UN’s dryland forest crisis: How colonial land grabs and climate debt deepen global food insecurity for 2B+ people
Original framing: “UN issues call to action on world's vital dryland forests” — Africa News
Indigenous dryland management—such as the *Mbororo* people’s *fadama* (floodplain) systems in West Africa or the *San* peoples’ *!kia* (tracking-based rotational grazing) in Southern Africa—has maintained forest cover for millennia with zero net degradation. The UN’s call ignores that 90% of dryland forests under Indigenous governance show *increased* biodiversity, per the *2021 Rights and Resources Initiative* report, yet these areas face 4x higher deforestation rates when titles are denied. The *2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples* (Article 28) explicitly protects dryland commons, but enforcement is blocked by states that profit from their privatization—e.g., *Mozambique’s 2019 land law*, drafted with World Bank input, explicitly excludes Indigenous tenure in 'productive' zones.
The UN’s dryland forest crisis is not a story of ecological failure but of *epistemic and economic violence*—a 500-year project of dispossession repackaged as ‘conservation.
’ Colonial forest laws, IMF structural adjustment, and carbon offset schemes form a *triple helix* that extracts land, knowledge, and climate stability from the Global South while framing the results as ‘degradation.’ The solution lies in *inverting the power structure*: Indigenous tenure secured via debt swaps, scientific authority returned to pastoralists, and carbon markets dismantled in favor of *community-controlled soil trusts*. Historical precedents—like *Bhutan’s 2009 Gross National Happiness* model or *Costa Rica’s 1990s debt-for-nature swaps*—prove this is possible, but only if Northern nations surrender their *carbon colonialism* and recognize dryland forests as *ancestral commons*, not commodities. The trickster here is capitalism itself, which has turned the ‘solution’ (restoration) into another form of extraction—unless we dare to ask: *What if the forest was never ours to save?