from Judy Miriga
Folks,
Orengo should let PLO Lumumba smoke out all those found engaged in corruption at the Ministry of Lands……Njoki is also brawled in the Timoin lands in Kwale, how will she be able to take stand while compromised………She has a tale tale to tale first… …poor people are being ripped off…..!….Election Broundary Committee must be free from all those associated with Kibaki, PM Raila, Kalonzo, Uhuru etc.,……Even Oswago has nothing to swago for Kenyans, he too should not come anywhere near the commission team……ata swago nini??? akili zetu au mali ya uma au ya community?
We need fresh start people…I am sick and tired of these folks….PLO should go ahead and smoke them all….!
PM Raila previously at the Court in Mombasa claimed that the Original land he bought, he did not see any neighbours within the surrounding and that the owner of the original land is “GOD”………Surely……!
PLO has all rights to swing into full action and let the heads swing and spiral, we are all set to protect the poor-man land and the disadvantaged by matching through the “Walls of Jericho”……….7 seven times……People …!
Each and everyone get into full gear action……..take charge…..Give the thieves sleepless nights…….YES, join with the 40 MPs who are against the thieves……and the thieves must be exposed and smoke them out people……..!
Unataka nini….??.”Tuna taka UNGA”……No Ethanol when people are dying from hunger…….you cannot sucrifice PETRO-DOLLAR ETHANOL for UNGA…..and this is DANGER…..
Ati Land for Sale…..?????
Judy Miriga
Diaspora Spokesperson
Executive Director
Confederation Council Foundation for Africa Inc.,
USA
http://socioeconomicforum50.blogspot.com
– – – – – – – – – – –
Orengo attack personal, replies livid Lumumba
The war of words between Lands minister James Orengo and anti-graft agency boss Patrick Lumumba over corruption at the ministry of Lands escalated on Friday with the latter now accusing the minister of making personal attacks.
The Kenya Anti-Corruption Commission (Kacc) director wrote to the minister asking him to stop attacking the anti-graft body for raising concern over issues facing his ministry.
In his letter which was copied to the Sunday Nation, Prof Lumumba accused the minister of attacking his character and other lawyers rather than addressing the issues raised.
Last week, LSK and Kacc protested over the “serious rot” in the ministry, and they demanded immediate action against corrupt civil servants who “frustrated efficient services in the lands office”.
Prof Patrick Lumumba and LSK chairman Kenneth Akide led the demonstration. (READ: Lawyers besiege Lands ministry)
“I fail to understand how your involvement in the struggle for multiparty politics is related to the performance of the Ministry of Lands and the protest by the legal fraternity in which I am a member of good standing without any history of impropriety and without any case in its disciplinary committee in my 25 years of practice,” Prof Lumumba said in his letter.
He went on to tell the minister that just because he was “involved in the multi-party politics struggle” it does not mean that any ministry he leads is “immune to public scrutiny”.
“Please do not pooh pooh the message against corruption and poor service delivery at the ministry of Lands because you dislike the messenger, nor should you forget the antelope of corruption in pursuit of the squirrel of ad personam (personalised) attacks,” Prof Lumumba told the minister.
He added that he and Kacc will not be “deterred from using all legal methods to create awareness in the fight against corruption as it is mandated by law”.
On Wednesday, Mr Orengo had launched an attack on Prof Lumumba asking him to “focus on his work” instead of engaging in public theatrics. (READ: Orengo accuses Kacc of incompetence)
He was dismissing claims by Kacc and the Law Society of Kenya that his ministry was not acting tough on corruption.
The minister produced correspondence between him and Prof Lumumba in which the latter asked him to revoke titles of public land that had been grabbed.
He added that the anti-graft body should concentrate more on prosecuting cases on economic crimes instead of “making noise” about it and not acting.
“I take exceptions to the director of Kacc who — forgetting about his mandate and instead of doing his job — he is out there demonstrating; the reports we give get nowhere. If he wants lessons in demonstrating I can organise counter demonstrations effectively,” he said.
“It is therefore amazing that people can now come and say we are not working and yet there is evidence of our cooperation with Kacc.”
The minister also came to the defence of his ministry following a public spat between the lawyers and his PS Dorothy Ongote during the demonstration.
He challenged the Kacc boss to prove that he was committed to his work by investigating and instituting proceedings against officials of the Lands ministry found culpable.
Source: Nation media
Africa: secret land deals fleece Africa 0
Jul9
Kenya risks leasing out huge tracts of land in rushed, one-sided deals that may create new social and environment problems, according to new reports questioning such deals across the continent.
