Oh, by the way, the Clinton Foundation knowingly refused to disclose 1,100 foreign donations

ABC's "This Week" Panel Questions The Clintons' Transparency

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4giz3An3Pj0

Published on Apr 26, 2015

ABC's "This Week" panel discusses the Clinton Foundation's latest illegality and transparency issues as new allegations of pay-to-play are being revealed in the new book Clinton Cash.

Chris Matthews On Clinton Foundation Scandal: "When Countries Give You Money, They Want Something" 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FhFwzH-cxe0

Published on Apr 26, 2015

During a panel discussion about the ongoing controversy souring the Clinton foundation, MSNBC host Chris Matthews said "when countries give you money, they want something" in return.

Will questions about conflict of interest hurt the Clinton campaign?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_R70P5EN6s

Published on Apr 23, 2015

According to The New York Times, a uranium company that donated millions to the Clinton Foundation sought approval during Hillary Clinton's State Department tenure to sell control to Russia. Also, Reuters reported that the Clinton Foundation is re-filing tax returns due to errors. Judy Woodruff learns more from Carolyn Ryan of The New York Times and Jonathan Allen of Reuters.

New Hillary Clinton Scandal

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C2joP5RT84s

Published on Apr 22, 2015

http://www.bb4sp.com/

********

Oh, by the way, the Clinton Foundation knowingly refused to disclose 1,100 foreign donations

posted at 2:01 pm on April 29, 2015 by Allahpundit

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Remember back in 2010, when the big red midterm wave was building and Democrats got desperate for a theme to run on? Remember what they ended up settling on, for a few weeks at least? It was “secret foreign money in politics,” specifically the Chamber of Commerce’s supposed habit of taking money from international donors, whose names it wasn’t required to disclose, and then plowing that money into attack ads against Democrats. It was a baseless smear, a political “Hail Mary” from a party facing an unholy landslide, but you can understand why Democrats thought it might play with voters. The idea of foreigners throwing wads of cash at American power brokers to steer national policy their way is disturbing, an especially corrupt form of influence peddling.
Five years later, here’s how Democrats feel about foreign money affecting U.S. policy now.

There are in fact 1,100 undisclosed donors to the Clinton Foundation, Giustra says, most of them non-U.S. residents who donated to CGEP [the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, a Canadian affiliate of the Clinton Foundation].  “All of the money that was raised by CGEP flowed through to the Clinton Foundation—every penny—and went to the [charitable] initiatives we identified,” he says.
The reason this is a politically explosive revelation is because the Clinton Foundation promised to disclose its donors as a condition of Hillary Clinton becoming secretary of state. Shortly after Barack Obama was elected president in 2008, the Clinton Foundation signed a “memorandum of understanding” with the Obama White House agreeing to reveal its contributors every year. The agreement stipulates that the “Clinton Giustra Sustainable Growth Initiative” (as the charity was then known) is part of the Clinton Foundation and must follow “the same protocols.”…
[N]ot all CGEP’s big donors are Canadian. The Canada Revenue Agency—Canada’s IRS—requires charities to reveal whether they receive donations of more than $10,000 (Canadian) from people who are not Canadians, employed in the country, or carrying on business there. In both 2009 and 2010, CGEP filings show that it reported receiving such donations to Canadian authorities.

The reason we can’t reveal the donors’ names, claims Giustra, is that Canadian tax law bars us from doing so. But as you hopefully know by now, thanks to some good work by the Federalist that was later picked up by WaPo, that’s simply not true. Nothing in Canadian law bars a charity from disclosing the identity of donors in non-commercial transactions, something that Giustra and Hillary Clinton and their armies of lawyers presumably know. Which raises the question: Why haven’t the names been revealed?
The answer seems pretty obvious, says Sean Davis:

[F]or the past several years, the Clinton Foundation has basically been a foreign money-laundering operation. The scheme works like this: collect millions of dollars in foreign money, dump it into a foreign charity, pretend that the law prohibits you from ever disclosing the identities of those foreign donors to the foreign charity, then have the foreign charity bundle all the cash and send it to the Clinton Foundation. Then, when the time comes–whether it be a Clinton Foundation conference or a lavish Clinton Foundation trip overseas–make sure those individuals get some me-time w/ the Clintons…
The foreign-to-domestic laundering scheme satisfies a number of key Clinton objectives. First, it gave Secretary of State Hillary Clinton total plausible deniability about the millions in foreign cash that were being funneled into her family’s non-profit coffers. She wasn’t on the board of CGEPartnership, and wasn’t even named to the board of the Clinton Foundation until 2013, so how could she have known about this? Second, it gave Hillary’s allies the ability to claim that wealthy foreign individuals were not sending cash to the Clinton Foundation.
How? Because they were sending cash to the Canadian CGEPartnership. And while Bill Clinton’s name is obviously in the organization’s name, he never actually served on its board while Hillary was Secretary of State. Instead, Clinton retained control of the organization by placing Bruce Lindsey on CGEPartnership’s board. Lindsey, a long-time Clinton confidant and adviser, currently serves as the chairman of the board of the Clinton Foundation. He was also the Clinton Foundation’s CEO for over a decade.

