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As African leaders, policymakers, and researchers gather in Addis Ababa for the Sixth Conference on Land Policy in Africa (#CLPA), civil society organizations are issuing a powerful challenge to the dominant development model that treats African land as βvacant,β βunderused,β and open for exploitation.
New evidence reveals how this long-standing myth fuels large-scale land grabs, ecological destruction, and the dispossession of communities across the continent. As the African Union Commission, African Development Bank, and United Nations Economic Commission for Africa meet to deliberate on Land Governance, Justice, and Reparations for Africans and their descendants, civil society voices are demanding urgent policy action to address these injustices.
At a high-profile side event during the CLPA, experts from the Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa (AFSA), the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS), and the Oakland Institute will launch two landmark reports exposing the structural forces behind land alienation in Africa.
The first report, Land Availability and Land Use Changes in Africa, jointly produced by PLAAS, AFSA, and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, dismantles the persistent claim that Africa holds vast tracts of unused farmland ready for industrial agriculture. It exposes how extractive industries, biofuels, and carbon markets are driving massive land-use changes, displacing communities, and undermining communal tenure systems.
The second report, Climatewash: The World Bankβs Fresh Offensive on Land Rights, led by the Oakland Institute, warns that new World Bank programmesβframed under βclimate goalsββare paving the way for agribusiness, mining, and speculative carbon markets while dismantling customary and public land governance systems.
Together, the two reports make a strong three-point call to action. First, to end the myth and the grabs by rejecting the false narrative of βunusedβ or βabundantβ African land, halting land grabs disguised as development or climate solutions, and ensuring Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC) for all affected communities. Second, to reclaim policy power by freeing African land policy from the control of international financial institutions and corporate interests so that land governance serves people, protects communal tenure, upholds womenβs land rights, and safeguards ecological integrity. Third, to fund the real solutionβagroecologyβby redirecting public and donor finance away from industrial agriculture, extractivism, and carbon markets, and investing instead in agroecological systems that restore soils, feed communities, and strengthen Africaβs climate resilience.
The organisers call on African governments and regional bodies to reject the commodification of land, defend communal tenure systems, and reclaim sovereignty over land policy from financial institutions and foreign corporations.
βLand is life, culture, and identity,β said Bassey-Olsson. βAfrica must not trade it away for false climate promises and corporate profits.β
DOWNLOAD THE FULL PRESS RELEASE HERE
https://afsafrica.org/press-release-debunking-the-myth-of-land-abundance/
DOWNLOAD THE REPORT HERE
https://afsafrica.org/africas-land-is-not-empty-new-report-debunks-the-myth-of-unused-land-and-calls-for-a-just-future-for-the-continents-farmland/