Harvesting Hunger in Angola’s Diamond Fields

The seizure of farmland for the purposes of commercial diamond mining in Angola’s Lunda provinces is causing widespread hunger and deepening poverty, according to new research to be released on July 30 2008. The report, titled Harvesting Hunger in Angola’s Diamond Fields, focuses on the activities of the Sociedade Mineira do Cuango (SMC): a joint venture led and managed by a British-based mining enterprise, ITM Mining, in partnership with the Angolan diamond parastatal, Endiama, and Lumanhe, a private company owned by Angolan Army generals.

Research conducted by independent Angolan journalist Rafael Marques, in collaboration with a network of local activists in the Cuango municipality of Lunda Norte province, records how SMC usually arrives without warning at night and destroys fields where crops are cultivated. The company then takes arbitrary measurements of the affected areas in order to determine how much to pay the peasants. This practice is leaving thousands of people hungry while SMC expands its concessions. In 2007, SMC had a production turnover of 340,002 carats of diamonds, yet farmers are paid only US$0.25 for each square metre of land that is seized.

The report highlights how the legal framework that governs the diamond industry in the Lunda provinces effectively denies full rights of citizenship to the region’s farming population, putting the commercial interests of the companies ahead of the local people’s land rights. Yet even those aspects of the law which ought to provide some protection for farmers – demanding, for example, fair compensation for land expropriated – are routinely ignored by SMC, whose compensation payments in no way reflect the productive value of the land that is being seized. The company appears to enjoy impunity despite the illegality of its actions.

The report calls on the companies involved to start negotiations with the farming communities of the Lunda region with a view to establishing mechanisms to ensure fair compensation for people who lose access to their land as a result of the granting of diamond mining concessions. It calls on the Angolan government to enforce the laws that govern the diamond industry in the Lundas, and to ensure that the region’s farmers are accorded their full rights as citizens.

*For further information, please contact Rafael Marques at +244 929 419644; +244 912 331034; or by e-mail at: [email][email protected]

*Please send comments to [email protected] or comment online at