Send a Message to US Congress: Stop Driving Global Land Privatization

Billions of American taxpayer dollars are being used to dispossess communities of their ancestral land and threaten millions of livelihoods globally!

The US is driving efforts to privatize land around the world through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

Our new report Driving Dispossession: The Global Push to “Unlock the Economic Potential of Land” exposes how governments are pressured to privatize their public and customary land and create land markets. What is happening under a false narrative of putting land to “productive use” is a misguided effort to hijack the commons.

Billions of people rely on communally managed farmland, pastures, forests, or savannahs for their livelihoods. The US efforts will further marginalize the poor, concentrate land in the hands of a few, overexploit natural resources, and increase carbon emissions through the expansion of ranching and monocultures. In fact, USAID and the World Bank’s own research has shown that customary systems provide adequate tenure security and that past efforts to privatize these systems have often resulted in devastating social and economic impacts.

At the country level, local communities, civil society organizations, and Indigenous People resist these efforts and remain steadfast in their struggle to preserve their livelihoods and the environment.

Please stand with them and join us in writing to the US Congress to urge the relevant Senators and Congressional Representatives to hold these agencies and international institutions accountable by halting all initiatives that privatize land and create land markets.