In a Uganda forest reserve, green goals and community land rights are at odds. It’s a story being played out across Africa, as investors scramble to lease and buy vast tracts.
On the shores of Lake Victoria in eastern Uganda, villagers tend to crops and make repairs on their wooden, straw-roofed huts, while cattle graze near pine and eucalyptus trees. Not too far away, workers labor for a Norwegian-owned forestry company. The scene is deceptively tranquil.
Communities settled in and around the Bukaleba Central Forest Reserve say they are being deprived of the land they have worked and lived on since the 1970s, when they were encouraged by the Idi Amin Dada government to settle there.
The villages they established have not stood the test of time, or the hungry hand of profit. By the end of the 1980s, the administration of the day had begun to push people back off the reputedly degraded or underused land.
A 2014 study by Kristen Lyons and a team of researchers for the California-based Oakland Institute environmental think tank cites the real reason as clearing communities to make way for private forestry investors.
One is the Norwegian company Green Resources, which bought a 50-year lease for some 9,000 hectares in Bukaleba from the Ugandan government in 1996.
The company describes itself as Africa’s largest forestry company, and has 45,000 hectares of standing woodland in Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda. On its website, it touts its green credentials, saying it trades in wood from its own plantations – thereby easing the burden on natural forest. It also sells emissions reductions, which allows businesses and countries to offset the carbon they produce. But it’s also being accused of land grabbing…more details
