ADDIS ABABA, Nov 19 (IPS) – As COP30 negotiations intensify in Belém, Brazil, civil society organizations and research experts have called on major financial institutions to advance foreign interests in controlling Africa’s land by formalizing land ownership and seeking to convert Africa’s land into industrial farms or carbon markets.
In May last year, the World Bank unveiled plans to transform land ownership in the Global South through its recently launched ‘Global Program on Land Tenancy Security and Land Access for Climate Goals’. But activists and researchers fear the move will pave the way for farms, mining and speculative carbon markets, while dismantling customary and public land management systems.
So far, the US-based Oakland Institute has released a report detailing how the Bank’s plans threaten, rather than secure, land rights, while promoting false responses to the climate crisis and actions that will even worsen it.
According to Frédéric Mousseau, policy director of the Oakland Institute and one of the leading researchers, the World Bank’s land reform agenda in its current form would be disastrous for Africa.
“By promoting property rights and land commodification under the guise of climate action, the Bank is opening the door for foreign interests to control Africa’s land and resources, while destroying communal systems that have sustained African societies for centuries,” he said.
However, the World Bank states that formalizing land ownership is necessary for communities to benefit from the extraction of minerals needed for the energy transition. But the report accuses the Bank of skipping the issue of community and government consent – assuming that landowners and policymakers will accept the exploitation of natural resources.
According to Appolinaire Zagabe, the director of the DRC Climate Change Network (Reseau Sur le Changement Climatique RDC), such interventions for the climate transition have led to forceful evictions of people from their ancestral homes in cobalt mining areas in the Democratic Republic of Congo, as foreign interests move to exploit the precious mineral used to produce lithium-ion batteries, which are used to power electric vehicles, motorcycles, computers and smartphones, among others.
“Local communities in cobalt mining areas, some of whom have never seen an electric car and do not own mobile phones, continue to bear the burden of the energy transition while world leaders watch from a distance, fully supporting the transition but ignoring the plight of suffering communities,” Zagabe said. “The transition has brought total injustice to rural communities in my country, creating an opportunity for foreign entities to make profits.”
In a statement to the media during the ongoing 30e Conference of Parties (COP 30) in Belém, the Climate Action Network (CAN) noted that many rich countries are strongly opposed to creating new energy transition plans, claiming that current systems are good enough – despite clear evidence that they cannot handle the scale and coordination required.
“The blockers are consistent: denial of responsibility, resistance to coordinated international action and a refusal to recognize that transitions without justice are neither sustainable nor legitimate,” part of the statement reads.
In addition to the essential exploitation of minerals, it is clear that once title rights are issued to foreign investors, the land can be rented, sold, mortgaged and possibly lost to the banks. This, according to the researchers, paves the way for a structural transformation that will see small or struggling farmers driven out of agriculture and farms consolidated into larger units that are likely to specialize in monocultures and rely on fossil fuel-based agrochemicals and mechanization.
The World Bank also supports afforestation and reforestation interventions, which scientists think are the right thing to do, but prioritizes financing them through carbon offset programs. According to the report, the IPCC has already identified a number of effective mitigation measures that require land and has made it clear that carbon offsets are not among them because “the net combined effects on emissions were found to be negligible.”
“With the recent creation of so-called “high integrity” carbon credits, the Bank intends to revive and incentivize a false climate solution that serves the very same interests that created the climate crisis in the first place,” Mousseau said.
In a similar vein, the Oakland Institute, in collaboration with the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), and the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), has released another report challenging the dominant narrative of the Africa Development Bank (AfDB) that Africa has vast expanses of “unused” or “underutilized” land available for large-scale industrial agriculture and other land investments.
“The idea of land abundance is a colonial fiction that refuses to die,” says Professor Ruth Hall, director of PLAAS at the University of the Western Cape. “Our research shows that Africa’s lands are already intensively used and highly valued by millions of rural residents,” she said, noting that the real challenge is not to ‘open up’ land to investors, but to protect it for communities and future generations.
The AfDB supports strategies such as the ‘Feed Africa’ initiative, which is often used to justify the conversion of land into agro-industrial production zones to serve global markets. However, the new report released on the sidelines of the Conference on Land and Policy in Africa (CLPA) in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, shows that such insights are deeply flawed, both empirically and ideologically, and that they obscure the real dynamics of land use, land ownership and ecological value across the continent.
“These policies are the latest front in the seizure of African land and resources,” said Mariann Bassey-Olsson of AFSA, Nigeria. “They are sold as climate solutions and investment opportunities, but in reality they increase inequality, weaken land rights and accelerate ecological collapse.”
She notes that much of the land labeled as “vacant” is actually used for grazing, shifting cultivation, foraging, or sacred and ecological purposes. “These multifunctional landscapes accommodate millions of people and are far from empty,” says Bassey-Olsson.
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