Makes sense. Foreign governments prefer to donate directly to the Clinton Foundation, since they like the publicity and can more plausibly deny a quid pro quo arrangement later (although not always), but if you were an individual who wanted to buy influence from a former president and current secretary of state and didn’t want people knowing about it, the obvious conduit was CGEP. You could make your “donation,” eventually receive a meeting with Bill or Hillary to ask for a favor, and no one would be able to connect the two. The result, in the words of the Sunlight Foundation: “It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons.” At this point, between the e-mail server fiasco and the “charity” revelations (which may very well be linked), Hillary’s campaign increasingly feels like a lab experiment in how much corruption Democrats will tolerate in a candidate in the name of maximizing their odds of holding the White House. Result so far, given Biden’s and Elizabeth Warren’s reluctance to run: A lot.
Via the Free Beacon, here’s Chuck Todd marveling at the fact that the Clinton Foundation itself insists on continuing to receive donations from foreign donors even as Hillary campaigns for president. Any other candidate would pull the plug on that for fear of the appearance of impropriety, even if there’s no actual impropriety happening. With the Clintons, though, the appearance of impropriety is already baked in the cake. It’s part of their “brand.” Why turn down new money to appear a little cleaner when you’re already this dirty?

ABC's "This Week" Panel Questions The Clintons' Transparency

Chris Matthews On Clinton Foundation Scandal: "When Countries Give You M...

Chuck Todd: 'It Boggles The Mind' That Clinton Foundation Continues to T...

South Africa Land Expropriation a Priority According to President Zuma

Added by Laura Oneale on January 11, 2015.
Saved under Opinion, South Africa, World
Tags: south africa

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image: http://guardianlv.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/EFF_land_march_on_Mandela_Day_2014-e1420974057444-450x300.jpg
The land expropriation, land grab, and land reform are enormous problems currently for South Africa and, according to President Jacob Zuma, will become a top priority for government. The ruling African National Congress (ANC) party, under the leadership of Jacob Zuma, has stated that new acts in combination with the Constitution will be implemented. The land reform will be attended to urgently in a bid to end the unjust frustration of millions of people in South Africa.
The ANC and in particular, Zuma commented on the historical injustices toward the African people. The loss of dignity and the denial of land ownership remained a concern that needed to be resolved. Zuma and the ANC government have committed to addressing the land reform issues swiftly this year.
The land reform policy of the ANC is to ensure that state land be implemented for land restructuring. To guarantee victims of forced removals of land claims, restitution through a Land Claim Court.
According to the SA Human Rights Commission (SAHRC), there was no primed system to keep track of land claims. Having no definite system at the moment does not help the claimants who lodged claims before the 1998 deadline to receive useful information regarding claims. It is estimated that over 8,000 claims were outstanding, and this figure was not guaranteed to be correct based on the continual changes of counting claims. Other problems such as loss of files and documents, and claims not gazetted are difficult to resolve. The added problem of manipulation by officials is underestimated due to the lack of controlling the system.
A proposal in the restitution of land rights amended bill to open the land claim process for another five years is likely to be stacked with problems for the Commission for the Restitution of Land Rights (CRLR). There appears to be an absence of operating procedures and a lack of electronic equipment for the department to capture new land claims.
There is towering confusion regarding the new land claim act and a statement by Zuma that the restitution law would be amended to allow people placed in a disposed position before 1913 to lodge a claim. MP Bantu Holomisa of the United Democratic Movement (UDM) asked that clarity on this matter be defined.
Massive land claims are to be lodged by the Zulu King, Goodwill Zwelithini, and traditional leaders. Tribal land in Kwa-Zulu-Natal, South Africa, is managed by The Ingonyama Trust on behalf of communities. Both the king and Trust are to lodge a claim spanning back to the 18th century. Although currently only land taken since 1913 could be claimed. The indication of this massive claim would incorporate land in KwaZulu-Natal, the Free State and Eastern Cape making this exceptionally the largest land claim in the country.
The Constitution of South Africa clearly states that no land claim dispossessed prior to 1913 would be allowed. In the event of the Zulu King and Trust lodging, a claim dating back to the 1800s this would be rejected unless the ANC government amends the Constitution of South Africa.
As the land claim procedure heats up, President Zuma’s nephew launched a claim that will affect over 60 farms in the Natal Midlands area of South Africa. Inkosi Simpiwe Zuma rejected the idea of any dispute around the land claim and said it would be an enormous claim.
The masses of the people have aspirations, hopes and dreams of a secure and profitable future, yet as the years roll by, these have been trampled upon by the party receiving praises. The benefactors are the higher echelons of government and the deployed cadres. Many are wondering if  Zuma signed the extension of land claim bill for the noble causes of the people or for other reasons. Prevailing opinion is that one injustice does not correct another injustice.
According to Zuma, the tribal land will become communal land controlled by a chief who will have full dominion over the land. The massive land claims by the Zulu king and tribal leaders in South Africa will ensure that Zuma will inevitably stay in power and manipulate the masses into believing they are the rightful owners of the land. The new owned tribal land can be likened to a communist system with a commissar in charge.
Opinion by Laura Oneale

