British Corporation Mass Murdering Ugandans in UN Sanctioned Land Grab

Activist Post
Tony Carlucci


Beneath fraud, media spin, & UN stamps of approval, awaits an unfolding nightmare for the people of Africa and the world. 

The New York Times recently reported in an article titled, "In Scramble for Land, Group Says, Company Pushed Ugandans Out," that the British "New Forests Company" has evicted over 20,000 people from their land in Uganda to make way for tree plantations. Homes were burnt, people, including women and children, were brutalized and murdered during the long eviction process. However, the New York Times states that in this case "the government and the company said the settlers were illegal and evicted for a good cause: to protect the environment and help fight global warming."

The "group" the New York Times is referring to is Oxfam, which published a report titled, "The New Forests Company and its Uganda plantations," detailing the activities of New Forests in Uganda and the evictions the New York Times gingerly describes in its article.

Who is The New Forests Company? 

Meet "New Forests," a UK-based firm that claims to be a "sustainable and socially responsible forestry company with established, rapidly growing plantations and the prospect of a diversified product base for local and regional export markets which will deliver both attractive returns to investors and significant social and environmental benefits." Their corporate website is not short of the color green, nor of African people smiling and prospering, so apparently, we are left to believe, New Forests has made good on their mission statement.

Image: Taken from New Forests' website, they proudly display the swath of destruction their company is responsible for, of course, instead of depicting the displacements, murders, and thuggery they are committing against the people of Africa, they place images of thriving trees.
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Meet Robert Deveruex, chairman of New Forests, one of the founding shareholders of The Virgin Group and former chairman of Soho House Group. He has spent a great deal of time and energy making what his corporation is doing in Africa appear to have a philanthropic spin. In an August 2010 Guardian article titled, "Robert Devereux donates £4m of art collection to set up African charity," Devereux claims of his New Forests company that it "has a huge community development programme. It's not philanthropy. We go to the community and we say, 'We want to co-invest with you. If you provide what labour and materials you can, we'll provide money for things that you can't get.'" Devereux, however, never mentioned what happens if the community says, "no thanks."

Photo: Robert Devereux, a long time investor, a long time con-artist spinning his company's despoiling of Africa as some sort of cutting-edge investment strategy that makes money and "helps" people. Even as Devereux made his disingenuous statements in 2010 regarding New Forests, the villagers in Uganda he was "helping" had already filed a court case a year earlier protesting the British company's encroachment on their land.
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Meet New Forests executive director and CEO Julian Ozanne, who previously worked for the Financial Times, advised US and European investment banks on business and political risk in Africa and worked for the global corporate-fascists nexus, the World Economic Forum. Also serving as a New Forest director is Jonathan Aisbitt, chairman of the investment firm, The Man Group, and previously a partner and managing director at the now notorious Goldman Sachs.

There is also Avril Stassen, who is not only a director at New Forests but is also currently a principal at Agri-Vie Investment Advisers, which claims to be "focused on food and agribusiness in Sub-Sahara Africa with a mission to generate an above average investment return, as well as demonstrable socio-economic development impacts through its equity investments in food and agribusinesses." In other words, buying up land in African nations people depend on to live, to instead broaden foreign investors' portfolios and profits, all under the cover of feel good rhetoric and pictures of smiling Africans pasted all over their website and annual reports. A good website that seems to be keeping watch on Agri-Vie is Farmlandgrab.org, which in one short URL explains exactly the game Agri-Vie is playing.

And finally, meet Sajjad Sabur, also a director at New Forests, as well as a managing director at HSBC, heading the mega-bank's "Principal Investments Africa" branch which targets African businesses with management buyouts, growth capital and recapitalization "opportunities." Sabur's HSBC invesment arm has actually invested in New Forests.

Quite clearly, this looks more like the profile of a Wall Street-London corporate-fascist hit team than anything at all involving humanitarian, environmental, or social concerns. And judging by Oxfam's report and the subsequent attempt by the New York Times to mitigate the gravity of what the largest banks in the world are doing to Africa, it seems like a corporate-fascist hit is just what is unfolding in Uganda at New Forests' hands.

Globalization is Modern Day Imperialism by Anglo-American Bankers

Backtracking to New Forests' mission statement, apparently "social responsibility" equates to murdering or displacing tens of thousands of Ugandans in their own nation, and "attractive returns" equates to the extraction and exportation of Ugandan resources for a corporation's shareholders 4,000 miles away. What we are told is of significant "benefit" to society and the environment looks more like a textbook case of imperialism, perpetrated by British, surely new to being socially and environmentally responsible, but certainly not to imperialism nor gimmicks used to mask it behind noble causes.

