"Harvest of hardship: Yala Swamp land grab destroys Kenyan farmers' livelihoods"

Dominion Farms arrived in Kenya's Yala Swamp basin in 2004 with big promises. The company claimed it would turn a defunct state demonstration farm into a modern rice plantation, provide locals with good jobs, and build hospitals and schools...But a decade later, the communities have harvested nothing but hardship..."When Burgess came, we did not object to him taking the lands that had already been allocated to the Government years before for the development of an experimental farm," says Erastus Odindo, a local farmer. "But Dominion Farms has put a fence around much more land than that. The company has taken over all of our community lands without our consent and blocked our access to water." Odindo and other local farmers lost nearly all of the lands that they use for grazing their cattle.