Uganda

This article gives an overview on the industrial tree plantation expansion threat in eastern and southern African countries, its external drivers, as well as the challenges this expansion presents to affected communities struggling to defend their land and livelihoods.

Download the publication. Also available in Swahili.

The short film “Sacred Voices”, supported by the African Biodiversity Network and the Gaia Foundation, shares the messages of eight traditional Sacred Site Custodians from Kenya, Ethiopia, South Africa and Uganda. Sacred Sites in Africa are being increasingly threatened by mining companies, investors, plantations, tourist developments and governments. “They do not respect our ancestral lands or our Sacred Natural Sites, which are potent healing places for maintaining vitality of our planet.

Dear friends, we ask for your support. Our colleagues from the No2Bidco Campaign in Uganda and Kenya have contacted us to request support for their struggle against Bidco Africa. This multinational company -in a joint venture with Wilmar International- owns among others, the OPUL oil palm plantation and a palm oil refinery on the Lake Victoria island of Bugala, Uganda.

A film from “The Source Project” looks at how communities in the Karamoja region of Uganda have been organising along with the Uganda Land Alliance to ensure that their communal land rights are respected, in the face of large-scale land acquisitions for mineral exploitation.

The radio program Growing Voices, from Radio Mundo Real, discusses the impacts of the highly criticized Wilmar International, one of the largest palm oil corporations in the world. The program looks closer at the case of Kalangala in Uganda, where over one-hundred Ugandan small-scale farmers were evicted, and their lands grabbed by Oil Palm Uganda Limited, a subsidiary of Bidco Uganda Ltd -  which in turn is a venture co-owned by Wilmar International.

A new report by the Oakland Institute introduces the term ‘carbon violence’ to describe the impact of Green Resources’ plantation operations in Uganda on local communities and their environment. Green Resources is a Norwegian-registered plantation company with 41,000 hectares of plantations in Mozambique, Tanzania and Uganda. The company’s plantations, certified under FSC, are used for timber products and generate carbon credits.

REDD: A Collection of Conflicts, Contradictions and Lies presents summaries of reports from 24 REDD projects or programmes with a common characteristic: they all show a number of structural characteristics that undermine forest peoples' rights, or fail to address deforestation. As offset projects, they all fail to address the climate crisis because by definition, offset projects do not reduce overall emissions: emission reductions claimed in one place justify extra emissions elsewhere.

   

The Global Forest Coalition launched a new report on 'REDD+ and the Underlying Causes of Deforestation and forest Degradation' based on five case studies in Brazil, Colombia, India, Uganda and Tanzania elaborated by national organizations in those countries themselves. It was launched at the 19th Conference of the Parties of the Climate Convention in Warsaw.

Governments are opening the doors to corporations for planting vast areas of land with oil palm plantations. This trend is not only happening in West and Central African countries, but is even expanding to parts of Eastern Africa. Large scale oil palm plantations are already causing serious environmental and social impacts in some countries, resulting in loss of community rights over their territories.