Insight / Land Rights
Last week the Guatemalan attorney general and the International Commission Against Impunity in Guatemala (CICIG) announced that arrest warrants for bribery charges had been issued for three key figures in the country’s palm oil trade: Carlos Arévalo Garcia, legal representative of the palm oil company REPSA, and Hugo Molina Botrán…
Insight / Land Rights
On Sunday, April 30, local ranchers in Maranhão, Brazil, attacked the indigenous Gamela community, leaving 13 wounded. Several people were taken to a hospital, some with severe machete and bullet wounds. The attack came as the Gamela community was trying to reclaim ancestral lands, just a few days after 4,000…
Insight / Land Rights
Global Earth Day Mobilizations: Rural women mobilize to demand Land Rights Now Indigenous peoples and peasant farming communities in Guatemala are facing a threat to their existence due to loss of their land to agribusiness plantation. The community of La Ayuda in the coastal region is completely surrounded by palm…
Insight / Right to Food and Agriculture
Sonny Perdue, Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Agriculture, demonstrated a complete disregard for ethics when he was governor of Georgia. In one notable case he grabbed buying a Florida swamp near Disney World after selling Georgia farmland. His take included $100,000 netted through a retroactive tax break measure that…
Insight
Donald Trump opened his campaign by attacking immigrants, saying “they’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.” Trump’s belittling caveat “And some, I assume, are good people” only rubbed salt in the wounds. Immigrants and refugees, documented or undocumented, are actually less likely to commit crimes than native born U.S.…
Insight / Right to Food and Agriculture
Georgia politician Sonny Perdue studied veterinary science but made his fortune in trucking, trading grain, and selling chemical fertilizer. Once a conservative Democrat, then a Republican, the former Governor has long been on the wrong side of equity and fairness for family farmers, Black folks, and farm workers. As a Georgia…
Insight / Land Rights
As a person whose work-life as a teacher and as a public policy analyst has been grounded in anthropology, I am very alarmed at the way in which my retirement funds are being used by the investment firm TIAA (formerly Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association—College Retirement Equities Fund) to undermine…
Insight / Land Rights
A year ago today, Rigoberto Lima Choc was killed in Sayaxché, Guatemala. He was gunned down by two men on a motorcycle on the street in front of the Magistrate’s Court. Lima Choc had been an outspoken critic of the contamination and massive fish kill that had occurred on the…
Insight / Land Rights
Local communities, social movements and their allies have won some important victories recently to stop big land grabs around the world. Just last month people in Yala Swamp in Kenya, supported by ActionAid, won a court decision against Dominion Farms, a company from the United States, which has been grabbing…
Insight / Land Rights / Politics & Economics
Late last month, news media in Tanzania reported that a sugar and biofuels project in Bagamoyo, Tanzania, had been “shelved” by the Tanzanian government. The project is part of a large-scale agriculture initiative championed by the Obama administration and threatened to displace 1,300 farmers. There also appears to be a…