The reports say most contracts are heavily biased in favour of foreign investors. They grant them long-term access to public and community land at very low costs. There is also little to safeguard benefits for local people and the environment.
Foreign companies are currently acquiring large amounts of lands in Kenya and other African countries to grow food crops for export and for biofuels.
In Land deals in Africa: What is in the contracts? author Lorenzo Cotula analysed several contracts and found that most were negotiated in secret “Expected benefits are often in the form of jobs or irrigation and infrastructure development, rather than rental fees,” he says in the report produced by London-based think-tank, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
The report analyses 12 recent contracts through which investors have leased millions of hectares of land in East, West, Central and Southern Africa for farming. It found many problems with the contracts but also some signs of positive deals.
In Kenya, multinationals have applied for 500,000-plus hectares of land – more than five times the size of Nairobi – to do large scale farming and mining. The government earlier agreed to lease 40,000 hectares in the Tana River Delta to the Government of Qatar to grow crops to feed the people of Qatar.
Further, an Italian company, Kenya Biofuel Ltd, has been allowed to convert 5,000 acres of Dakatcha woodland at the Coast and plant Jatropha.
The investor had asked for 50,000 acres to plant Jatropha but that was scaled-down to 5,000 for “trial” after protests by conservation groups. “I will use any means to ensure the project begins,” Magarini MP and Fisheries minister Amason Kingi, who is the area MP, said recently.
In Nyanza, Belgium Company HG consulting is expected to put 42,000 hectares of land under sugarcane production while Dominion Farms Ltd has invested in 17,500 hectares around the Yala Swamp. There are other projects in the works, mostly at the Coast.
A second report released in Nairobi last week by Oxfam predicts food riots in East Africa, saying decreasing farmland will severely limit food production in the next 20 years. Oxfam is grouping of 15 international organisations which campaigns against poverty and injustice.
Its report, Growing A Better Future: Food Justice In a Resource-Constrained World, Oxfam advises governments to stop leasing fertile farmland and grazing land to foreign companies for tourism, large-scale agriculture for exports and biofuels. The report says African governments should instead support women and small scale farmers.
Oxfam projects food prices across the world will double in the 20 years and biofuels will increase hunger in Africa. “The grain required to fill the fuel tank of one 4×4 vehicle with ethanol is enough to feed one person for a year,” said Irungu Houghton, Oxfam’s pan Africa director. Oxfam says with the current trends, population will far outstrip food production.
The latest revision of United Nation’s World Population Prospects, for instance, shows that Kenya will be grappling with 71.5 million people in the next 20 years, yet maize production is only expected to rise by a third.
By John Muchangi – Nairobi Star
KENYA RISK LEASING OUT HUGE TRACTS OF LAND IN A RUSHED ONE-SIDED DEALS
Kenya risks leasing out huge tracts of land in rushed, one-sided deals that may create new social and environment problems, according to new reports questioning such deals across the continent.
The reports say most contracts are heavily biased in favour of foreign investors. They grant them long-term access to public and community land at very low costs. There is also little to safeguard benefits for local people and the environment.
Foreign companies are currently acquiring large amounts of lands in Kenya and other African countries to grow food crops for export and for biofuels.
In Land deals in Africa: What is in the contracts? author Lorenzo Cotula analysed several contracts and found that most were negotiated in secret “Expected benefits are often in the form of jobs or irrigation and infrastructure development, rather than rental fees,” he says in the report produced by London-based think-tank, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
The report analyses 12 recent contracts through which investors have leased millions of hectares of land in East, West, Central and Southern Africa for farming. It found many problems with the contracts but also some signs of positive deals.
In Kenya, multinationals have applied for 500,000-plus hectares of land – more than five times the size of Nairobi – to do large scale farming and mining. The government earlier agreed to lease 40,000 hectares in the Tana River Delta to the Government of Qatar to grow crops to feed the people of Qatar.
Further, an Italian company, Kenya Biofuel Ltd, has been allowed to convert 5,000 acres of Dakatcha woodland at the Coast and plant Jatropha.
The investor had asked for 50,000 acres to plant Jatropha but that was scaled-down to 5,000 for “trial” after protests by conservation groups. “I will use any means to ensure the project begins,” Magarini MP and Fisheries minister Amason Kingi, who is the area MP, said recently.
In Nyanza, Belgium Company HG consulting is expected to put 42,000 hectares of land under sugarcane production while Dominion Farms Ltd has invested in 17,500 hectares around the Yala Swamp. There are other projects in the works, mostly at the Coast.
A second report released in Nairobi last week by Oxfam predicts food riots in East Africa, saying decreasing farmland will severely limit food production in the next 20 years. Oxfam is grouping of 15 international organisations which campaigns against poverty and injustice.
