A monitoring visit to Atebubu in 2022 where Africa Plantation for Sustainable Development APSD is using 42000 hectares of Atebubu community land for biofuel plantation development and intends to acquire 138000 hectares more has revealed that apart from farmers losing their source of livelihoods, they are also undergoing atrocious human rights abuse at the hands of APSD. These have been documented in a video.
Communities lose their lands to investors due to investors’ connivance with chiefs for quick monies and chiefs’ failure to analyse the consequences of their actions on the current and future generations. The actions of the chiefs are mostly out of greed and ignorance.
This project seeks to assist Chiefs undertake strategic analysis of the consequences of their actions, the losses they are making due to wrong decisions and more strategic decisions that can be made to keep land in the hands of the communities and improve income through better and more transparent land administration and management.
The project also seeks to introduce the cocoa model into plantation development. In the cocoa model, land ownership remains in the hands of communities that produce the cocoa with chiefs receiving their share through prevailing benefit-sharing arrangements. This prevents investors from taking away lands from communities. This is being practiced in the Modified Taungya System (MTS) as well.
Discussions with the Lands Commission in July 2022 revealed that a consultant is being recruited to develop the road map in preparations to develop the Legislative Instruments (LI) for the enforcement of the new Land Act 1036 which was passed in 2020. The project also seeks to build concrete evidence from the work in Atebubu and Sene to inform the development of the LI to include ensuring that draft Guidelines for large-scale land acquisition developed in conjunction with the Lands Commission in 2018 as well as FPIC processes are incorporated into the LI.
The LI is the 3rd in the hierarchy of laws after the Constitution and Acts of Parliament.
- Halt the takeover of community lands for plantation development without FPIC processes and payment of negotiated compensations
- Build communities’ capacities to report infractions on abuse of land rights using Real Time Monitoring
- Develop inputs for LI development for the implementation of Land Act 1036.
Donors & Partners
- No. 9 Hibiscus Road, East Legon
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P.O. Box LG 1086, Legon,
Accra – Ghana - Tel.: +233 302 521 905
- info@civicresponsegh.org