Read more at http://guardianlv.com/2015/01/south-africa-land-expropriation-a-priority-according-to-president-zuma/#D0uresT6xvJRiLoB.99

African land owners beware: The new ‘scramble for Africa’ is here

International News Feed

July 2, 2012

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International investors are being primed up for land opportunities and vast swaths of Africa are being bought up by oligarchs, sheikhs and agribusiness corporations. The result? Displaced African farmers, destroyed ecosystems and up-rooted communities struggling to survive a new scramble for Africa on a massive scale.

Did you know that this month (June 2012) pension fund managers and hedge funds in the UK gathered in London  for a summit to discuss the next big investment opportunity: buying up swaths of African farmland?
The Agriculture Investment Summit promises guidance through the “complexities of investing in agriculture as an asset class” to benefit from “one of the greatest investments in the world”.
An estimated 70m hectares of agricultural land – or 5% of Africa – has been sold or leased to western investors since 2000, according to a public database of international land deals. British companies have bought the rights to more than 3m hectares of land in poor countries – the equivalent of almost two-thirds of the UK’s total farmland, according to the International Land Coalition.
Grain, an NGO that promotes sustainable use of world resources, estimates that investors have spent between $5bn and $15bn on farmland. They expect that investment to double by 2015.
“Farmland is a big attraction for them [pension funds and other investors],” Grain said. “They see in farmland what they call good ‘fundamentals’: a clear economic pattern of supply and demand, which in this case hinges on a rising world population needing to be fed, and the resources to feed these people being finite.”
The £3,660-a-head conference at the Victoria Park Plaza hotel, in central London, promises a “unique opportunity to gain insights from an A-list of speaker faculty on how, where and why to invest in this emerging and expanding asset class”.
One of the talks at the fifth annual summit is titled: Agriculture in Africa: land grab or untapped opportunity?
A coalition of 60 international development, environment and farming charities will gather outside the hotel to demand that pension funds and other investors “stop the land grab”, which is claimed to be taking local people’s land at the fastest rate since colonial times.

Tim Rice, an adviser at ActionAid, said: “The summit organisers cheerily call this devastating trend an ‘emerging and expanding asset class’ and bill the summit as an opportunity to ‘overcome the perceived obstacles to investment’.”
But, he says, they are “glossing over” the real impact on the ground. “They are displacing farmers, up-rooting communities and food production and destroying ecosystems on a massive scale. They are increasing hunger and poverty globally. In a world where 1 billion people already go hungry, land must stay in the hands of local communities so that they can feed themselves.”
Kenneth Richter, of Friends of the Earth, claimed square-mile investors are the “key players” fuelling an industry which leads to “peasants, herders, fishers and other rural households being dispossessed of their means to feed themselves and their communities, sometimes through promises of jobs, sometimes at gun point”.
Nyikaw Ochalla, of the Anuak people in Ethiopia, said “land-grabbing” is accelerating at “a rate not seen since colonial times”.
“Land is the lifeline of hunter-gatherers, pastoralists, fishing and farming communities in the Ethiopian lands targeted by land grabbing policy.”
In 2008 a quarter of Mhaga village in rural Tanzania was acquired by a British biofuels company Sun Biofuels, with the promise of financial compensation, 700 jobs, water wells, improved schools, health clinics and roads. But the company later went bust, leaving villagers not just jobless but landless as well.

Omot Ochan was sitting in a remnant of forest on an old waterbuck skin and eating maize from a calabash gourd. He was lean and tall, wearing only a pair of combat pants. Behind him was a straw hut, where bare-breasted women and barefoot children cooked fish on an open fire. A little way off were other huts, the remains of what was once a sizable village. Omot said he and his family were from the Anuak tribe. They had lived in the forest for 10 generations. “This land belonged to our father. All round here is ours. For two days’ walk.” He described the distant tree that marked the boundary with the next village. “When my father died, he said don’t leave the land. We made a promise. We can’t give it to the foreigners.”

Our conversation was punctuated by the rumble of trucks passing on a dirt road just 20 metres away. The dust clouds they created wafted into the clearing and rained down on the leaves on the trees. Beyond the road huge earth-diggers were excavating a canal. Omot watched them: “Two years ago, the company began chopping down the forest and the bees went away. The bees need thick forest. We used to sell honey. We used to hunt with dogs too. But after the farm came, the animals here disappeared. Now we only have fish to sell.” And with the company draining the wetland, the fish will probably be gone soon, too.

