The current World Bank’s land titling program in northeastern Brazil is a license for land grabbing.
(Washington D.C. March 21, 2018) The World Bank is financing a land titling program in the Brazilian State of Piauí, where large areas of land have been grabbed from local communities and illegally occupied by big agribusiness companies. If the program continues unchecked, it will further open the door for a dangerous rush of “legalized” land grabbing, affecting thousands of families and destroying an important ecosystem.
In Piauí alone, 11,000 farmers face eviction, as 4 million hectares of land are being privatized and snapped up by international companies. Hundreds of millions of dollars of investments have flooded into the region as foreign pension funds including U.S. giant TIAA, university endowments such as Harvard, and other financial companies acquire farmlands via Brazilian intermediaries. Internal documents show that the World Bank is aware of the extent of land grabbing and its impacts in the area.
source: https://www.actionaidusa.org/