A report from Liberia, about the spread of palm oil plantations. There are good things to say about this of course. Useful economic development in that poor benighted country, a lifting of at least some of the pressure on those Malaysian and Indonesian areas that home pongo pongo and all that. And yet there’s a problem:

Several miles farther on, past endless rows of carefully cultivated palm trees, it’s a slogan that bears little relation to reality. Gbenee Town is a small huddle of huts surrounded by a plantation more than six times the size of London’s Richmond Park.

The townspeople say that the benefits of the plantation’s expansion have passed them by and they have been duped by a government that took the land they were living off and gave it to foreign investors.

The base problem being that these people didn’t own the land. The government could therefore assign it as the government wished. The solution has already - for the future at least - been enacted:

The Land Rights Act, which was passed last year, is key to that effort. It gives communities ownership of ancestral lands, allowing them to make demands of firms that want to exploit it.

Quite so, people who won things get to say what is done with those things. Both the definition and point of ownership. Something worth recalling when people here start to demand that land ownership should be in the hands of the state, eh? When that happens we will only be the occupiers, at Whitehall’s whim, rather than the owners of our own fate.

As we’ve been noting over the years private property rights are the foundation of that freedom from the whims of the state and its governors.