Alfred Brownell Speaks on Land Rights in West Africa

On November 9, 2018, Liberian public interest lawyer and land rights advocate Alfred Brownell spoke at the Law School about his work defending vulnerable communities and the environment in West Africa. Brownell is the founder and lead campaigner of Green Advocates International and currently serves as a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at Northeastern University School of Law.

Brownell began his talk by explaining the early history of Liberia. Founded in 1847 by freed slaves from the United States, Liberia’s land was wrested from indigenous hands by a combination of purchase and conquest. “It was at the point of a gun that a chief signed the first treaty,” Brownell said. More recently, Liberia suffered two civil wars from 1989–1997 and 1999–2003. To Brownell, the conflicts throughout Liberia’s history are closely tied to his work in the present day. “The whole struggle was about trying to decide citizenship, and citizenship was really informed by the rights to land and the rights to resources,” he explained.

In his work, Brownell has pioneered the defense of those rights. When he founded Green Advocates, which is dedicated to protecting the environment and empowering the voices of poor Liberians victimized by resource exploitation, there was no framework for environmental law in Liberia. Brownell had to start from scratch. “With no guidance, with no help, I just started trying to read everything I could find,” he said. He eventually based the work of Green Advocates on Article 65 of the Liberian constitution, which enshrines customary and statutory rights.

Since establishing Green Advocates, Brownell has fought against a host of injustices, among them land grabs, pollution, and unfair labor practices. He noted that companies have made billions of dollars “on the back of kids as slave laborers” by overworking their parents to such an extent that children are called upon to help too. For example, he pointed out, the Bridgestone plantation in Liberia assigned laborers to tap 900 rubber trees each. Parents had to call upon their children to help them fill this impossibly high quota.

Green Advocates has also resisted the commodification and exploitation of indigenous land. Brownell denounced the “concession of land to corporations with no consultation” of the indigenous communities living there. These corporations see the land only as a resource “to exploit and extract.” He argued that this view of the land undermines “centuries of culture, of tradition, of values, of ways of life, of livelihoods — this land is also a home for people who have lived there and managed it for centuries.”

Brownell explained that when corporations dispossess indigenous people from their land, they offer them poor compensation. For instance, people are receiving only six dollars for an orange tree that produces a yield worth up to $120 annually. If this is what large-scale investment offers the poor, he concluded, then there is “something fundamentally wrong about the development model.” Brownell was quick to add that he is “not anti-palm oil or anti-business.” He simply believes there are more responsible ways to pursue those ends and promote the coexistence of business interests and indigenous rights.

With Green Advocates, Brownell has had significant successes, such as securing temporary protection of six million acres of forest. Yet his work has also exposed him to threats so severe that he was forced to flee Liberia. He now works on these issues from afar, even mobilizing his students at Northeastern to help pursue cases.

Overall, Brownell emphasized the importance of making changes to the way that we conceive of land and land rights. He criticized the notion that development by large corporations would benefit Liberia. “Can you call this investment?” he asked. “Can you call it development when the poor are further impoverished?”