World Bank and UN carbon offset scheme ’complicit’ in genocidal land grabs - NGOs | Nafeez Ahmed | Environment

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  • World Bank and UN carbon offset scheme ’complicit’ in genocidal land grabs - NGOs | Nafeez Ahmed | Environment | theguardian.com
    http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/jul/03/world-bank-un-redd-genocide-land-carbon-grab-sengwer-kenya

    Many such deals are geared toward growing crops or biofuels for export to richer, developed countries – with the consequence that small-holder farmers are displaced from their land and lose their livelihood while local communities go hungry.

    The concentration of ownership of the world’s farmland in the hands of powerful investors and corporations is rapidly accelerating, driven by resource scarcity and, thus, rising prices. According to a new report by the US land rights organisation Grain: “The powerful demands of food and energy industries are shifting farmland and water away from direct local food production to the production of commodities for industrial processing.”

    Less known factors, however, include ’conservation’ and ’carbon offsetting.’

    In west Kenya, as the UK NGO Forest Peoples Programme (FPP) reported, over a thousand homes had been torched by the government’s Kenya Forest Service (KFS) to forcibly evict the 15,000 strong Sengwer indigenous people from their ancestral homes in the Embobut forest and the Cherangany Hills.

    #terres #Kenya #autochtones #agrobusiness