Land grabbing is a central feature of the industrialised production of agricultural commodities, and coffee is no exception. Large-scale land acquisition by private corporations rarely involves genuinely unused land. Instead, these acquisitions most often affect land already under use: smallholder farms, customary pastures, and fertile or densely populated areas that support local livelihoods and local food systems.
In August 2001, four villages in Mubende District, Uganda, disappeared almost overnight.
Kitemba, Luwunga, Kijunga and Kiryamakobe sat on just over 2,500 hectares of land where families had farmed for years. They grew food, kept livestock, and produced coffee at small scale. That land was reclassified as an investment site following negotiations between the Ugandan government and the German multinational Neumann Kaffee Gruppe for the establishment of a large coffee plantation. With the support of local authorities, the Ugandan army carried out violent evictions. Homes were burned, crops and livestock were destroyed, and around 4,000 people were forced to leave the land.
The lease agreement required the land to be uninhabited and included provisions for compensation. In reality, most displaced families received nothing. After the eviction, the land was leased to Kaweri Coffee Plantation Ltd., a wholly owned subsidiary of Neumann Kaffee Gruppe, and the plantation was established on cleared land.
In the years that followed, more than 2,000 displaced residents pursued legal action against the Ugandan government and the plantation company. When domestic proceedings failed, a formal complaint was lodged in Germany under the OECD Guidelines for Multinational Enterprises. In 2013, the High Court in Kampala ruled that compensation was owed and sharply criticised the investor for its disregard of human rights. Appeals followed, and the provision of justice was delayed.
Academic research on the Kaweri case shows that the dispossession was made possible not by the absence of legal protections, but by their contradiction. Uganda’s constitution formally recognises customary land tenure, even where land is not formally titled. At the same time, development policy grants the state broad authority to acquire land in the “public interest” and lease it to foreign investors. What constitutes public interest is not clearly defined, creating space for displacement to occur within the law.
This has been described as accumulation by ambiguity. Land is transferred not only through overtly illegal acts, but through overlapping and unclear legal frameworks that privilege formalised land tenure and investment goals over customary use. The result is land acquisition that is legally defensible while producing severe social and economic harm.
The Kaweri plantation was also supported by international development institutions, including German development agencies and the African Development Bank. The European Parliament has since noted that Germany failed to assess the human rights impacts of the project before providing financial support and did not ensure that affected communities had access to effective remedies. This places responsibility not only with corporations and states, but with the development architecture that enables large-scale commercial coffee projects to proceed.
These dynamics are most visible in commercial coffee production, where scale, export orientation, and consistency are prioritised. In this context, land becomes a strategic asset, and control over land becomes a central expression of power in the coffee system. Decisions about land use are made far from the communities who depend on it, while the consequences are local, permanent, and difficult to reverse.
What the academic work makes clear is that land acquisition is not a side effect of commercial coffee production, but one of its organising mechanisms. The ability to reclassify land, to define public interest, and to delay remedy when harm occurs is a form of power embedded in commercial coffee systems. Ignoring land means ignoring where that power is most clearly expressed, and where its impacts are most difficult to reverse.