Its report, Growing A Better Future: Food Justice In a Resource-Constrained World, Oxfam advises governments to stop leasing fertile farmland and grazing land to foreign companies for tourism, large-scale agriculture for exports and biofuels. The report says African governments should instead support women and small scale farmers.
Oxfam projects food prices across the world will double in the 20 years and biofuels will increase hunger in Africa. “The grain required to fill the fuel tank of one 4×4 vehicle with ethanol is enough to feed one person for a year,” said Irungu Houghton, Oxfam’s pan Africa director. Oxfam says with the current trends, population will far outstrip food production….Quote…(Mollasses is producing ETHONAL…..The reason PM Raila is starving Luos through Dominion land thieving/grabbing)
The latest revision of United Nation’s World Population Prospects, for instance, shows that Kenya will be grappling with 71.5 million people in the next 20 years, yet maize production is only expected to rise by a third.
The country is currently unable to feed its 40 million people, and is a major maize importer despite having large tracts of unfarmed arable land. Irungu says African countries can produce enough food if they stop leasing land to other countries and instead empower women and small scale farmers. “Food is about power – those with power and money can eat, those without cannot. Africa is abundant with resources, yet governments fail to invest effectively in its biggest resources – its people and its land,” he says.
Already in the Tana Delta, where different foreign companies are jostling for more than 300,000 hectares land, indigenous communities are feeling the pinch.
About 250,000 villagers in Tana and Lamu, where a Canadian company wants 130,000 hectares to plant sugarcane for ethanol, have already been threatened with eviction notices. “Farmers in Wema and pastoralists in Dida Waride affirmed that they would die first before moving out of their land,” says Nature Kenya’s advocacy officer Serah Munguti, who leads a campaign to protect the Tana Delta. This is an expansive area where Kenya’s biggest river, the Tana River, branches out before emptying into the Indian Ocean.
She says it is one of the most important wetlands in Africa. It supports more than 350 species of birds, including globally threatened birds such as the Basra reed warbler, for which the delta is a critical wintering site, and two threatened primates found nowhere else in the world – Tana red colobus and Tana River mangabey. But some political leaders and locals accuse the NGOs of blocking developments at the Coast.
Magarini MP Kingi says the Italian Jatropha project will, for instance, create 7,000 jobs. Most villagers in this region are poor, jobless and the government has not sponsored any irrigation project there. “It is godsend,” says Mohammed Gule, a jobless father of six in Magarini.
District environment officer Samuel Ng’ang’a told the Star the 5,000-acre Jatropha project has already been licensed but the National Environment Management Authority in Nairobi contradicted this.
Other parties with projects include Bedford Bio fuels Inc, a private multinational company based in Canada, which wanted 90,000 hectares through 45-year lease agreements. They have been licensed a smaller portion to grow Jatropha curcas. Mumias Sugar Company and Tarda will jointly get 20,000 hectares for a Sh24 billion sugarcane project. The fifth, Tiomin Kenya Ltd, a company incorporated in Canada, mines titanium near Kwale.
The report by IIED expresses fears that nearly all farming companies surveyed have not created the jobs they promised. There are no mechanisms to force them to do so, says Cotula, the report author.
He says most contracts reviewed across Africa lack enforceable commitments, or fail to provide detail about how many and what kind of jobs the investment will create. “Some of the contracts analysed by the report are just a few pages long, with scant details on what investors should do to ensure that risks will be properly managed and that expected benefits will materialise,” he says.
Changamwe MP Ramadhan Kajembe, expresses a similar concern. “What happens to the owner of the land where minerals have been discovered? Is he going to benefit in any way?” he asked recently at a meeting to draft legislation on land use and natural resources provisions of the Constitution.
An exception is Liberia where contracts stand out for their shorter duration. They are also specific commitments on jobs and greater attention to local food security. In addition, the Liberian contracts are ratified by Parliament and are available online. Kenyan contracts are not available to the public. Head of Kenya Land Alliance Odede Lumumba says deals shrouded in secrecy cannot be good deals.
KLA is an alliance of 117 civil society organisations and individuals advocating for reform of policies and laws governing land in Kenya. “Mutually beneficial decisions need to be made, and this cannot happen when land agreements continue to take place without involvement of the public,” Lumumba said recently during the meeting on Politics of Food Security in Eastern Africa meeting.“The veil of secrecy that often surrounds these land deals must be lifted so poor people don’t ultimately pay the heavy price of losing their land,” World Bank Managing Director, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, said last year when the bank released its report on land deals.
