This bulletin focuses on a central cause of large-scale deforestation and dispossession of forest peoples: The imposition of land concessions as an instrument to separate, divide and map land according to economic and political interests. In consequence, the editorial alerts on the grabbing of vast amounts of hectares for Carbon Concessions.
Bulletin 260 - March 2022
Land Concessions: An Underlying Cause of Forest Destruction
This Bulletin articles are written by the following organizations and individuals: Land Watch Thai, Thailand; the Coordinator of the Laboratory for Social Movement and Territoriality Studies of the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil; GRAIN; Sempreviva Organização Feminista (SOF), Brazil, together with a representative of communities from Iporanga and of PETAR Women’s Collective; an Emeritus Professor of Human Geography, University of Sydney; and members of the WRM International Secretariat.
WRM Bulletin
260
March 2022
OUR VIEWPOINT
LAND CONCESSIONS: AN UNDERLYING CAUSE OF FOREST DESTRUCTION
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23 March 2022The control of land was vital to colonisers. It meant wealth, territorial influence, access to ‘resources’ and cheap (and often enslaved) labour. The separation of indigenous inhabitants from their territories was a crucial component that persists until today. The effect of this history continues to influence the management of and conflicts over land.
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23 March 2022British firms not only controlled 80 per cent of the established ‘logging lands’ in Thailand, but they also influenced the establishment of the Royal Forest Department, which came to have total power over the nation’s forests. Massive land grabs and various colonial laws made half the country’s territory into a colony of the central state.
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23 March 2022What a certain historiography terms civilizational expansion or capital’s expansion has in fact been the invasion and de-territorialization of peoples and communities using much epistemic and territorial violence. Concessions have been granted in areas that are not demographic voids, a colonial concept that ignores the fact that they have been populated for millennia.
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23 March 2022Many oil palm plantations’ concessions in West and Central Africa were built on lands stolen from communities during colonial occupations. This is the case in the DRC, where food company Unilever began its palm oil empire. Today, these plantations are still sites of on-going poverty and violence. It is time to end the colonial model of concessions and return the land to its original owners.
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23 March 2022Women from the Ribeira River Valley -in the state of São Paulo, Brazil- have devoted themselves to opposing the concession of one of the region’s most important tourist parks. Their struggle is fundamental, and part of diverse resistances against the privatizing trend of creating ‘territories without people’. They remind us that their territory has been and is rooted in their stories, voices and resistance.
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23 March 2022Colonial and anti-colonial movements’ have deeply shaped the patterns and impacts of concessions in SE Asia. In some cases, communities have experienced dispossession through land grabs dressed as concessions. In others, concessions are part of a re-concentration of land holding. Either way, the concession model fits well with ideologies of modernisation.
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23 March 2022The conservation industry is now promoting the idea of ‘buying up’ Conservation Concessions and reconstituting them as business models with profit-seeking aims. A case in point is the ‘African Parks Network’, which manages 19 National Parks and Protected Areas in 11 countries in Africa.
RECOMMENDED
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22 March 2022The book, Une écologie décoloniale' (a decolonial ecology), written by Malcom Ferdinand, presents an analysis of how we cannot understand the current environmental crisis without knowing colonial history.
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22 March 2022A Public Civil Action from the Prosecutor of Agrarian Justice in the state of Pará, Brazil, against the Jari Cellulose Group requested that part of their land titles be annulled.
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22 March 2022The International Labour Research and Information Group has produced a beautifully illustrated and inspiring calendar for 2022.
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22 March 2022With the title, ‘Ima Bote Madjacca: Madja Myths,’ anthropologist Rosenilda Nunes Padilha (Rose) has launched a book of the myths of the Madja people (also known as the Kulina).
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22 March 2022An article from Mongabay news portal alerted the announcement of French oil giant Total Energies for developing a 40,000 hectare monoculture plantation in the savannahs of the Republic of Congo to offset its emissions.