Gambella is the poorest province in one of the world’s poorest nations – a lowland appendix in the far south-west of Ethiopia. Geographically and ethnically, the hot, swampy province feels like part of the new neighbouring state of South Sudan, rather than the cool highlands of the rest of Ethiopia. Indeed, Gambella was effectively in Sudan when it was ruled by the British from Khartoum, until 1956. For the half-century since, the government in Addis Ababa has ruled here, but it has invested little and cared even less for its Nilotic tribal inhabitants, whose jet-black skin and tall, elegant physique mark them out from the highlanders. The livestock-herding Nuer, who frequently cross into South Sudan, and the Anuak, who are farmers and fishers, are peripheral to highland Ethiopia in every sense.
Only three flights a week go to the provincial capital, also called Gambella. When you get there, there are no taxis, because there is no demand. The road from the airport is a dirt track through an empty landscape. Gambella town is a shambles. Its population of 30,000 has no waste collection system, so garbage piles up. The drains don’t work, public water supplies are sporadic and electricity is occasional. There are few public latrines. The couple of paved roads are heavily potholed and give out before the town limits. My billet, the Norwegian-built guest house at the Bethel Synod church, was probably the dirtiest, bleakest and most ill-kempt building in which I have ever rested my head. The only vehicle in town for hire was a 40-year-old Toyota minibus of dubious roadworthiness, with a crew of three. I took it.

Of late, the central government in Addis Ababa has stopped pretending that the province of Gambella doesn’t exist. It now seems intent on taming a populace that might prefer rule from Juba, the capital of South Sudan. In practice, that means bringing in foreign agribusiness and collecting the province’s dispersed population in state-designated villages, while their forests, fields and hunting grounds are handed over to outsiders. In the service of capitalism, the Gambella “villagisation” programme will relocate a domestic population much in the manner of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot.
I set out along the only road south from Gambella town to find the land grabbers. On the outskirts, as we hit the dirt, my driver decided to pick up a dozen hitchhikers. From then on, we were the local bus service. To an outsider, much of the province looks deserted. For miles, the only obvious sign of human activity was the odd cellphone tower, usually with a generator to power it and a native guard. But there were hidden villages in the bush. Their members would sit by the roadside trying to sell mangoes and other fruit to any vehicles that passed. Mangoes cost less than three cents each and the price had halved by late afternoon. Soon after the small town of Abobo, the road passed through a landscape of ash, smoke and charred trees. This was land newly acquired by my first land grabber – Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Ali Al Amoudi, a Saudi oil billionaire with large holdings in Ethiopian plantations, mines and real estate. In 2011, Fortune magazine put his wealth at more than $12bn. Ethiopian-born, he is a million-dollar donor to the Clinton Foundation and also a confidant of Ethiopia’s prime minister, Meles Zenawi, and his ruling party, which had granted a 60-year concession on 10,000 hectares of Gambella to Amoudi’s company, Saudi Star.
Amoudi has been eyeing agriculture since the world food price spike in 2008 sent Saudi Arabia into a spin about its food supplies. He is intent on shipping most of his intended produce, including in excess of a million tonnes of rice a year, to Saudi Arabia. There, he has been feted by the king for making investments abroad to keep the kingdom fed. To smooth the wheels of commerce, Amoudi has recruited one of Zenawi’s former ministers, Haile Assegdie, as chief executive of Saudi Star.
Saudi Star’s concession is based around the Alwero dam, built in the 1980s to irrigate a state cotton farm that never happened. The dam’s rusting sign still advertises the consulting services of Soviet engineers Selkhozpromexport. Amoudi is digging a 30km canal from the dam to irrigate rice paddies. Once the old state farm is watered, he wants to expand to at least 250,000 hectares, to grow sunflowers and maize.

Workers at a Saudi Star rice farm in Ethiopia.

At the gate of the Saudi Star compound, I watched soldiers usher in giant Volvo trucks and Massey Ferguson tractors and workmen starting to replace the temporary buildings with new permanent structures. Close by, they were laying an airstrip in a recently made clearing in the forest. Nobody at the company here or in Gambella town would talk to me. Perhaps they thought there was nothing to add to their boss’s media statement that “land grabbing poses no harm on the environment or on the local community”.
Our next hitchhikers were a couple of schoolgirls who wanted a lift to their home 2km away. It was there, in a small clearing in a forest by the road, where we found Omot Ochan in his combat pants, describing how Amoudi and his company were destroying his world. Hearing his testimony of ancestral connection with this patch of forest, and his determination to keep it, I was struck by how most westerners have lost any sense of place and attachment to the land. I move around all the time and buy and sell houses without feeling ties to the soil. But here in Gambella, their land is like their blood. It is everything. And to lose it would be to lose their identity.
Omot insisted Saudi Star had no right to be in his forest. The company had not even told the villagers that it was going to dig a canal across their land. “Nobody came to tell us what was happening.” He did remember officials from the “villagisation” programme dropping by to say the families should go to the new village at Pokedi, across the River Alwero from Saudi Star’s compound. But that was all. Omot had no doubt the purpose of the new village was to clear them and others off land taken from them to give to Saudi Star. So far, his family and their neighbours had refused to go, even though their children walked to the school at Pokedi on a Monday morning and didn’t return until Friday evening.
“In our culture, going to a different place is unusual. You get different people and there is quarrelling,” he told me, as his children gathered and grabbed the remaining maize. “We should remain in our own area. We won’t go unless we are forced. God gave us this land.” Another truck rumbled past, spraying dust over the tiny forest community now ostracised by its own government and under siege from a Saudi billionaire. After the truck had gone, I noticed a large, dead stork in the road. A woman headed off down the road with a bucket, on a long walk to find water.

