‘The Land Beneath Our Feet’ – A Review

By Fidel C.T. Budy The critically-acclaimed documentary The Land Beneath Our Feet, produced by Gregg Mitman and Sarita Siegel (University of Wisconsin-Madison and Alchemy Films), is an in-depth ethnographic portrayal of processes of land grabbing and dispossession of rural communities in Liberia, which challenges the dominant narrative that depicts affected communities as passive victims. Gregg …

Pará, bloody Pará

Even when the police doesn’t kill in Pará, Brazil, it still lets others do the killing. The coup and the political power of the rural sector in Brasília have provided Amazonian gunmen with a carte blanche. We are living in times of death. The massacre of nine men and one woman in Pau D'Arco, on …

Xingu, the clamor coming from the forest in Rio de Janeiro’s Carnival

By Barbara Arisi & Felipe Milanez * Much to the chagrin of ranchers and agribusiness, one of Rio de Janeiro’s popular samba schools, Imperatriz Leopoldinense, is making visible the terrible consequences of agribusiness and hydropower dams on the Xingu Indigenous Park in this year’s Carnival. It’s the biggest party on earth. The greatest multitude of …

A short history of the enclosures in Ethiopia

By tracing the history of enclosures in Ethiopia we learn how common property was first turned into state property that now enables the transfer of land to private investors. Such historical political ecological analysis can help civil society organisations learn from past social struggles against the enclosures and for the commons.* The 2007/08 financial crisis, …

Interview with researcher Jonah Wedekind on agrarian transformation in Ethiopia

by Giorgos Velegrakis This interview was originally given to Giorgos Velegrakis for the Greek environmental magazine Oikotrives. Giorgos Velegrakis (G.V): For a few years now Ethiopia has been one of the countries which has been strongly associated with the phenomena of land grabbing. Why? Jonah Wedekind (J.W.): Land grabbing has become a popular term since …