Deal #234 Version #45528

Out of the seven impacted villages, only four were warned beforehand that land from their village had been conceded. Their stories show the type of repressive and ideological pressure they faced to accept the concession.

employement Compensation for lost land can be seen as a retroactive tactic used to reduce resentment to the project after land had been acquired. Rather than being a proactive strategy of offering high prices in advance to force villagers to give up their land, compensation was retroactive in the sense that it was intended to smooth over resentment that might result from the bumpy process of directly appropriating land. In most cases, compensation was only offered when villagers confronted the company about land that had already been cleared. HAGL only offered compensation in advance when they could visibly see highly valuable economic productivity on the land, such as commercial tree plots, or when they encountered farmers working in their fields during the clearing process. Compensation can be seen as a strategy for lessening the possibilities of civil unrest, sabotage to plantations, etc. Whether proactive or retroactive, the compensation process went unregulated – compensation amounts were decided based upon individual negotiations between the village household and HAGL representatives, characterized by a clear misbalance of power. Such negotiations led to prices far below the market value of the land, and much less than what villagers requested. HAGL forced villagers to accept such low prices by threatening to not award any compensation at all, a threat that villagers felt they could have no recourse against.