Global food crisis: China land deal causes unease in Argentina

The Guardian

A Chinese agribusiness firm is to buy a large swath of land in Patagonia. Critics fear it will bring heavy agrochemical use and ecological degradation, and strain the region's water resources

The attraction to the Chinese of access to an area of land in Patagonia larger than Cornwall is obvious. As China's economy grows and its population becomes more urbanised, diets are changing rapidly. People are eating more industrially produced meat and dairy products, and buying more processed foods.

Soya is the feedstock for this revolution, but demand for it can no longer be met within China. So the Chinese state-owned agribusiness company Beidahuang has joined the global scramble for land and water that has accelerated since food prices spiked in 2008.

Last year it was confirmed that the company had signed an agreement, with the government of Patagonia's Río Negro province, which provides the framework for it to acquire up to 320,000 hectares (790,000 acres) of privately owned farmland, along with irrigation rights and a concession on the San Antonio port.

Details of the deal, alleged to have been kept quiet, have been emerging in recent weeks as Chinese technicians have started work.

Beidahuang has also reported a 2008 deal on 200,000 ha in the Philippines, and says it plans to buy palm oil plantations and grain terminals this year as it pursues the Chinese government's policy of securing food supply lines from abroad.

Beidahuang, based in the north-eastern province of Heilongjiang, is the leading soya producer in China and one of the country's five largest soya processors. It also raises more than 600,000 cows, 1.3m pigs and more than 6m chickens at any one time.

The company believes its expertise in large-scale farming can be transferred to Argentina, according to Juan Manuel Accatino, the region's deputy secretary for agriculture in Río Negro, who was close to the deal. The arrangement made good economic sense, Accatino said. "We can foresee global shortages of land, water and energy, and Río Negro can offer all three."

Argentinian environmental groups and constitutional experts are outraged. Eduardo Barcesat is a top constitutional lawyer who has been helping the federal government of the Argentinian president, Cristina Kirchner, draft legislation that would restrict foreign ownership of Argentinian land. The laws would also provide, for the first time, a full register of all landholding so that authorities can keep track of who owns what.

"Chinese and Indian people have been coming to Argentina over the last five years and would be happy to buy all our land, whatever the price. American businesses have been buying access to our water," Barcesat said. "We need our own people to eat well first, and after that we can feed the rest of the world. We want more small and middle-sized owners, we don't like the excessive concentration, and we want farmers who will be careful with the land, not exploit it."

Research from the International Land Coalition, and Oxfam Novib, the Netherlands affiliate of Oxfam International, has identified more than 1,200 international land deals covering more than 80m hectares since 2000 – the vast majority of them after 2007. More than 60% of the land targeted was in Africa.
The Río Negro region is famous for its fruit orchards, which produce 70% of the country's apples and pears, exports eaten in northern Europe when the fruit season in that continent ends.

Environmentalists in Río Negro say the Chinese arrival will mean heavy use of agrochemicals, ecological degradation and severe strain on the region's water resources. Some of the land in question is virgin forest that would be deforested.

Dams have already cut the flow of the Negro river, they say, and Chinese plans to invest $20m (£12m) immediately to build irrigation infrastructure would strain resources further. The campaigners say that since soya cultivation is highly mechanised it will prompt unemployment in the area, as it has elsewhere in the country where many rural communities have seen an increase in deep poverty as jobs are lost.

Elvio Mendioroz, president of Uñopatún, an agro-ecoclogical group that opposes the Chinese deal, said the agreement had been kept secret. "China has run out of land to feed its people, and is suffering drought and soil erosion, so they come here.

"But it will create the same problems for us. There has been no consultation, yet it's already signed."
Accatino thinks the deal has been misunderstood. Río Negro's provincial government was merely acting as a facilitator for the Chinese, he said, who would have to negotiate with the private owners of land to buy sections. The port concession, reported as being for 50 years, would depend on an evaluation of its feasibility.

Accatino said: "We will take into account the environmental concern about further expansion of soya and dependency of this monoculture. We would never endanger the Negro river."

How The Global Food System Is Failing

Free Internet Press
Intellpuke

Domingo Tamupsis works on a Guatemalan sugar plantation for a company that exports bioethanol to fill the fuel tanks of U.S. cars. He has a job as a harvester, six days a week, 10 to 12 hours a day, in a country that is a major producer of food for global markets. His settlement in the fertile Pacific coastal area is surrounded by industrial farms, but he earns so little that his family can't afford to eat every day. Some days he survives his shift of hard physical labor on nothing but the mangoes that drop from trees by the roadside.

His wife, Marina, is 23-years-old, but is so slight she might be mistaken for a young teenager. She has two daughters, Yeimi aged six and Jessica aged two. Jessica is the size of the average European one-year-old, her distended stomach a sign of chronic malnutrition. When she tries to smile, hollow creases form in her cheeks, betraying her semi-permanent state of hunger.