The IIED notes agricultural investment can bring benefits to developing nations, but large land deals carry big risks as local people may lose access to the land and resources they have used for generations.“The more promising investments are those that involve supporting local smallholders, rather than large plantations,” their report says.
Secret Land Deals Fleece Africa
John Muchangi
6 July 2011
Kenya risks leasing out huge tracts of land in rushed, one-sided deals that may create new social and environment problems, according to new reports questioning such deals across the continent.
The reports say most contracts are heavily biased in favour of foreign investors. They grant them long-term access to public and community land at very low costs. There is also little to safeguard benefits for local people and the environment.
Foreign companies are currently acquiring large amounts of lands in Kenya and other African countries to grow food crops for export and for biofuels.
In Land deals in Africa: What is in the contracts? author Lorenzo Cotula analysed several contracts and found that most were negotiated in secret “Expected benefits are often in the form of jobs or irrigation and infrastructure development, rather than rental fees,” he says in the report produced by London-based think-tank, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED).
The report analyses 12 recent contracts through which investors have leased millions of hectares of land in East, West, Central and Southern Africa for farming. It found many problems with the contracts but also some signs of positive deals.
In Kenya, multinationals have applied for 500,000-plus hectares of land – more than five times the size of Nairobi – to do large scale farming and mining. The government earlier agreed to lease 40,000 hectares in the Tana River Delta to the Government of Qatar to grow crops to feed the people of Qatar.
Further, an Italian company, Kenya Biofuel Ltd, has been allowed to convert 5,000 acres of Dakatcha woodland at the Coast and plant Jatropha.
The investor had asked for 50,000 acres to plant Jatropha but that was scaled-down to 5,000 for “trial” after protests by conservation groups. “I will use any means to ensure the project begins,” Magarini MP and Fisheries minister Amason Kingi, who is the area MP, said recently.
In Nyanza, Belgium Company HG consulting is expected to put 42,000 hectares of land under sugarcane production while Dominion Farms Ltd has invested in 17,500 hectares around the Yala Swamp. There are other projects in the works, mostly at the Coast.
A second report released in Nairobi last week by Oxfam predicts food riots in East Africa, saying decreasing farmland will severely limit food production in the next 20 years. Oxfam is grouping of 15 international organisations which campaigns against poverty and injustice.
Its report, Growing A Better Future: Food Justice In a Resource-Constrained World, Oxfam advises governments to stop leasing fertile farmland and grazing land to foreign companies for tourism, large-scale agriculture for exports and biofuels. The report says African governments should instead support women and small scale farmers.
Oxfam projects food prices across the world will double in the 20 years and biofuels will increase hunger in Africa. “The grain required to fill the fuel tank of one 4×4 vehicle with ethanol is enough to feed one person for a year,” said Irungu Houghton, Oxfam’s pan Africa director. Oxfam says with the current trends, population will far outstrip food production.
The latest revision of United Nation’s World Population Prospects, for instance, shows that Kenya will be grappling with 71.5 million people in the next 20 years, yet maize production is only expected to rise by a third.
The country is currently unable to feed its 40 million people, and is a major maize importer despite having large tracts of unfarmed arable land. Irungu says African countries can produce enough food if they stop leasing land to other countries and instead empower women and small scale farmers. “Food is about power – those with power and money can eat, those without cannot. Africa is abundant with resources, yet governments fail to invest effectively in its biggest resources – its people and its land,” he says.
Already in the Tana Delta, where different foreign companies are jostling for more than 300,000 hectares land, indigenous communities are feeling the pinch.
About 250,000 villagers in Tana and Lamu, where a Canadian company wants 130,000 hectares to plant sugarcane for ethanol, have already been threatened with eviction notices. “Farmers in Wema and pastoralists in Dida Waride affirmed that they would die first before moving out of their land,” says Nature Kenya’s advocacy officer Serah Munguti, who leads a campaign to protect the Tana Delta. This is an expansive area where Kenya’s biggest river, the Tana River, branches out before emptying into the Indian Ocean.
She says it is one of the most important wetlands in Africa. It supports more than 350 species of birds, including globally threatened birds such as the Basra reed warbler, for which the delta is a critical wintering site, and two threatened primates found nowhere else in the world – Tana red colobus and Tana River mangabey. But some political leaders and locals accuse the NGOs of blocking developments at the Coast.
Magarini MP Kingi says the Italian Jatropha project will, for instance, create 7,000 jobs. Most villagers in this region are poor, jobless and the government has not sponsored any irrigation project there. “It is godsend,” says Mohammed Gule, a jobless father of six in Magarini.
District environment officer Samuel Ng’ang’a told the Star the 5,000-acre Jatropha project has already been licensed but the National Environment Management Authority in Nairobi contradicted this.
