AlertNet | 17 April 2014

Local women in Rufiji, Tanzania, wait to draw water from a borehole. (Photo: Zuberi Mussa)

 BY KIZITO MAKOYE
 The world’s quest for crops to produce biofuels has triggered a wave of controversial land acquisitions in Tanzania as foreign companies jostle for land that villagers and indigenous people claim as theirs.

Aid groups have accused investors backed by the government of grabbing swathes of village land to set up biofuel projects in the country’s Coast Region.
 “To state it bluntly, most of the lands that the government wishes to see developed will need to be taken away from the villagers and leased to investors,” Doug Hertzler, a senior policy analyst with ActionAid USA, told the World Bank’s annual conference on land and poverty in Washington DC, in late March.
– See more at: http://www.farmlandgrab.org/post/view/23391#sthash.OCqMUm6D.dpuf