I et af verdens fattigste lande fortryder nok flere som han, at de har lejet deres jord ud i 50 år til en stor koncern – bonde siger, han aldrig har set noget, der ligner en regning på handelen.
FREETOWN, 20 March 2012 (IRIN): In southeastern Sierra Leone’s Pujehun District, the small village of Kortumahun sits at the edge of orderly rows of hundreds of thousands of bright green palm oil seedlings. Small groups of women weed (luger) the pots while men spray fertilizers and pesticides across the nursery.
It has been 30 years since large-scale oil palm plantations operated in this chiefdom (høvdingedømme).
But in March 2011, the agro-industrial company Socfin Agriculture Company Ltd., a subsidiary of the Belgian company Bolloré, signed a 50-year land lease (lejekontrakt) with the government of Sierra Leone to produce palm oil on 6.500 hectares of land in Pujehun’s Malen chiefdom.
Tommy Silman, landowner and resident of Kortumahun, says he wishes he had not given up his land: One month ago he leased all 3,04 hectares (ha) of his land for the next 50 years to the government. He used to cultivate oil palm trees for direct sale to process into the cooking oil (madolie) used by most Sierra Leoneans.
“It was not a fair deal,” Silman says, explaining that he received no receipt (regning/opgørelse) for the land sold and now has no idea of where he stands.
Flocking in
Foreign land investment is on the rise in Sierra Leone and, as with many of its West african neighbours, the government wants more companies to come in to boost the economy and spur much-needed agricultural development in rural areas.
Sierra Leone ranked 180 out of 187 countries on the UN human development index in 2011.
The country’s Investment and Export Promotion Agency (SLIEPA) advertises “over 4,3 million ha of cultivatable land available”, high local demand for staple food crops and opportunities for the production of biofuels for the global market.
According to Sierra Leone’s Ministry of Lands, around 70 percent of arable (dyrlbar) land is available for investment, outside of protected forest reserves.
“Foreign land investments are a good thing,” says William Farmer, director of surveys and lands in the Ministry of Lands, adding:
“Civil society makes a lot of noise about land-grabbing (jordtyveri). But if the investment is well-planned then it can create employment and improve lives.”
The US-based policy think-tank the Oakland Institute’s 2011 country report on Sierra Leone counts 15 large-scale land deals totalling 500,000 ha.
This was published before the largest-yet recorded deal in 2012 with the Chinese Hainan Natural Rubber Industry Group which signed a 1,2 billion US dollar deal with the government in February to lease 135.000 ha for rubber and rice plantations.
The Hainan group has promised to plant 35.000 ha of rice for sale on the local market, establish a rubber-processing factory and create approximately 100,000 jobs. Rubber plantations will stretch over 100.000 ha, across three districts – Moyamba, Tonkolili, and Port Loko.
But as more and more companies flock to the country to lease large tracts of land, murmurs of protest and unrest are cropping up among local populations who are unhappy with the way the deals are done.
And civil society groups are growing increasingly concerned that foreign land deals are not producing the win-win scenarios they had hoped for.
Lack of regulation, transparency (gennemskuelighed)
Læs videre på
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/95112/SIERRA-LEONE-Land-deals-beginning-to-stir-discontent
Se også
http://www.irinnews.org/Report/94680/WEST-AFRICA-The-downside-of-foreign-land-acquisitions
