The Greene County Democrat

Category: Agriculture

  • Newswire : Dutch Court upholds $15 million payout to Nigerian communities damaged by spills

    Oil spill damage in Nigeria


     
    Jan. 1, 2023 (GIN) – A Dutch court has upheld a payout to residents of the Niger Delta of US$15.9 million for oil spills that contaminated land and waterways in three communities.
     
    In the case brought by Friends of the Earth, Shell’s Nigerian subsidiary was found to be responsible for the spills that occurred between 2004 and 2007. The payout will benefit the communities of Oruma, Goi and Ikot Ada Udo that were impacted by the four spills.
     
    “The settlement is on a no admission of liability basis, and settles all claims and ends all pending litigation related to the spills,” Shell said.
     
    The case was brought in 2008 by four farmers seeking reparations for lost income from contaminated land and waterways in the region, the heart of Nigeria’s oil industry.
     
    After the appeals court’s final ruling last year, Shell said it continued to believe the spills were caused by sabotage. But the court sided with the farmers, saying Shell had not proven “beyond reasonable doubt” that sabotage had caused the spill, rather than poor maintenance.
     
    Shell is the largest oil operator in the Niger Delta, Africa’s largest oil-producing region. Its residents face high poverty rates and a largely degraded environment, owing to hundreds of spills every year.
     
    “We have groundwater polluted with benzene 900 times above World Health Organization level, we have farmlands with poor yields, rivers that are barely fishable, neonatal deaths numbering thousands yearly as a result of spills. We have reduced neuroplasticity of the brain as a result of oil pollution,” Niger Delta activist Saatah Nubari told CNN. 
     
    “The Niger Delta is a graveyard of the living,” said Nubari, “and we will never know how much harm has been done until we audit the entire environment”.
     
    In 2012, in a similar case, members of the Bodo community in Nigeria filed a lawsuit against Shell for two oil spills and losses suffered to their health, livelihoods, and land.
     
    They also requested clean-up of the oil pollution. In 2015, Shell accepted responsibility for the spill and agreed to pay US$83 million in an out of court settlement and to assist in clean up.
     
    An earlier offer by Shell of less than $5,000 to settle the case was rejected unanimously as “derisory” by the community.  Some 15,600 Bodo residents have benefited from the larger settlement, receiving over $2,500 each. 
     
    Meanwhile, Donald Pols from Friends of the Earth Netherlands commented on the compensation award. “It’s the most beautiful experience to see all the happy faces. Everybody is enormously happy.”
     
     

  • Federation holds Heirs Property Bootcamp

    Federation’s Land Retention Director, Attorney Dania Davy with Federation Executive Director Cornelius Blanding at Bootcamp

    The Federation of Southern Cooperatives/Land Assistance Fund held its fourth annual Heirs Property Bootcamp in Atlanta from December 1-3, 2022.
    The program was open to Black farmers and landowners who have land in heirs property status and need assistance in clearing titles and making productive use of their land.

    Heirs property is land that was passed down in families where the owner did not leave a will and the families own the land in common, based on their generational status in the family. State laws determine who is an heir to an undivided interest in the property.

    In some cases, there are a few heirs but in other cases there could be as many as several hundred, scattered around the nation and the world. The ownership of land in this status makes it vulnerable to loss for non-payment of taxes, or sale by a partitioner from outside the family, or laying idle because none of the tenants can raise or invest money to make it productive.

    Research suggests that 40% or more of the three million acres of farmland still owned by African American people in the South is held as heirs property, which means over one million of the three million acres remaining is held under these unclear joint titles. These one million acres of generational wealth, conservatively valued in the billions of dollars, is in danger of being lost, unless families come together to protect it.

    The Federation’s Bootcamp brings 100 families with heir property problems together to learn about heir property and how to clear titles. Each participant is given a workbook and a schedule of activities like doing a family tree, contacting the heirs, bring heirs together to decide on a common strategy to retain and utilize the land.

    Attorney Dania Davy, who heads the Federation’s Land Retention Department led the bootcamp. “We had 70 families represented this year; we were not able to have a virtual component which reduced attendance. We also had land practioners and attorneys from several states in the Southeast to participate. We are hoping to get families into the process to clear the titles and free the land for a productive use, including establishing family trusts and LLC’s to hold the land into the future for accumulating generational wealth,” said Davy.

    Davy explained that the Federation has been funded by USDA for a multiyear, $5 million national cooperative agreement to provide technical assistance to heirs property owners. This agreement is liked to a USDA investment of $100 million in Heirs Property Relending Funds, which is available through intermediary lenders, most of them Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFI’s). Shared Capital, a cooperative lender and CDFI out of Minneapolis, Minnesota, is the heirs property relending agent that is working with the Federation.

    There were workshops at the Bootcamp on mediation available for families to work out disputes related to the land, clearing title on heirs property; estate planning for heirs property; how to get a UDA farm number for heirs property; ways the Federation assists heirs property owners to manage and get the most income from their land, including how to use USDA programs; and the heirs property relending programs.

    There was also time on the program for families to meet with attorneys on their specific problems and also to get advice on wills and estate planning.

    At the conclusion of the program, Cornelius Blanding thanked the program sponsors including USDA, John Deere, Nationwide Insurance, American Farmland Trust, CoBank, Farm Credit Council, the Farm Policy Center at Alcorn University. Crew, USDA Forest Service, National Cooperative Bank, Vermont Law School-Center for Agriculture and Food Systems and others for their support.

    If you own heir property and need help and technical assistance, contact the Federation’s Land Retention Department at 404-765-0991 or through the website at: http://www.federation.coop.