Afritorial.com note: Africa we seriously need to wake up and move faster on land reform so we don’t deprive our own people of their legacy. We will be caught asleep and wake to find ourselves ‘bought’ out of our own birthright. If we need to, we ought to petition our governments and local authorities to stop selling us literally from under our feet!

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International land deals: who is investing and where - get the data

Explore the global database on more than 1,000 land deals covering an area roughly half the size of western Europe

• World's largest public database of land deals launched

Workers at a palm oil plantation in Ethiopia. The data shows that east Africa has the highest concentration of recent land deal investments. Photograph: José Cendon/Getty Images Jose Cendon/Getty Images

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Claire Provost

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Friday 27 April 2012 02.00 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 20 May 2014 20.41 EDT

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Over the past few years, so-called "land grabs" have become an increasingly hot topic. But reliable data has been hard to find. Now, an international coalition of NGOs and research groups has published the world's largest database of deals struck since 2000, offering unprecedented detail on who's investing, where and what for.
The database, launched on Thursday, includes 1,006 deals covering 70.2m hectares (173m acres) – or roughly half the size of western Europe. Data on further deals will be added on an ongoing basis.
Some highlights from the database:

• Eastern Africa has the largest number of recent investments, with 310 deals.
• Indonesia is the country with the largest area of land acquired by investors – 9.5m hectares. The Democratic Republic of the Congo comes second, with almost 8.1m hectares.
• The Indian government, Chinese telecommunications firm ZTE International and Indonesian company Indah Kiat Pulp & Paper are the top three investors, having acquired more than 10m hectares around the world between them.
• The vast majority of the deals are for agricultural projects (690 deals covering 50.2m hectares). Forestry is the next largest sector (94 deals covering 12.7m hectares).
• Of the agricultural deals, fewer than 30% are for food crops alone. Almost 20% are for non-food crops such as biofuels and livestock feed.

The Land Matrix database is now the most comprehensive public source for information on international land deals – but it is not perfect. Some countries, for example, may be over-represented in the data simply because they are more transparent and routinely publish contract information. In other cases, the data may be skewed towards investors or countries that have featured in more media reports.

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This makes it difficult to draw too many conclusions from the data. For example, there appears to be a sharp decline in deals since 2009 – but although this could correspond to a drop in investments, it could also be driven by a fall in media interest or an increasing reluctance to disclose information about deals.
Researchers warn that smaller deals are often harder to track and may be under-represented in the database. Data for deals struck after 2010 is still being collected, cross-checked and verified.
Researchers hope that releasing the data and inviting the public to crowdsource new information will help address some of these issues. The site lets users "report a land deal" or submit further details on deals already recorded. This information will be independently verified by researchers before being included in the database.
We have pulled out all the data on who's investing, where and what for. You can browse key figures below, or download the full dataset. What can you do with the data?

Data summary

Top 10 investors

Investor	Investor's Country	Hectares	Deals	Location of Investments
Indian Government	India	4877419	9	India, Ethiopia
ZTE International	China	2800000	1	DRC
Indah Kiat Pulp & Paper	Indonesia	2388468	1	Indonesia
Wuhan Kaidi	Unknown	2000000	1	Zambia
Tata Power	India	2000000	1	Indonesia
Samling Group	Malaysia	1838000	1	Malaysia
Al Ain National Wildlife	United Arab Emirates	1680000	1	Sudan
Daewoo Logistics	Republic of Korea	1600000	2	Madagascar
Sinar Mas Group	Indonesia	1600000	2	Indonesia
Muting Hijau	Indonesia	1100000	1	Indonesia
The Land Matrix project draws on a wide variety of sources, including media reports, information from companies and governments, and additional data from NGOs, academic research, and investigations around the world. Researchers are still in the process of verifying a large number of reported deals, and say they will add to the database on an ongoing basis.

