Christine (not her real name) and her husband used to grow enough food to feed their eight children on the six hectares of land that they had farmed for over 20 years. By selling the surplus at the market, they could afford to send their children to school. Instead of living in their old six-room home, complete with kitchen, they now struggle to pay rent for a cramped two-room house, where there is not enough land to farm and grow food. Christine’s children often eat only once a day and are no longer receiving an education, as it is too expensive. She and her husband were once self-sufficient, but now depend on the goodwill of friends and neighbours and whatever casual labour can be found.

Christine is among more than twenty thousand people who claim that they have been evicted from their homes and land in Kiboga district, and nearby Mubende district, to make way for UK-based New Forests Company (NFC) plantations.

The Ugandan National Forestry Authority (NFA) granted licences over the plantation areas to NFC in 2005 and authorised the removal of the former residents, which took place by February 2010 in Mubende and between 2006 and July 2010 in Kiboga. The NFA says that the people living there were illegal encroachers on forest land and that their evictions were justified.

NFC presents itself as a ‘sustainable and socially responsible forestry company’. It has applied for carbon credits for carbon offsetting, and says it creates jobs in rural areas and builds schools and health facilities as part of its community development programme. NFC maintains that, in Mubende and Kiboga, locals left the land voluntarilyand that, in any event, it would bear no responsibility for evictions from land licensed to it. The company told Oxfam that these ‘are solely in the hands of the government’ and that, as a licensee, it has ‘very limited rights and certainly no rights to evict anyone’.

Although the company claims to uphold strict social and environmental standards, and despite the fact that its plantations are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), it was discovered that between 2006 and 2010, more than 22,000 people were evicted from their lands, in some cases with the use of violence.

In Oxfam’s view, NFC’s operations highlight how the current system of international standards – designed to ensure that people are not adversely affected as a result of large-scale transfers of land use rights – does not work. The serious impacts of the operations on local villagers, as reported by them to Oxfam, raise particular concerns given that NFC operations are supported by international investment from institutions including the World Bank’s private sector lending arm, the International Finance Corporation (IFC), as well as the European Investment Bank (EIB) and HSBC, all of which claim to uphold high social and environmental standards.

On the villagers’ rights to use the land, NFC has followed the NFA in describing the displaced groups, some of whom claim to have spent their entire lives on the land, as ‘illegal encroachers’ and ‘trespassers’.The company says that ‘the majority of people who had settled within the [reserves] had done so illegally’, with the exception of those who could demonstrate residence on the land since before 1992. It points to a government-driven authentication process in Mubende, which determined that only 31 families could demonstrate such ownership. NFC says that no families in Kiboga have demonstrated rights to the land they used to occupy.

Over 20,000 local villagers, however, believe that they have clear legal rights to the land they occupied, and both communities have brought a case before the Ugandan High Court to protect those rights. These claims are being resisted by NFC, and neither case has been finally decided. Those from Kiboga district state that they were invited to move onto the land in the 1970s by the Idi Amin regime. They also say that the government recognised their rights to stay on the land, allowing them to build schools and establishing administrative structures.Further, their legal pleadings refer to an executive order prohibiting the evictions, which they say remains in effect. Many of the people who lived in the Mubende concession area say they were allocated land in the area as Second World War veterans, who fought in Egypt or Burma for the British, or their descendants. Others say they bought, were gifted or inherited land during the 1980s and 1990s. In their legal pleadings, the claimants aver that they are ‘either bona fide, lawful occupants and/or customary tenants and are protected by the Constitution of the Republic of Uganda and the land laws of Uganda.’ In both court cases, the High Court considered that the communities’ concerns were sufficiently urgent and their arguments sufficiently strong to justify granting orders restraining evictions, pending disposal of the full hearings.

Local communities say that evictions continued to take place despite these orders. They describe the evictions as anything but voluntary and peaceful. People told Oxfam that the army and police were deployed in the area to enforce the evictions, and that many people were beaten during the process. Some villagers also say that casual labourers, whom they believe were employed by NFC, joined the police and army in burning homes, destroying crops and butchering livestock. The pleadings in the claim brought by the Kiboga community allege that NFC, ‘purporting to be a licensee of [the NFA], trespassed on the Plaintiffs’ land, destroyed homes, crops and animals of the Plaintiffs and attempted to evict the Plaintiffs’. They also allege ‘trespass, uncivility, harassment and abuse’ by NFC and its agents. The Mubende evictees claim that employees of NFC were ‘evicting, harassing, erasing their plantations, demolishing their houses, intimidating, mistreating’ them.

Sources: https://oxfamilibrary.openrepository.com/bitstream/handle/10546/142858/bp151-land-power-rights-acquisitions-220911-en.pdf;jsessionid=7F61CCDA0D1061964E26CF814149B440?sequence=32

https://ejatlas.org/conflict/new-forests-in-uganda

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