Other parties with projects include Bedford Bio fuels Inc, a private multinational company based in Canada, which wanted 90,000 hectares through 45-year lease agreements. They have been licensed a smaller portion to grow Jatropha curcas. Mumias Sugar Company and Tarda will jointly get 20,000 hectares for a Sh24 billion sugarcane project. The fifth, Tiomin Kenya Ltd, a company incorporated in Canada, mines titanium near Kwale.
The report by IIED expresses fears that nearly all farming companies surveyed have not created the jobs they promised. There are no mechanisms to force them to do so, says Cotula, the report author.
He says most contracts reviewed across Africa lack enforceable commitments, or fail to provide detail about how many and what kind of jobs the investment will create. “Some of the contracts analysed by the report are just a few pages long, with scant details on what investors should do to ensure that risks will be properly managed and that expected benefits will materialise,” he says.
Changamwe MP Ramadhan Kajembe, expresses a similar concern. “What happens to the owner of the land where minerals have been discovered? Is he going to benefit in any way?” he asked recently at a meeting to draft legislation on land use and natural resources provisions of the Constitution.
An exception is Liberia where contracts stand out for their shorter duration. They are also specific commitments on jobs and greater attention to local food security. In addition, the Liberian contracts are ratified by Parliament and are available online. Kenyan contracts are not available to the public. Head of Kenya Land Alliance Odede Lumumba says deals shrouded in secrecy cannot be good deals.
KLA is an alliance of 117 civil society organisations and individuals advocating for reform of policies and laws governing land in Kenya. “Mutually beneficial decisions need to be made, and this cannot happen when land agreements continue to take place without involvement of the public,” Lumumba said recently during the meeting on Politics of Food Security in Eastern Africa meeting.
“The veil of secrecy that often surrounds these land deals must be lifted so poor people don’t ultimately pay the heavy price of losing their land,” World Bank Managing Director, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, said last year when the bank released its report on land deals.
The IIED notes agricultural investment can bring benefits to developing nations, but large land deals carry big risks as local people may lose access to the land and resources they have used for generations.”The more promising investments are those that involve supporting local smallholders, rather than large plantations,” their report says.
Large Land Deals Threaten Farmers, World Bank Says
September 08, 2010, 4:25 PM EDT
By Sandrine Rastello
(Corrects third paragraph to reflect Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala is a woman.)
Sept. 8 (Bloomberg) — Foreign purchases of agricultural land from Mozambique to Cambodia pose “significant risks” to the livelihoods of farmers in countries with “weak land governance,” the World Bank said in a report.
Large-scale purchases raise “a real concern about the ability of local institutions to protect vulnerable groups from losing land on which they have legitimate, if not formally recognized claims,” according to the report by the Bank’s Agriculture and Rural Development department.
“The veil of secrecy that often surrounds these land deals must be lifted so poor people don’t ultimately pay the heavy price of losing their land,” World Bank Managing Director Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former Nigerian finance and foreign minister, said in a statement. The acquisitions “can come at a high cost,” she said.
Rising prices of rice, corn and palm oil in 2008 triggered deadly unrest in some parts of the developing world. The report, Rising Global Interest in Farmland, said that over the next year farmland investment spiraled, with 10 times more property bought in developing countries by nations seeking food security.
Nations dependent on food imports, such as Saudi Arabia and South Korea, stepped up efforts to buy land and lock-in overseas resources to ensure food security, the bank said. Foreign investment in Sudanese agricultural land in 2009 was estimated to increase five-fold by 2014, according to a Sudan Investment Ministry estimate last year.
Environmental Impact
Investor deals also have an environmental impact in countries such as Brazil, where deforestation was pursued to enable farmland expansion, the report said. The report reviewed data from 14 countries in Africa, Latin America, Europe and Asia between 2004 and 2009.
“The question will be what will the bank be able to do to change these dynamics,” said Vince McElhinny, who is a project manager for The Bank Information Center, a nonprofit in Washington, D.C. that advocates for transparency and public accountability within the World Bank. “In practice what we’re seeing is a trend that suggests that it will be able to do very little.”
Foreign agricultural investments have sometimes met with resistance. Protests by local communities in Madagascar caused that country to abandon a $6-billion farming agreement last year with Daewoo Logistics Corp.
Governments were “unprepared” for the increase in such land deals after the food and fuel crisis, the report said.
The report noted that private investors had the potential to increase productivity in less-developed countries with technological help. “In many cases, however, the desired benefits were not achieved,” the report said. The World Bank is trying to develop voluntary principles for responsible agricultural investment, it said.