Last year, Marina gave birth in the eighth month of pregnancy to a stillborn child. She had been ill and hungry throughout, but then felt severe pains one day while making a breakfast of a small corn tortilla for Domingo before he went out to work. She carried on, knowing that if they miss a day on the plantation the men often get fired.

When she finally reached the nearest medical help, a hospital a 45-minute bus ride away, staff told her the baby was dead. They operated and returned the baby's body to her, but she and Domingo had no money for the return bus fare. A compassionate doctor gave them the price of a fare, and a friend in town lent the money for a coffin. So it was that their third child, Marvin Orlando, a brother for their two little girls, came home to be buried.

Guatemala is a prime example, according to a new report by Oxfam, of how the global food system is failing. It predicts that the average price of staple foods will double by 2030.  "Spiraling food prices, climate chaos, rising demand on top of a collapsing resource base, and markets rigged against the many in favour of the few" are taking us into a new era of crisis in which more and more people are going hungry, the charity warns.

Its new research predicts that the international prices of key staples will more than double in the next 20 years, raising "the prospect of a wholesale reversal in human development". The world's poorest people spend up to 80% of their income on food and will be hit the hardest. The global food system is broken and its power structures must be overhauled, it says.

Developing countries like Guatemala are on the front-line of the crisis. Half of all its children aged under five are malnourished, one the highest rates of malnutrition in the world – yet it has food in abundance. It is the fifth largest exporter globally of sugar, of coffee, and of bananas. Its rural areas are witnessing a palm oil rush as international traders seek to cash in on demand for biofuels created by U.S. and E.U. mandates and subsidies.

Despite being a leading agroexporter, half of Guatemala's population of 14 million live in extreme poverty on less than $2 a day, and the indicators are getting worse. The money to be made from the food chain here, as in most poor countries, has been captured by elites and transnational corporations, leaving half the population excluded.

No Way Out

Domingo Tamupsis can see no way out of his dilemma. "The money I make is not enough to feed us," he says. "We feed the children first because the girls cry so much when they are hungry, but it's not enough and I think that's why they get ill and don't thrive. I don't know where to get more money: I can't work any harder and I can't steal because they shoot you if you steal." If he had a little land, he would grow food to support the family, but the promised government redistribution of unproductive land that drew him to the area never took place.

"The food is here," Oxfam's country director, Aida Pesquera, says, "but the main problem is distribution. Land is concentrated in very few hands. The big companies pay very little tax. Labor conditions on plantations are appalling. It's a classic case of how a very productive country with high rates of exclusion, especially among the indigenous population, cannot feed its own people."

The economic policies favored by the international financial institutions in the last decades have here, as in so many developing countries, weakened food security.

In the 1980s, a structural adjustment program imposed by the IMF on the debt-laden nation resulted in the slashing of technical assistance provided by the Ministry of Agriculture to small farmers. Guatemala, which had been self-sufficient in grain, was encouraged to pursue growth through agricultural exports. Local production of staples declined.

Although the government disputes it, Oxfam believes that Cafta, the free trade agreement between the U.S. and central American states approved in 2005, has undermined local farmers further, as subsidized U.S. grains have poured in. (Industrialized countries, including the U.S. and the E.U., subsidize their farmers to the tune of $252 billion a year, making it impossible for small farmers in developing countries to compete.)

The result is that Guatemala is now dependent on imports of staple foods, mostly from the U.S.  and at the mercy of increasingly volatile food prices internationally. The average poor rural family here spend 80% of their income on food, so when world prices go up dramatically, they simply can't afford to eat. When the food price spike occurred in 2008, the price of corn locally was 240% higher than the year before.

The government is now distributing food rations to around 90,000 desperate families. The program is led by Sandra Torres, who has neatly sidestepped the law that bars spouses of presidents from standing to succeed them, by divorcing her husband, President Alvaro Colom.  Critics say money for the handout is being diverted from other vital government services, and that what is needed is fundamental structural reform.

Over two-thirds of productive land is in the hands of 2% to 3% of the population. The current social democratic government drafted legislation to promote rural development, including some land reallocation, but it was blocked by the congress after fierce lobbying from agribusiness, which makes substantial donations to political parties and members of congress. Land reform is a subject freighted with a violent history in Guatemala.

Major Exporters

When the leftwing President Jacobo Arbenz was elected in 1950, he began a program of expropriating unused lands owned by major exporters. These included a large chunk of territory owned by the American United Fruit Company. Arbenz said compensation for the land would be based on valuations calculated from the companies' declared taxable profits. UFCo countered that this was a fraction of what they were really worth. Arbenz was labelled a communist and Soviet sympathizer by President Eisenhower, who, with much urging from UFCo, authorized the CIA to sponsor a "liberation army". The army invaded in 1954 and led a coup against Arbenz. A return to repressive rule followed, and marked the beginning of decades of agrarian conflict and civil war.

