By Witness Radio team.
Leaders of the Informal Alliance against the expansion of Industrial Monoculture Plantations have passed a declaration committing to the fight against land grabbing, particularly those linked to tree planting projects on the continent. Africa is experiencing increased cases of forced land evictions to give way to carbon credit offset projects. Many communities have lost their land to land-based investments without being offered alternative settlement or fair compensation.
In their sixth assembly, in Mouila, Gabon, last year (2024), over 60 leaders represented victim communities and organizations from Gabon, Nigeria, Cameroon, Sierra Leone, Congo Brazzaville, Liberia, Ghana, Congo Kinshasa, Ivory Coast, and Uganda.
They recognized that their lands were not just pieces of the earth but essential ancestral lands, hosting homes of different communities of people with traditional culture and knowledge of nature with intrinsic worth and warranted respect regardless of their usefulness to inhabitants and humanity. This understanding of the profound value of ancestral lands fuels our unwavering commitment to fight against their illegal occupation and exploitation.
For many years, ancestral community territories have been illegally occupied by colonial and postcolonial government regimes as concessions to corporations for business development, which violates the rights of the people and, therefore, constitutes serious crimes against humans; an illegality is an illegality regardless of the time they were committed – a declaration reads in part.
Acknowledged that postcolonial governments have failed in their responsibilities by giving true independence to the communities by prioritizing colonial interests by foreign agents by enacting neo-community laws to dislodge and rob communities of their ancestral land using various opaque notions of national land and government land ownership.
It further revealed that threats caused by the senseless acts of grabbing ancestral land and awarding them as concessions to businesses have brought untold hardship, violence, and irreparable damage, such as loss of lives and biodiversity, entrenched poverty due to loss of livelihoods and community property, early child pregnancy, and gender-based violence, etc.
The declaration ends with commitments, namely, to promote and defend agroecological practices and food sovereignty as a form of resistance. This commitment is a beacon of hope, offering a sustainable and empowering alternative to the destructive practices of land grabbing.
We recognize the need to establish an effective and efficient network of communities, activists, and NGOs cooperating locally and internationally. This unity is not just a strategy but a source of strength, vital to understanding the strategies and tactics used by corporations to steal communities’ ancestral land and to develop further strategies and tactics to guide communities to stop land grabbing and recover previously illegally occupied land according to the Alliance objectives.
Develop mechanisms that permit all sectors of society, especially the longstanding local populations, to start the journey nonviolently assert their ancestral rights fondly referred to by some governments as national land and state-owned land, be partners in planning, the establishment of initiatives that add value to the ancestral land;
Strengthen nonviolent resistance education and provide training to improve their ability to confront governments and corporations wanting to take over their territories.
