Press Releases

The Oakland Institute and Rainforest Rescue today delivered a petition signed by over 72,000 people from around the world to the President of the World Bank, Ajay Banga, calling on him to immediately stop funding the Resilient Natural Resources Management for Tourism and Growth (REGROW) project in Tanzania. The project’s objective is to improve management of natural resources and tourism assets in priority areas of Southern Tanzania – including Ruaha National Park (RUNAPA). Instead, the project has led to widespread human rights abuses against the villagers living near the park in order to expand tourism revenues.

In a new report, Nicaragua’s Gold Rush, the Oakland Institute exposes how, despite US sanctions on Nicaragua’s gold mining sector, the industry has boomed, fueled by foreign business interests. The US is the primary destination, accounting for a staggering 79 percent of total Nicaraguan gold exports.

En un nuevo informe, La fiebre del oro de Nicaragua, el Oakland Institute expone que, a pesar de las sanciones de EE. UU. al sector de la extracción de oro de Nicaragua, la industria ha aumentado radicalmente, dirigida por empresas extranjeras. EE. UU. es el destino principal del producto e importa un asombroso 79 por ciento de todo el oro exportado de Nicaragua.

African Agriculture Holdings which went public on the NASDAQ stock exchange on December 7, 2023, plans to operate on over 2.9 million hectares across West Africa to produce animal feed and carbon credits for international markets. In Senegal, the US firm is producing alfalfa for export to the Middle East and South Korea on land that local pastoralist communities have long relied on for their livelihoods. African Agriculture’s largest shareholder, Frank Timis, is an energy and mining tycoon whose past ventures have implicated him in fraud, corruption, and other scandals.

African Agriculture Holdings, qui a fait son entrée à la bourse NASDAQ le 7 décembre 2023, prévoit d'exploiter plus de 2,9 millions d'hectares en Afrique de l'Ouest pour produire des aliments pour bétail et des crédits carbone destinés aux marchés internationaux. Au Sénégal, l'entreprise américaine produit de la luzerne pour exportation vers le Moyen-Orient et la Corée du Sud sur des terres et des pâturages dont les communautés pastorales dépendaient auparavant pour leur subsistance.

2024 has started with the Tanzanian government escalating its brutal campaign against Indigenous and local communities living near Protected Areas (PAs) around the country. Impacted villagers are sounding the alarm that their rights to land and life are under siege from a government focused on increasing revenues from safari tourism and hunting at any cost.

Today the World Bank announced the launch of a full investigation into harms caused by the Bank-financed REGROW project in Tanzania.

In a new report, Unaccountable & Complicit, the Oakland Institute exposes how the World Bank is enabling the violent tactics of the Tanzanian government to increase tourism revenue. The expansion plans for the Ruaha National Park (RUNAPA) are greased by rampant violence and cattle seizures by wildlife rangers with the goal of forcibly evicting tens of thousands of villagers.

With carbon offset schemes and tree plantations set to take center stage at the Africa Climate Summit (ACS) and Africa Climate Week (ACW) — despite their devastating social and environmental impacts and the prevailing corruption and fraud within the voluntary carbon markets — a new report from the Oakland Institute, Green Colonialism 2.0: Tree Plantations and Carbon Offsets in Africa, denounces the alarming direction taken by the Summit. Starting on September 4, 2023 in Nairobi, Kenya, the two events aim to establish a common position for Africa on the climate crisis for the upcoming COP 28 conference in Dubai, slated for December 2023.

Land is Life. Land is sacred. It is culture, sustenance, and spirituality for billions of people on this planet. This drives our work at the Oakland Institute.