worked – and how it did not – shows just how hard it is for communities to organise in the face of international capital and authoritarian politics.
Mining rush
Many of the 1.2 million people in Karamoja are cattle-keepers, driving their herds across grasslands managed by clan and custom. The rains are fickle, so negotiating access to pasture involves an element of give-and-take.
But the mining companies that are exploring the region want something solid and immovable: the minerals that lie beneath the soil, including marble, limestone, copper and gold.
In the early 2000s, the army forcefully disarmed the gun-wielding cattle-raiders who once roamed the plains, and speculators rushed in during the ensuing peace.
“The first businesspeople who came were taking over the land,” says Simon Nangiro, chairman of the Karamoja Miners Association, which represents small-scale miners in the region. “Companies come with military accompaniments … [They’re] negotiating behind the scenes with people who are vulnerable.”
According to the mining cadastre, the government has granted full mining leases in Karamoja to four companies – Sunbelt, Tororo Cement, DAO Marble and Mechanized Agro – across 79 square km (31 square miles) of land.
It has also issued licences for exploration to dozens of other local and foreign companies on roughly 4,000 square km (1,544 square miles) and is considering applications on nearly 5,000 square km (1,931 square miles) more.
Documents like leases, licences and land titles are how the modern state speaks – but it is a language foreign to Karamoja, where ownership is rarely written down and only a quarter of people can read.
“Here in Karamoja we have a customary land tenure system,” explains John Bosco Logwee, an elder in Rupa and one of the leaders of organising efforts there. “As a result, people [from outside] looked at the land and thought it does not belong to anybody.”
In Uganda as a whole, an estimated 80 percent of the land is held customarily although exact figures are hard to come by. The problem of proving who owns what worries everyone from activists, who warn of land grabs, to the World Bank, which wants to spur rural property markets.
Under the 1998 Land Act, communities can create “communal land associations” (CLAs) to defend their collective land rights. More than 600 have been incorporated nationwide, often with World Bank support.
Some of the first to be established were in Karamoja, where 52 were set up in 2012-2013 by a non-governmental organisation, the Uganda Land Alliance. According to Edmond Owor, its former executive director, the CLAs had some early successes in fending off fraudulent investors. But in 2016, the Alliance itself collapsed due to internal governance problems, leaving the fledgling CLAs on their own.
“The creation of a CLA is a very easy process, and that’s where the easy work ends,” says Simon Longoli, executive director of the Karamoja Development Forum (KDF), a civil society group based in Moroto. “We find it very difficult to trust a piece of paper to ensure the rights of the community over a piece of land.”
What people really needed, he thought, was organising and capacity building to assert the rights they had on paper. In short, they needed power.

Community organising
Communities in Rupa had been at the forefront of Karamoja’s mining rush. A 2014 report by Human Rights Watch described how two foreign-owned companies had come to the area and started exploration without the consent of the locals.
“International capital has come into Karamoja, it has allied itself with powerful political and military elites at the centre, facilitated by influence peddlers,” says David Pulkol, a Rupa indigene who formerly served as a member of parliament, government minister and head of Uganda’s external intelligence agency. “Those three are in the same bed, dispossessing the ordinary people of their livelihoods.”
So in 2017, the three clans of Rupa sub-county joined their CLAs together to form the Rupa Community Development Trust (RUCODET), taking out the formal title to the land on behalf of 35,000 people.
Longoli and his KDF colleagues arranged training for the trust’s leaders in negotiation and other skills. No other community in Karamoja had organised on such a scale to take on mining companies.
The arrival of the Sunbelt mine would give RUCODET its first major test. Under Ugandan law, all minerals belong to the government. But landowners have “surface rights” to the land itself, which have often been trampled by mining companies.
Now, thanks to RUCODET, the Chinese investors would have to negotiate with the community. “It was tough,” says Logwee, the elder. “We had no experience before of that kind of thing.”
Sunbelt had strong backing from Operation Wealth Creation, a sprawling Ugandan military programme that started out giving seeds to farmers and was now helping build fruit factories, disburse credit and develop the minerals sector.
The programme is led by Salim Saleh, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni’s ubiquitous brother, whom many consider the second-most powerful man in the country. He is a feared general with extensive business interests, who has been accused by UN experts of grabbing resources during the 1998-2003 Congo war – an allegation he has always denied.