  • Newswire: Overfishing and environmental changes could leave thousands jobless in Africa

    African fishers face environmental challenges

    Oct. 22, 2022 (GIN) – After decades of overfishing combined with environmental changes, Namibia’s sardine population has finally collapsed, writes Conservation Namibia, a publication of the Namibian Chamber of Environment. “Falling by 99.5% from an estimated 11 million tonnes in the 1960s to a tiny 50,000 tonnes in 2015, this resource is exhausted.”
     
    Despite calls for a moratorium on sardine fishing by scientists since 1995, this was only implemented in 2018 for a period of three years, according to the Chamber of the Environment. The Ministry of Fisheries and Marine Resources (MFMR) is now contemplating reopening sardine fishing, but the stocks may not have recovered sufficiently.
     
    The fishing industry provides jobs for more than 10,000 workers at the country’s port towns of Walvis Bay and Lüderitz in the Kharas Region, according to figures by the Erongo Regional Council. The industry has, over the years, gone through bouts of stress caused by quota corruption, overfishing, and climate change factors making it unstable for its workers.
     
    Fishermen have blamed the government and fishing companies over the years for unfair treatment and mismanagement within the industry.
     
    In 2017, local newspapers reported that ex-fisheries minister, Bernard Esau, who is currently facing charges of fraud and corruption, allegedly downplayed the sardine and pilchard shortage despite advice by scientists at the time calling for a ban. 
     
    One-third of the planet’s assessed fishing stocks are already being overfished. According to the World Wildlife Organization, overfishing can cause also loopholes in entire ecosystems worldwide and creates an imbalance that can “erode the food web”, and can alter the size of fish that are remaining and affect how these fish reproduce including the speed at which they mature.
     
    The demand for fish will continue to increase globally leaving more businesses and jobs dependent on dwindling food fish stocks and high-demand seafood will also continue to drive overexploitation and environmental degradation.
     
    “The collapse of the sardine fish stocks in this highly productive ecosystem is a stark example of the severe repercussions of unsustainable management combining with negative environmental conditions. By delaying the moratorium for many years after fisheries scientists sounded the alarm, the hole was dug ever deeper for this economic sector.
     
    “Getting out of the hole will require a different mindset to the one that got us into it – rather than just focusing on short-term economic gains, Namibia needs a long-term ecosystem-based recovery plan.” 
     
     

  • Newswire:USDA provides payments of nearly $800 million in loan assistance to help keep farmers farming

    WASHINGTON, Oct. 18, 2022 – The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) today announced that distressed borrowers with qualifying USDA farm loans have already received nearly $800 million in assistance, as part of the $3.1 billion in assistance for distressed farm loan borrowers provided through Section 22006 of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA).
    The IRA also rescinded Section 2005 of the American Rescue Plan, which provided full debt forgiveness to BIPOC farmers. These benefits were challenged by white farmers who filed lawsuits in Federal District Courts around the nation. These lawsuits succeeded in getting injunctions to halt the program. The relief for distressed farmers in the IRA was an alternative means of assisting farmers in financial distress due to the pandemic and inflationary cost increases.
    The IRA directed USDA to expedite assistance to distressed borrowers of direct or guaranteed loans administered by USDA’s Farm Service Agency (USDA) whose operations face financial risk.
    Today’s announcement kicks off a process to provide assistance to distressed farm loan borrowers using several complementary approaches, with the goal of keeping them farming, removing obstacles that currently prevent many of these borrowers from returning to farming, and improving the way that USDA approaches borrowing and servicing. Through this assistance, USDA is focused on generating long-term stability and success for distressed borrowers.
    “Through no fault of their own, our nation’s farmers and ranchers have faced incredibly tough circumstances over the last few years,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “The funding included in today’s announcement helps keep our farmers farming and provides a fresh start for producers in challenging positions.”
    `Work has already started to bring some relief to distressed farmers. As of today, over 13,000 borrowers have already benefited from the resources provided under the Inflation Reduction Act as follows:
    Approximately 11,000 delinquent direct and guaranteed borrowers had their accounts brought current. USDA also paid the next scheduled annual installment for these direct loan borrowers giving them peace of mind in the near term.
    Approximately 2,100 borrowers who had their farms foreclosed on and still had remaining debt have had this debt resolved in order to cease debt collections and garnishment relieving that burden that has made getting a fresh start more difficult.
    In addition to the automatic assistance already provided, USDA has also outlined steps to administer up to an additional $500 million in payments to benefit the following distressed borrowers:
    USDA will administer $66 million in separate automatic payments, using COVID-19 pandemic relief funds, to support up to 7,000 direct loan borrowers who used FSA’s disaster-set-aside option during the pandemic to move their scheduled payments to the end of their loans.

    USDA is also initiating two case-by-case processes to provide additional assistance to farm loan borrowers. Under the first new process, FSA will review and assist with delinquencies from 1,600 complex cases, including cases in which borrowers are facing bankruptcy or foreclosure. The second new process will add a new option using existing direct loan servicing criteria to intervene more quickly and help an estimated 14,000 financially distressed borrowers who request assistance to avoid even becoming delinquent.
    More details on each of the categories of assistance are available at the factsheet on the USDA website.

    ` Similar to other USDA assistance, all of these payments will be reported as income and borrowers are encouraged to consult their tax advisors. USDA also has resources and partnerships with cooperators who can provide additional assistance and help borrowers navigate the process.

    The announcement today is only the first step in USDA’s efforts to provide assistance to distressed farm loan borrowers and respond to farmers and to improve the loan servicing efforts at USDA by adding more tools and relaxing unnecessary restrictions. Additional announcements and investments in assistance will be made as USDA institutes these additional changes and improvements.
    This effort will ultimately also include adding more tools and relaxing unnecessary restrictions through assistance made possible by Congress through the IRA. Further assistance and changes to the approach will be made in subsequent phases.