Partner organization The Oakland Institute published a report in 2009 detailing what they describe as a “land rush,” or the fervent rush of private investors involved in land-grabbing in Africa. Investors from all over the world are lured to Africa by the promise of cheap and productive land with which they can grow food for export. All of this comes at the expense of the local people, many of which have been relocated to new villages with little to no resources available with which to grow food.
Read Oakland Institute’s report here:
A recent example of this behavior can be found in Ethiopia, where the government is currently leasing out 3.6 million hectares to foreign investors, and many indigenous people are being removed from their homes. While the Ethiopian government denies “forcing” anyone from their homes because the land being leased is “uninhabited,” investigations done by US-based Human Rights Watch (HRW) show that the current residents of the land never had a formal title, which allows the government to bypass laws that would protect these populations from relocation.
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