Why Should Rubber Barons Have A Duty

Land has always been desirable. Wars have been fought, blood spilled, and lives destroyed over it. Nowadays, lives are still being destroyed by the desire for land, but often in more subtle ways, like land grabs and forced evictions and the power of the rich over the poor local communities. Despite national laws put in place to protect people and forests, in Cambodia and Laos massively powerful Vietnamese ‘rubber barons’ (Hoang Anh Gia Lai and the Vietnam Rubber Group) backed by foreign investments from Deutsche Bank and the International Finance Corporation have been illegally logging, harassing and evicting people, obtaining land without the consent and knowledge of those who live on it, and depriving thousands of their livelihood.
As Thomas Pogge notes, this is completely unacceptable. It’s morally unjust for those who already have plenty to attempt to make more by depriving a country of its national resources and plunging its people into poverty. These rubber barons should stop, and they also have a duty to return what’s possible and necessary in order to restore the people to a reasonable living standard. They aren’t entitled to the land or to benefits gained from it, as the way the benefits were
Firstly, the right of property and individual rights doesn’t trump the right to life, which extreme poverty and the loss of livelihood threatens. Most all nations and people agree the right to life has highest priority, such that murder is generally considered the most serious crime possible, with us only allowed to kill in self-defense, in defense of our own right to life. As such, one’s individual rights to life trump that of right to property or freedom of actions which deprive others of their right to