In our APRA study, we have been asking: what actually happens on the ground, even when corridors as originally planned are slow to materialise? Do the grand visions play out as expected? Who is involved and who loses out?
Ambitions for venture capital in African agriculture – once the Next Big Thing – are foundering, as is the case with the Southern Agricultural Growth Corridor of Tanzania.
Locked within the legislation is a flaw for those living on the quarter of the country’s land set aside for concessions: it is not retroactive. A difficult truth that is only just beginning to permeate thousands of villages in Liberia.
As the world’s first Sustainable Rubber Platform is launched, Ali Hines of Global Witness asks whether tire companies can make good on their promises.
ESCR-Net members have been engaged in several actions in opposition to Luxembourg registered agri-business Socfin Group and its operations in several Western African countries.
This Saturday military forces fired live bullets at villagers within the Lokutu oil palm plantation concession area of the Canadian company Feronia Inc, following weeks of growing tension between communities and the company.
Brazilian deforestation is most highly driven by land speculation, whereby land speculators deforest an area, possibly selling off the timber, then convert the land to pasture, and then again quickly sell the land to a soy producer at a much increased price.
The Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria says that all the states in the South-South and South-East regions have agreed to provide at least 100,000 ha for investors in oil palm plantations.
Rights groups are calling on Myanmar's government to scrap a new land reform law they fear could leave millions of people with nowhere to call home.
Myanmar's new land law amendment has its roots in a British colonial notion of “wasteland” that consciously undermines customary land claims of highland communities to the benefit of foreign investors and tax collectors.
Representatives of more than 700 Cambodian families who were violently displaced to make way for a sugar plantation have filed a formal complaint against Bonsucro, the sugar industry’s sustainability certification body, for breaches of the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises.
Unless these organizations are firmly held accountable to international human rights standards, they will not only fail to push their industries towards more responsible behavior, but they will become little more than window dressing for corporate misconduct.