Where land has been acquired (since 2000)

Country	Region	Hectares	Deals
Indonesia	South-East Asia	9527760	24
Democratic Republic of the Congo	Central Africa	8051870	10
Ethiopia	Eastern Africa	5345228	83
Philippines	South-East Asia	5182021	45
Malaysia	South-East Asia	4819483	20
India	South Asia	4628578	113
Sudan	Northern Africa	3923430	18
Brazil	South America	3871824	61
Madagascar	Eastern Africa	3779741	39
Zambia	Eastern Africa	2273413	9
United Republic of Tanzania	Eastern Africa	2194975	58
Mozambique	Eastern Africa	1983127	92
Argentina	South America	1505020	22
Cambodia	South-East Asia	1154194	86
Russian Federation	Eastern Europe	1113434	11
China	Eastern Asia	1108396	12
Benin	Western Africa	1040900	9
Cameroon	Central Africa	710340	17
Liberia	Western Africa	679000	6
Ghana	Western Africa	669900	9
Ukraine	Eastern Europe	662167	7
Kenya	Eastern Africa	633500	13
Sierra Leone	Western Africa	588950	11
Mali	Western Africa	581891	27
Peru	South America	571900	26
Lao People's Democratic Republic	South-East Asia	478153	49
Colombia	South America	420820	14
Australia	Australia and New Zealand	400926	3
Nigeria	Western Africa	362532	21
Malawi	Eastern Africa	310147	7
Senegal	Western Africa	234800	8
Côte d'Ivoire	Western Africa	207200	5
Zimbabwe	Eastern Africa	201171	2
Angola	Central Africa	183000	4
Viet Nam	South-East Asia	156540	7
Congo	Central Africa	138000	2
Guatemala	Central America	81006	10
Papua New Guinea	Melanesia	79178	1
Uganda	Eastern Africa	76512	4
Mexico	Central America	56581	5
Bolivia (Plurinational State of)	South America	37156	4
Niger	Western Africa	29969	3
Bangladesh	South Asia	29456	2
Thailand	South-East Asia	28912	3
South Africa	Southern Africa	27124	3
Somalia	Eastern Africa	21500	2
Swaziland	Southern Africa	15124	2
Ecuador	South America	8000	1
Costa Rica	Central America	7658	5
Solomon Islands	Melanesia	7577	1
Pakistan	South Asia	5926	3
Turkey	Middle East	4500	1
Rwanda	Eastern Africa	3100	1
Chile	South America	1400	2
Suriname	South America	1073	2
Burkina Faso	Western Africa	1000	1
The Land Matrix project draws on a wide variety of sources, including media reports, information from companies and governments, and additional data from NGOs, academic research, and investigations around the world. Researchers are still in the process of verifying a large number of reported deals, and say they will add to the database on an ongoing basis.

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Environmental sustainability

Poverty matters blog

Land-grabbing firms beware: cost of ignoring people's rights is rising

Communities have more hope than ever of seeing off companies trying to acquire their land, with support from media and NGOs

View of the Conga mine in Cajamarca, in Peru. Photograph: Ernesto Benavides/AFP/Getty Images

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About this content

Jonathan Glennie

Monday 18 February 2013 02.00 EST Last modified on Wednesday 21 May 2014 11.30 EDT

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A new report on land acquisition by the Munden Project/Rights and Resources Initiative brings an important angle to the land "grab" debate. Rather than focusing on the ethics of land grabbing, the report makes the business case for working with local communities, arguing that failure to inform or fairly compensate affected locals heightens the risks to investors. Why? Because affected communities start to make life difficult for abusive or lazy companies, leading to massive unexpected costs or even an eventual full-scale retreat.
The key risk, perhaps not emphasised sufficiently by the report, for companies considering acquiring land overseas is the probability of local people mounting a successful defence of their land. Where there is little likelihood of resistance or where, more probably, resistance can be easily quashed and a company or government thinks it can get away with it, there is no real business case for doing the right thing.
And that is where campaigning comes in. Without national and international support, even the most organised and persistent communities have found it hard to defend their rights and interests. But campaigner support can swing the balance in favour of the community at risk.
A few years ago, when I was writing reports on mining and local communities in Peru and the Philippines, and later managing Christian Aid's work in Colombia, which revolved around major national and international companies removing people from their land to produce bananas and palm oil for export, the chances of starting a major international campaign on the issue of land rights were minimal to say the least. Our campaigning colleagues were busy with aid, debt and trade, and the growing issue of tax collection and avoidance. Land was considered a niche issue for agronomists and nerds. One such nerdy agronomist at a major UK NGO told me how his office had gradually been moved to the back of the building, where few people were known to visit him.

