by ANABELA LEMOS
Community members walk toward the Zambezi River in Tete Province, Mozambique, where land grabbing for coal mining has displaced people and impacted their food sovereignty. PHOTO/Justiça Ambiental.
This article was drawn from an interview with Anabela Lemos, and conducted, edited, and condensed by Simone Adler.
Anabela Lemos is Co-founder, Campaign Coordinator, and Board Member of Justiça Ambiental (JA), the Mozambique branch of Friends of the Earth.
To corporations, the forest is only business. To communities, the forest is everything: trees, medicine, culture, spirituality. Land-grabbing and the removal of communities from forests and land breaks the community, displaces access to food and water, and uproots the connection to nature and [local] knowledge. If the community structure is broken, if the land – the means of food production – is lost, we lose everything.
Land That Can Only Grow Stones
In Mozambique, where 80% of the population is campesinos – traditional, family farmers – companies are taking the best, most fertile land and moving people to land that can’t grow anything. For example, the coal mining project in the Tete province relocated people from the fertile soil by the Zambezi River, with the promise of houses and two hectares of land per family. They were moved to an arid place with land that can only grow stones, as they say, losing access to the land and river their lives depended on.
When a foreign company wants to extract [natural resources], the government grants them the rights, claiming ownership of whatever is beneath the ground. Legally, these extractive projects need to be accepted by the communities, but the legal system doesn’t work properly.
Activists in Mozambique formed Justiça Ambiental [JA] in 2004 to address issues of food, water, mining, extraction, forests, and energy as they relate to the climate crises. In 2008, JA became a member of Friends of the Earth International. JA keeps civil society informed and brings awareness to people in cities who are disconnected from rural areas.
We organize to support farmers and communities in taking back their land, their forests, and their rights and demand that our government does not jump on the GMO bandwagon. We work on leveraging legal support for communities in the struggle against mining, despite repeated instances of our cases being turned down in the courts. We are still waging a 14-plus year fight to stop the Mphanda Nkuwa dam from being built on the Zambezi River. We know that change comes from the ground up and that together we have the power to build movements for our collective struggles.
Toward Freedom for more