Below is the synthesis of Landless Voices: Land & Climate Change held March 2025. LANDLESS VOICES is a series of online consultative forums where rural people’s groups can share their land issues and struggles amid the global food crisis. The outcome of the consultation series were shared during the March 29 Global Landless Speakout.
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One of the common points from the sharings of the participants is the landgrabs by development aggression projects such as megadams, ports, and extractives/mining. But there are also projects that are now posing as “climate-friendly” or claimed as climate solutions. These so-called “carbon projects” – which are corporate-led climate solutions – are justified for their “carbon capture” to supposedly help reduce carbon dioxide that warms our planet. In many countries, these projects are publicly financed and incentivized, as pushed by international finance institutions like the IMF-WB.
Climate action is now being used as a cover-up to grab our lands and profit from it. One stark example is the Northern Kenya Rangeland Carbon Project, the world’s largest soil carbon removal project that has displaced forest people and pastoral communities in Kenya in the name of conservation. In many countries like in India, there are plantations growing biofuel crops as renewable energy source, which have resulted in poisoned soils and the dispossession of farmers of their lands. Agricultural workers in these plantations earn meager wages and face unsafe working conditions.
Coastal areas and our waters are not exempt. Blue carbon projects like mangrove restoration and the demarcation of marine protected areas restrict our small fisherfolk of their fishing rights, which is already happening in India’s Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Maharashtra, and Sundarbans.
These projects also take pride in bringing in the advanced technology that will essentially “modernize” landgrabbing. In Pakistan, the government has launched the Green Pakistan Initiative that makes use of digitalization – a Geographical Information System – to manage land, water, and other natural resources toward upscaling. It covers 1.94 million hectares of land for “new farming,” which promotes the adoption of modern farming techniques – also known as genetically modified/engineered seeds and the dependence on agro-chemicals – to boost productivity with sustainable development. Their sustainability therefore relies on the technologies from these transnational corporations.
Land use conversion has also become rampant in many countries to facilitate the entry of carbon projects as land investments, such as in the case of the Philippines wherein agricultural lands are being converted into other uses. In Central Luzon, agricultural lands are converted into other uses to pave the way for the Central Luzon Development Plan.
Naturally, communities resist these projects. And they are always met with fascist attacks and repression, resulting in countless state-perpetrated human rights violations.
Nevertheless, rural people’s movements carry on with their struggles to assert their rights and defend our lands, waters, and resources from imperialist plunder. From holding militant actions to the promotion of agroecology, peasants are rising for land! #