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How things have changed. Last month, celebrities were on British television programmes talking about land grabs as part of the launch of the If campaign. Within two or three years, land has become a popular campaigning issue. For those, like me, worried that NGO campaigning was in danger of reverting to the tired "Let's send them more cash" agenda, this is inspiring – a new set of national and global power relationships may be pushing mainstream NGOs into steadfast positions of principle.
Oxfam has been flogging an apparently unsexy horse courageously for years. Oxfam America has long been supporting communities throughout Latin America and elsewhere in danger of losing their land to mining, and, throughout the past decade, Oxfam Australia had a mining ombudsman travelling the globe auditing mining companies for human rights abuses and trying to develop solutions. For some reason, that brilliant initiative has now ended; it is something the present-day land-grab campaigners should consider reinventing.
There is nothing new about land grabs, although the age-old problem of powerful groups and individuals displacing communities from land that they have farmed for (usually) centuries has been aggravated by the rapid increase in the world's population in the past few decades, and the strong economic growth of populous nations such as China, India and Indonesia.
What seems to have changed is that communities whose resistance might once have been in vain can hope for international civil society and media to stand by them, increasing the costs to investors of doing the wrong thing. The mainstream NGOs and the non-radical middle classes that support them are getting behind the world's most marginalised communities, giving them a fighting chance of survival.
Their main target at the moment, via the If campaign, appears to be the World Bank's International Finance Corporation, whose lack of safeguards on investments in large deals via financial intermediaries has been the object of damning criticism by the in-house ombudsman. And there, too, things have changed. Everyone knows that the World Bank now has the most progressive president in its history.
By freezing investments in deals that could be land grabs, Jim Yong Kim would be sending a signal to the rest of the world – when the life opportunities, rights and dignity of poor communities are at stake, some costs are too high, and some risks too great.
• This article was amended on Tuesday 19 February 2013. In the original we referred to the Rights and Resources Institute. This has now been changed.

Land rights

Poverty matters blog

Where’s the evidence that land grabs are good for economic progress?

We can’t be sure that moving people off their land to develop it for export industries will benefit resource-rich countries

Andean women and children thresh grain in Collana Baja, near Cuzco, Peru. Photograph: Tomas Munita/AP

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Jonathan Glennie

Tuesday 4 November 2014 06.44 EST

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The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) and the Munden Project, have not been resting on their laurels since delivering an important study last year on the business costs associated with land grabs.
They have turned their focus on 73,000 mining, agricultural and logging concessions, in eight countries but mostly in Peru and Colombia, and found that almost all of them are inhabited (93-99%, depending on the data source).
This blows out of the water any idea that such projects are victimless; extrapolate this globally and many millions of the world’s poorest people face existential threats to house and home.
So what to do?
The first thing is to get the facts straight on the development benefits of such projects. Obviously, the driving factor behind them is profit – there is big money to be made, as a recent report by Grain, a research group based in Barcelona, makes depressingly clear.
Powerful companies and their supporters, including governments and a host of international experts, argue that such concessions bring jobs, taxes and multiplier effects for the countries concerned, and even for the people at risk of displacement.
Clearly, claims by companies should not be taken at face value. The incentives for them to make that case are obvious – the kind of thing Naomi Klein might bluntly dismiss as “essentially a cover story for greed”.
But the views of (often democratically elected) governments and experienced researchers should be listened to. Are remote communities holding back the development of their countries by resisting money-making opportunities, as bureaucrats often claim? Should they move aside for the good of the whole population?

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Answers to such questions are complicated, but the policy response turns out to be surprisingly simple. And somewhat refreshingly we can turn to the aid debate’s great antagonists, Jeff Sachs and Bill Easterly, for a common line.
It was Sachs who worked up and popularised (in a 1995 study and since) the theory of a resource curse, whereby, paradoxically, countries with an abundance of natural resources have weak economic growth.
Such easy sources of revenue means there is often little incentive to promote efficient and productive economic development. In addition, resource wealth is a major cause of conflict, which is perhaps the biggest barrier to economic development.
This counterintuitive, but very well substantiated, analysis is seldom heeded by governments keen to earn exports dollars fast, often for good reasons. And on issues as complex as economic growth it is hard to make reliable generalisations. But that, in fact, is also the point, and it is where Sachs’s nemesis comes in.
Easterly’s latest book, the Tyranny of Experts, has many flaws, but one thing he does well is to profoundly question the confidence of economists and politicians about what does or does not promote growth.
The reality is that, on balance, we know very little about what causes growth. Commodity exports play a part, of course, but we do not know precisely what part, and swift growth today can easily be reversed tomorrow, with much the same policy regime in place.
This is where Easterly’s second point comes in. The logical conclusion of this uncertainty about the development impacts of particular policies or projects is that the presumption should be against undermining people’s rights. It is a kind of precautionary principle for human rights.
If we are sure that moving people off their land to develop it for export industries is going to be beneficial for the country, then there is at least a case that such upheaval for some is the unfortunate price to be paid for the progress of many.
But if we are far from certain about the national benefits even in terms of economic growth, let alone growth equitable and sustainable, then there can be no justification for such devastating decisions. The only circumstances in which development could take place, under this logic, would be with the full consent of the communities affected.
And this is the area that the Munden Project/RRI report homes in on, identifying late communication and a failure to follow the principle of free, prior and informed consent as prevalent across the examples studied.
The case for moving people from their land is further undermined by the tactics used by most companies – if it were really such a good option, why are so many deals done in the shadows?
So, despite the complicated debates about what spurs growth and development, the policy response to these cases is simple – stand by the local communities and ensure their rights are defended.
Not because they have the God-given right to stay in their land forever at the expense of national development. But because there needs to be exceptionally strong evidence of wider positive impacts to justify such disruption to people’s lives. And that evidence does not exist.