As part of the negotiations, a team from RUCODET travelled 400km to Kapeeka, where a Chinese-owned industrial park has been constructed close to Saleh’s personal residence. Longoli of KDF says that some leaders in RUCODET and in local government were taking calls from Saleh himself to get an agreement signed.
Major Kiconco Tabaro, a spokesman for Operation Wealth Creation, claims that it was not directly involved in the negotiations but has “a strategic working relationship with all ministries, departments and agencies of government” to “help bring about socioeconomic transformation”.
It was hard to say no to a man like Saleh, and the leaders of RUCODET did not. In 2018, they signed away surface rights to 3.3 square km of land to Sunbelt for 21 years, receiving compensation of 1.8 billion shillings ($500,000), they say.
By one yardstick, that was a lot of money. Small-scale miners in Rupa say they get just 100,000 shillings ($28) from traders for filling a 7-tonne truck with stone, a task which takes four people at least a week.
But Sunbelt expects gross revenues of $30m a year, according to the 2021 manifesto of the ruling National Resistance Movement – making the payout to RUCODET equivalent to one week’s turnover. A spokesman for Sunbelt declined an interview request for this story.
The leaders of RUCODET used 100 million shillings ($28,000) to set up 94 educational scholarships for schoolchildren and university students. Some of the rest was handed out as cash to community members.
But there was protest from those who felt left out and mutterings that money was misused or even stolen – allegations which Logwee dismisses as “speculation”. Three people familiar with the matter told Al Jazeera that the lawyer who advised RUCODET charged 400 million shillings ($110,000) for his services, which included the cost of surveying and titling the land.
Then tragedy struck. The leader of RUCODET was a man called Marjory Dan Apollo Loyomo, a brother of the former spy chief Pulkol. “He was very strong, he was very charismatic, he was very committed,” recalls Longoli. He was also the elected chairman of Rupa sub-county, which meant he had to represent his people in disputes.
In 2019, after a decade of peace, the armed cattle-raiders started to make a comeback. Loyomo had disagreed with aspects of the army’s handling of the issue.
On December 17 that year, according to the UN Human Rights office, the army called him to a military detach in Rupa. It had impounded cattle after a raid; local people were angry. Loyomo, as sub-county chairman, tried to deliberate with the officers. A soldier shot him dead.
The regional army commander was transferred soon afterwards. His successor, Brigadier General Joseph Balikudembe, says that he cannot comment on the incident due to ongoing proceedings against the soldiers involved.
Nobody that Al Jazeera spoke to wanted to speculate on the reasons for Loyomo’s killing, but everyone agreed that it was a devastating setback.
“The loss of a torchbearer, the founder chairman, has been a very big loss for RUCODET,” says Logwee, who has succeeded him to the role.
“He was fighting really for his people,” argues Joyce Nayor, an activist and Rupa resident who is critical of the trust’s current leadership. “Since he died, RUCODET has also died a natural death.”
Hardly any local people got jobs in the Sunbelt mine, Al Jazeera heard on two visits to the area with local activists. Some small-scale miners have been allowed to remain in a corner of the land that was allocated to the company, where they break boulders for sale.
They complain that Sunbelt tried to push them into an ever-smaller area and take away the traders who would buy their stone – and that RUCODET has done little to help.
“RUCODET is there in name only,” says Isaiah Aleu, a miner.

Choppy waters
Land trusts and CLAs are promising tools for communities to defend their rights, say land campaigners. But there is no consensus about how they should navigate turbulent political waters.
Pulkol is now helping build RUCODET’s capacity through the Africa Leadership Institute, a non-governmental organisation he leads. He thinks the best hope for Karamoja is to work with investors and government for shared benefits, rather than to block them altogether.
Longoli, the activist, is not so sure. Often when it comes to minerals, “the best deal is just no deal”, he says. “RUCODET, because of pressure from above or pressure from within the institution, was in a hurry to close deals.”
Yet he remains hopeful that organisations like RUCODET can be the basis for something better. “These are not perfect but they give a bridge somewhere,” he says.
The next test is coming soon.
In Loyoro sub-county of Kaabong district, 100km (62 miles) to the north, a new company called Moroto Ateker Cement is exploring for limestone. Pulkol, representing the local government of Moroto, sits on its board.
The state-owned Uganda Development Corporation has a 45 percent stake in the project. The seven clans of Loyoro have started the process of forming a trust, after the RUCODET model.
Meanwhile, in the bush, surrounded by soldiers and tsetse flies, exploratory drilling machines bore down into their land.
Source: Al Jazeera
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