Deal #544

*In 2007 InnovGreen arrived and started to take possession of villagers’ forest land with land certificates in hand for a duration of 50 years to grow acacia and eucalyptus trees for their paper pulp mills.

*Most of local residents who are mainly Thai and Kho Mu ethnic minorities have no clear idea where the company is from, what it intents, and how their subsistence livelihoods will be affected as well as to maintain their long standing traditional lifestyle and customary practices.

*All activities stopped in 2011 and the project was abandoned. According to Nghe An People's Committee, in 2016, they already asked to shut down the project and reclaim the land after reviewing the project. In January 2019, the Department of Natural Resources and Environment reported that they couldn't reclaim the land yet because it was an important project in the department’s raw material area planning and they must follow the procedures carefully to avoid unnecessary complications and lawsuits.

*Farmers who did not agree with these plans were threatened by company representatives to loose their forest land titles. Their Red Book land title certificates were collected and returned only after months-long protests. This information was confirmed by local authority leaders during a subsequent commune meeting.

*Acacia boom poses another major threat to biodiversity conservation of protected areas in the region, resulting in Special Use Forests (SUF) becoming more isolated and fragmented. This also compels local people to turn increasingly to SUFs for much needed food items. *More than 300 households had to cut this size of land out of their upland land to make place for the paper pulp project without any compensation.

In many cases, no compensation was paid. *Many villagers reported that the company cheated them, annexed much more land than previously announced, and did not pay compensation for trees and land as they promised before. Other villagers, who were hired for land clearing operations, did not receive payments for several months.

*InnovGreen promised to build roads and create jobs for local people, but until now the ten kilometer road to Ban Danh village is still a rough dirt road. The Company promised to build social facilities for the village and to offer jobs. Many families, but not all, handed over their land to this firm but haven’t seen any benefits from the project so far. Even their wages have not been paid.