Land Rights in Gabon Facing Up to the Past – and Present Liz Alden Wily with contributions from Nathalie Faure A Report by FERN April 2012 Produced by FERN. FERN works to achieve greater environmental and social justice, focusing on forests and forest peoples’ rights in the policies and practices of the EU. FERN’s aim is to work with partners to improve forest governance and strengthen tenure rights of local communities by using the EU FLEGT process, which also aims to control the import of illegal timber in the EU. Around half of the tropical timber and 20 per cent of timber from boreal forests imported into the EU is illegally sourced. Illegal logging destroys forests and damages communities, but it is hard to tackle because it is often an integral part of a nation’s economy, giving financial support to political parties and companies. FERN believes the challenge is to address the root causes of illegal operations: lack of good governance, including corruption, unjust tenure regimes and government policies that marginalise local people. Author: Liz Alden Wily Design: Daan van Beek, the Netherlands Print: Redlin, UK Photos: Rainforest Foundation UK Produced by FERN, Brussels, Belgium/ Moreton in Marsh, UK Key words: Gabon, customary land tenure, forests, forest reform ISBN: 978-1-906607-21-0 FERN office UK, 1C Fosseway Business Centre, Stratford Road, Moreton in Marsh, GL56 9NQ, UK FERN office Brussels, 26 Rue d’Edimbourg, 1050 Brussels, Belgium www.fern.org This publication has been made possible with financial support from SwedBio/CBM, DG Development of the European Commission, DG Environment of the European Commission and ICCO. The views in this report are those of the author and do not necessarily represent FERN’s position or that of any of the donors. April 2012 Contents Overview 5 Figure 1: Overview of Gabon 8 Preface 9 Acknowledgements 10 Introduction 11 Figure 2: Physical Geography of Gabon 13 Chapter One The Status of Land & Resource Rights in Gabon 15 1 Background 16 Box 1: Snapshot of modern Gabon 16 Box 2: Gabon timeline 18 Box 3: The legal framework 22 2 What Gabon Law Says About Land Rights 26 Table 1: Post-independence legislation relating to land rights 26 Box 4: Human Rights Instruments in the Gabon Constitution 28 Figure 3: Official procedure for acquiring private land title in Gabon 39 Box 5: Forest Classification in Gabon under the 2001 law 43 Box 6: Evolution of conservation policy in Gabon 49 Figure 4: Provinces in Gabon today 53 3 Conclusions 56 Chapter Two Looking Back to Better Understand the Present 59 Introduction 60 1 Early Settlement of Gabon 61 Box 7: Hunter-gatherers in Gabon 63 Figure 5: Location of Pygmies in Central Africa 63 Figure 6: Location of Pygmy Groups in Gabon Today 64 2 The Mercantile Era: 1472-1842 65 Figure 7: The extent of the slave trade in Gabon in 1830 67 3 The Enclave Colony: 1846-1886 71 Box 8: Ceding sovereignty of the estuary 72 Figure 8: The coastal enclave colony of Gabon ( 1846-1886) and trading expansion 74 4 The Greater Colony of Gabon: 1886-1960 81 Box 9: The General Act of the Berlin conference on West Africa, 1885 83 Figure 9: The area granted to Société du Haut-Ogooué (SHO) 86 5 Founding Land Laws Of Modern Gabon 88 6 The Concession Era: 1899-1919 94 Figure 10: Circumscriptions (administrative divisions of Gabon in 1916 96 Box 10: An Example of Villagization in Gabon- Bolossoville 105 Box 11: Ngou – a small village in the north 107 Chapter Three Back to the Present and Looking Forward 111 1 Putting The Past into Context 112 2 Urbanization And What It Means For Land Rights 114 Box 12: Onslaught on Essassa 123 Box 13: The Gabon Special Economic Zone 124 3 The New Land Grab in Gabon 125 Box 14: Features of the current land rush in Africa 126 4 Conclusions 135 5 Looking to Other Africa States for New Approaches to Old Problems 137 6 Moving Forward in Gabon 143 Cited References 153 Land Rights in Gabon Facing Up to the Past – and Present Overview The central African state of Gabon faces many challenges. For over a century the people have endured dispossession of their lands and resources, both in law and in practice. This began in 1899 when France declared itself owner of the soil. Virtually the entire country was then allocated to French logging companies. As well as making money for themselves and the colonial administration, these companies served as the state in remote areas, helping collect taxes and control waterways. Thus began the long association of aligned state and private business which still characterizes Gabon today. These events also put an end to nearly two centuries of one of the most highly developed African trading regimes of the time, in which local clans serviced international slave and commodity trading. Their participation had crucial effects on land relations. First, social polar- ization and the emergence