“Our Land, Our Future”: LEMU’s message for World Environment Day 

Our Land, Our Future! What does this statement mean to people who depend on land? | The author, Theresa Auma O. Eliu, PhD, is Executive Director of LEMU. 

As the world marks 52 years of commemorating the World Environment Day since its inception in the Stockholm Conference in Sweden in 1972, it is important to interrogate the theme of this year’s celebration – “our land our future”.

In many African societies – including in Uganda – land is not only a site of production but carries several other connotations including cultural, religious, political and historical identities.

It is on land where people bury the dead and keep family and clan ties, it is on land where people grow foods that are culturally specific to their diets, it is on land where societies define their boundaries and keep their identities as a people, it is on land where people erect structures of worship and construct historical memories about the past generation.

Land has therefore held societies together, weaving layers of generations upon generations, making land a thing of past, present and future relevance. Keeping land therefore means keeping up with the past, with the present and with the future.

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For a long time, customary land acted as a shield against market forms of dispossession but this too has become under attack as it is now being turned into  a commodity, with many individuals and families selling off their customary land as a result of poverty.

Research has shown that in northern Uganda for example, some poor people sell their land to pay school fees, pay medical bills in private hospitals in case of prolonged illness, bury their dead, marry wives for their sons, and some even sell land to buy food.

Interestingly, the rich are the buyers of land from the poor population. So who are the rich buying off land? They are businessmen, civil servants, politicians and the list goes on and on. This process has occasioned an ongoing transfer of land from the poor to the rich.

If poor people sell their land for today’s survival, where then is their future? Where is the future of their children? It is worth noting that land being sold, at least for the case of northern and eastern Uganda is not because there is plenty of land, as may be wrongly assumed. Infact, poor families are not only facing a land shortage, they are also facing a food shortage.

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