Corporate Colonialism
For many Indigenous communities, land is not only the foundation of their livelihood and right to self-determination, but essential to their spirituality and cultural identities. However, this sacred connection has not prevented the rise of what’s known as “corporate colonialism”, or neo-colonialism; a contemporary form of past imperial land grabs, when native peoples were forced off their territories and on to restricted reservations.
Corporate colonialism allows businesses built on extracting natural resources for profit to use their might as means to take over occupied or foreign land, exploiting economic weaknesses to influence governments therein - who are often all-too happy to trade land for foreign investment (even at the expense of local peoples’ livelihoods). The land sold to investors is typically stolen from Indigenous people without their prior knowledge or consent, and commonly leads to their removal.
The takeover of Indigenous land by extractive and industrial corporations also causes profound environmental degradation on what are meant to be protected territories. As such, it is widely seen as theft among local communities. These presumed sanctuaries for Indigenous groups (already poor compensation considering the vast forced displacement that led them there), remain under threat from gas, oil and timber firms looking to extract natural resources for Profit.
In some parts of the world, the impact of corporate land grabs may appear less direct, but are just as harmful. Communities in the Southern Hemisphere are often the first to feel the effects of the climate crisis—despite being its smallest contributors—and are increasingly forced off their ancestral lands by extreme weather; itself largely the result of polluting industries which fuel wealthier (often white-majority) nations. In West Africa, for example, the Nemadi hunters have had their home and way of life, including practices handed down through generations, wrecked by drought in a matter of decades.
Elsewhere, corporations colonise ancestral lands and directly poach resources, depriving Indigenous people and destabilising their livelihoods. A long civil war coupled with an Ebola outbreak in 2014 left Liberia, for example, looking for an economic solution to the devastation that followed. The country’s vast swathes of ancient forest seemed to offer just that, providing ready-made fodder for massive palm oil plantations. Liberia’s government, like many others before it, thus gave huge concessions—around 25%—of the country’s land mass to the rubber, logging and palm oil industries. Subsistence farmers were promised great financial rewards to convert their crops accordingly, whilst being assured of the inevitable community benefits to come from all this investment, in the form of schools and clinics. In reality, these were empty promises, and in some cases, people were forced to clear land—which would otherwise have sustained them for life—for $100 or less. Likewise, the promised infrastructure never came.
This growing poverty and disenfranchisement all takes place alongside a globally thriving palm oil industry, making a few rich people much richer, while causing mass deforestation, destroying biodiversity and natural habitats, and significantly worsening the climate emergency - in the service of foreign bodies who show little interest in the welfare of Native communities. The companies behind said operations do little (or nothing) to support those whose ancestral land has been taken.
Corporate colonialism allows businesses built on extracting natural resources for profit to use their might as means to take over occupied or foreign land, exploiting economic weaknesses to influence governments therein - who are often all-too happy to trade land for foreign investment (even at the expense of local peoples’ livelihoods).
Indigenous Liberian people were not consulted, nor given say in how their land was to be used, or for whose benefit. The development projects have been protested by locals, who say that their land was granted to corporations without their free, prior and informed consent (FPIC). It’s another example of governments and corporations deciding between themselves ‘what’s good’ for local people without consulting them, instead feeding the greater prospect of economic expansion (which rarely trickles down to such communities – if ever).
In response to these injustices, many Indigenous people have protested against corporate land grabs, at their own risk, to showcase the destruction caused by extractive industries to their homelands and independence. This has even led to legal action: The Association of Environmental Lawyers of Liberia, for example, filed a lawsuit against Salala Rubber Corporation (SRC) for alleged violent attacks against both community members and land defenders, which forced some residents and activists to flee for safety.
Another progressive measure came with the 2018 Land Rights Act, which gave Liberia’s local and Indigenous communities ownership of ancestral lands and the authority to make their own demands of extractive companies. However, it cannot gain back the land that has already been lost, nor is it necessarily a solid guarantee of future protection.
Ultimately, the problem is less about a lack of protective regulations as it is the systemic, global failure to enforce them in the face of big businesses when the alternative incentive is increased GDP: i.e., how our society measures success. To truly see change and the rights of Indigenous communities gain strength, a wider system of checks and balances must be integrated into international trade bodies, into the entire global economy, to ensure that local people are heard and their long-term wellbeing is valued over short-term profit.