The minster of agriculture today, Juan Alfonso de León García, is not optimistic that serious land reform can now be achieved. "Agriculture is the engine of our economy, but we have to recognize that Guatemala has a very complicated agricultural structure that is very unequal. We have big owners who have the best land, and the majority have a very small percentage of the fertile land," he explains.

"Food security is a serious problem for us. We have to talk about land distribution, but it's not easy. In the 1950s, we tried to have agricultural reform but that promoted the fall of the government and marked the beginning of armed conflict that lasted 36 years."

However, he still hopes some land that is not being used can be acquired for reallocation to smallholders. Meanwhile, his government has increased technical assistance for small farmers to help improve yields. The theory of the agroexport model of development is that growth stimulated by increased foreign revenues will trickle down to the rest of the population. But most of the profits made from Guatemalan resources have so far gone untaxed. Total tax revenue amounts to less than 12% of GDP (roughly less than half that of rich countries).

As De León García explains: "We have very low rates of taxation, and we cannot even determine whether the agroexporters pay even that. But it's not just big business that avoids tax here, all taxpayers do."

The global food system in the last two decades has seen a dramatic flight of capital, as transnationals make use of offshore subsidiaries to minimize the tax they pay both in the countries where they produce food and in the countries where they sell it. To take one example, U.N. trade data, analyzed by Christian Aid, also shows that Guatemala received an average export price of just $0.18 per kilo for its bananas. By the time those bananas had reached their destination of importing countries, the average price of the same bananas was $0.46, suggesting various costs are added offshore by trans-nationals trading with their own subsidiaries in other jurisdictions. Christian Aid estimates more than $50 million a year may have been lost by Guatemala as a result in 2006 and 2007.

Low Minimum Wage

In theory, agroexport-led growth also benefits the rural poor by enabling them to move from marginal subsistence farming to becoming waged labor, but in Guatemala the minimum wage is so low it does not meet the most basic needs. The pattern is repeated in many developing countries that depend on agricultural exports. Labor relations in Guatemala are also characterized by extreme repression and violence.

Earlier this month, Idar Hernández Godoy, one of the secretaries of Sitrabi, the banana workers' union, was shot several times by unknown assailants on a motorbike while on his way to local union headquarters in the Atlantic region.

His death brings to five the number of banana union leaders assassinated since 2007. Trying to organize workers or demand better conditions is likely to result in death threats. Luis Fuentes, Guatemalan representative of the Danish food workers' union 3F, describes typical conditions on the plantations – whether banana, sugar or palm – as "inhuman". He too has received many death threats. In the sugar sector, unions were effectively dismantled in the 1970s, when leaders were persecuted and assassinated.

All the transnational companies and national producers in the country say they respect labor rights, respect the environment and have corporate social responsibility policies in place to tackle any abuses. However, the Guardian interviewed several current and former plantation workers from each of the sugar, palm and banana sectors this month. Many were afraid to speak out, and said it was only safe to do so on guarantee of anonymity. A consistent account emerged: many were working day to day with no proper contract. Most reported being set impossible targets by middle managers and then given warnings or having pay deducted if they failed to meet them.

Many were working with highly toxic agrochemicals, often without protective clothing, including paraquat, which is banned in Europe. Several reported chronic health problems from chemical exposure. They also reported workers being bitten by poisonous snakes in the palm plantations.

They typically earned 1,500 ($190) to 1,800 quetzales a month, whereas the National Statistics Institute, a Guatemalan government organization, has calculated that a minimum of 4,100 quetzales a month is needed to feed the average family.

Without exception, they said that joining a union would be a sackable offenze that would lead to blacklisting. Even where top management has tried to put in place contracts or better conditions, usually under pressure from outside buyers, they said the managers in the field abuse workers. When auditors arrive, they are told what to say and given protective clothing for the day. Persistent allegations also emerged of a new phenomenon, of workers being given or taking stimulant drugs to help them through the pain of the punishing shifts.

Those who have land supplement their exhausting work with growing their own food. Those without are often driven into illegal migration to the U.S. The week of our visit, two U.S.-bound tractor-trailers packed full of illegal migrants were stopped by the Mexican border authorities. The 513 men on board were half dead from suffocation. Most of them were Guatemalan. One of them told reporters: "We have no choice, there is not enough food for us at home."

Intellpuke: You can read this article by Guardian special correspondent and author Felicity Lawrence, reporting from Guatemala City, Guatemala, in context here: www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/may/31/global-food-crisis-guatemala-system-failure