Dear friends, we ask for your support.
Our colleagues from the No2Bidco Campaign in Uganda and Kenya have contacted us to request support for their struggle against Bidco Africa. This multinational company -in a joint venture with Wilmar International- owns among others, the OPUL oil palm plantation and a palm oil refinery on the Lake Victoria island of Bugala, Uganda.
Bidco and OPUL have decimated the province of Kalangala on Bugala Island, clearing some 18,000 acres of rainforest to make way for a large scale monoculture oil palm plantation. Kalangala has suffered a double blow from Bidco’s investment: not only is the environment irrevocably damaged, but also smallholder farmers in the area have been kicked off from the land they have been cultivating for generations.
Local farmers who were engaged in the project (as part of an outgrowers scheme) believing in the promises that oil palm plantations would improve their livelihoods, are denouncing that the company, in partnership with the government, fixed monopolistic purchase prices that make it impossible for them to earn a living.
The United Nations Development Programme is currently investigating its decision to partner with Bidco.
We are requesting your support to help raise awareness so that organizations associated with Bidco, such as the UNDP, IFC, World Bank and UN Global Compact stop making business with this multinational company.
If you would like to endorse a letter requesting UNDP
to immediately disassociate from the project please do so at:
https://www.change.org/p/undp-stop-the-involvement-with-bidco-group
For further information on the case we encourage you to see the following videos:
For more information, please visit: www.no2bidco.org
Thanking you in advance.
The WRM Team.