of wealthy ‘big men’ and elite classes developed. Second, fierce competition to control resources and trading routes in the interior heightened clan-based territoriality and the sense of land as property. When the French established their first colony around the Libreville estuary in the 1840s, they did not question that the land in the colony was already owned and merely introduced a law (1849) to regulate how Africans sold their lands to immigrants. Pretence that Gabon was ‘empty of owners’ only came later, when France sought to expand its control to the entire area, now known as Gabon, and did not want to pay for the vast lands it then handed over to its own enterprises, with itself as landlord. With local elites increasingly party to the benefits and integral to political dominance, it is perhaps not surprising that Independence in 1960 did not bring with it liberation of majority land rights. Then and now the only way land ownership may be secured (outside of transac- tions within the tiny private sector) is through grant or sale of parcels by the government. The process is sufficiently inaccessible, politically-advantaged, complex, expensive, and demanding of demonstrated development that only a minority of urban and even fewer rural inhabitants have completed it since 1902. Only 40,000 private titles exist, mainly for urban plots. Those without title – the vast majority – remain technically landless occupants on state property, from which they may be evicted at any time. Compensation for other than titled plots is only available at the erratic discretion of the state. Little change to land and property law has been made since 1910. Changes that have been made have focused on periodic improvement of allocation procedures (but with little impact) and are now proposed again – without the intention to alter the fundamentals of dispossession – which retain the government as majority owner and partisan regulator at the expense of its own citizens. 5 Land Rights in Gabon Facing Up to the Past – and Present Forests represent a major land resource covering 85% of the country and laws of 1982 and 2001 have more explicitly entrenched these as government property. While customary use of these areas is upheld, no family or community can secure ownership of its traditional forests, arguably its most precious livelihood and capital asset. The government has been either unaware of, or unwilling to explore economic growth models, which include rather than exclude customary landholders as accepted landowners, and thence partners or even lessors of lands to entrepreneurs. The state has meanwhile demonstrated extreme bad faith by failing to deliver on the limited legal improvements it has made since 2001. The most severe omission has been failure to demarcate the Rural Forest Domain. Although this would not have made rural populations the legal owners of their lands, it would have at least helped them to secure rights of occupancy and use and give them a stronger hand in dealing with invasive concessions. Assurances made to populations evicted by the much-praised move to give protected status to ten percent of Gabon’s area have also not been backed up with essential enabling decrees. Nor has a promise to better regulate the logging sector itself been significantly realized. Despite the rise of permitted concession areas from 200,000 ha to 600,000 ha per company in 2001 – this continues to be exceeded – the export ban on round logs is periodically ignored, concession plans or social agreements with local communities are only occasionally forth- coming, and without the promised boundary demarcation of often overlapping mining, logging and now agri-business concessions. Both protected areas and community lands — For the majority of citizens rightful security of tenure or even the hope of security of real tenure does not exist in Gabon 6 Land Rights in Gabon Facing Up to the Past – and Present are routinely encroached. Nor have needed changes in governance, which could support a fairer land and resource-based economy, been put in place as legislated for in 1997. No rural community councils or borough councils have been established; these might have given greater say to local populations over land and resource allocation in their areas. Turning laws into hollow promises has encouraged impunity, corruption and loss of faith in the state. Inse- curity of tenure is rife. Gabon is unusual in the fact that 86% or more of the population lives in cities or towns. This has been used to help explain inattention to rural rights. However, the interconnectivity of rural and urban populations in Gabon is underestimated. This study, like others before it, found that rural-urban movement is noticeably fluid, urban dwellers returning routinely to village areas and remaining there when jobs in towns are hard to find.