Private sector

World Bank and aid donors accused of enabling land grabs

Millions of smallholder farmers worldwide have been left homeless and hungry because of private investment promoted by policies such as tax breaks and cheap loans, says report

An Ivorian man harvests fruits from the Jatropha, which is used as a diesel substitute. The demand for biofuels is exacerbating land grabs, says ActionAid. Photograph: AFP Kambou Sia/AFP

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Ellie Violet Bramley

Wednesday 21 May 2014 11.07 EDT Last modified on Wednesday 20 August 2014 11.40 EDT

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Aid donors and international institutions including the World Bank and World Economic Forum (WEF) have been accused of promoting an environment that fuels land grabs through policies and initiatives that pave the way for large-scale private investment.
In a report published on Tuesday, the NGO ActionAid says public money and policy incentives such as tax breaks and cut-price loans are facilitating land deals that threaten the lives and livelihoods of small-scale farmers in poor countries.
ActionAid warns that the consequences of such deals, which are too often happening behind closed doors and with little or no consultation with local communities, include "forced evictions, human rights violations, lost livelihoods, divided communities … rising food insecurity and, ultimately, increased poverty".
A spokesman for the World Bank said it was also concerned about the risks of large-scale land deals and stressed that it did not support investments that took advantage of weak institutions in developing countries.
ActionAid's report says weak governance and regulation of land use and agricultural investments have left millions of smallholder farmers and indigenous people in vulnerable situations "lack[ing] recognition over their land rights, even if they have resided in or used the area for generations".
ActionAid's campaign manager, Antoine Bouhey, said a "nexus of different policies" at the global level, which encourage private investment as a route to development, were also to blame.
"Governments are turning to private capital to fill the massive shortfall in public spending but too often this blind rush for investment is leading to land grabs which are leaving communities landless, homeless and hungry. Growth cannot be achieved at the expense of the poorest and most vulnerable," he said.

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The NGO's report points to the G8's New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition as one of the international initiatives "via which taxpayer money and public policies are fuelling land grabs" and failing to ensure strong safeguards to protect the poorest.
The New Alliance was condemned as a new form of colonialism this year, after African governments agreed to change seed, land and tax laws to encourage private investment.
Last month, World Development Movement, the anti-poverty group, said the New Alliance was in effect carving up Africa in the interests of big business.
ActionAid's report also looks at how governments of developing countries are facilitating large-scale land deals through direct intervention in sales and lease agreements, and by introducing public policy incentives such as tax holidays for agribusiness investors.
It says such deals, often justified on the basis of attracting increased investment into food and farming, have come at great human cost.
Public and private investment should be redirected towards supporting sustainable agricultural practices suited to the needs of smallholder farmers, particularly women, says ActionAid. A "zero-tolerance approach" must be taken by governments over land grabs and the incentives that fuel them.
Most of the 1.4 billion people worldwide who live on less than $1.25 a day reside in rural areas and depend largely on agriculture for their livelihoods. Globally, an estimated 2.5 billion people are involved in small-scale agriculture.
A World Bank spokesman said the organisation provided roughly a third of all aid to support countries in improving governance of land tenure. "Securing access to land is critical for millions of poor people. Modern, efficient, and transparent policies on land rights are vital to reducing poverty and promoting growth, agriculture production, better nutrition, and sustainable development," he said. "Our role is to be a leader in assisting countries to improve land governance and the behaviour of private investors."
Lisa Dreier, a senior director working on food security and development at the WEF, said its New Vision for Agriculture helped found the Grow Africa initiative, which created 33,000 jobs and gave 2.6 million small farmers in Africa access to technology, financing and new markets.
"Smallholder farmers are key to the future success of Africa's agriculture and governments can support them by implementing clear rules on land ownership that protect smallholder rights and encourage investment," she added.

What is a land grab?

"Many land deals are, in fact, land grabs carried out without proper consultation, consent and compensation," says ActionAid.
The NGO uses a definition of land grabs that draws on the Tirana declaration, agreed at a 2011 international conference. The declaration defines land grabs as deals that are "in violation of human rights, particularly the equal rights of women, not based on principles of free, prior and informed consent, or are in disregard or fail to thoroughly assess social, economic and environmental impacts, not based on transparent contracts … " or are not based on "effective democratic planning, independent oversight and meaningful participation".
Conclusive, independent data on the scale of land grabs worldwide is hard to come by. ActionAid's report looks at data from the international Land Matrix project, which suggests that the vast majority of large-scale deals have been struck in sub-Saharan Africa (41%), south-east Asia (32%), and the Americas and Caribbean (19%).