Cameroon

This bulletin, on International Women's Day, is a call for direct and radical solidarity with those women who suffer, resist, organize and mobilize against the daily violence and abuse that industrial plantations cause.

From rapes, forced body searches and searches of private spaces, to the risk of losing their lives: this article calls on us not to be accomplices to the violence women living around tree plantations in Cameroon suffer.

A woman from the village of Mbonjo 1, Cameroon, which has witnessed the impact of industrial palm oil plantations and the constant presence of the military, calls for international solidarity and protection of right to life and freedom.

Plantations are increasingly surrounding and engulfing communities. Women must walk through company-occupied lands in order to seek their livelihoods. This, among other things, can cost them their lives.

The sixth and latest issue of the magazine “Trait d’Union“, a trimestral magazine and liaison of the associations of populations surrounded by oil palm plantations from SOCAPALM, workers’ unions and oil palm planters, was released. The magazine shares over 15 relevant articles highlighting different aspects of the struggles surrounding these oil palm plantations in Cameroon. This time, we want to emphasize two articles:

In West and Central Africa, the many radically different ways in time and space of how people relate to and manage land reflects the many forms of customary tenure that interact and overlap between themselves as well as with statutory law. This article highlights the reflections of four activists from West and Central Africa.

A new Survival International report documents serious instances of widespread and systematic human rights abuses between 1989 and the present day in Cameroon, the Republic of Congo, and the Central African Republic (CAR) by wildlife guards funded and equipped by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the parent organization of New York’s Bronx zoo. Documented abuses and harassment are likely just a small fraction of the full picture of systematic and on-going violence, beatings, torture and even death.

Large-scale monoculture plantations “rob women of everything they have as they take the agricultural lands and forests that women depend upon for their livelihoods and for feeding their families”. This is part of the final declaration of a workshop organized in Port Loko, Sierra Leona, in August 2017, which brought together women from Sierra Leona’s Northern, Southern and Eastern regions, together with representatives from Cameroon, Liberia and Guinee. (1)

Photo: SOCFIN

The fifth issue of the journal "Trait d'Union", a trimestral magazine and liaison of the associations of populations surrounded by SOCAPALM plantations, workers' unions and oil palm planters, is available at this link. The issues of the Magazine Trait d'Union can be downloaded for free at www.palmespoir.org

Hundreds of people who live in the vicinity of SOCAPALM and SAFACAM plantations went to SOCAPALM headquarters in Bonanjo, Douala, Cameroon, to request a serious dialogue. Local residents complain that the existing dialogue is very uncertain, and that it lacks a strong framework for effective problem-solving. This is considering the very little progress made in recent years. Local communities, organized through SYNAPARCAM, are requesting to meet with the Director General to establish a solid framework for dialogue.

Marie Crescence Ngobo coordinates the Sustainable Development Actors Network in Cameroon (RADD, by its French acronym). RADD works with women on economic and social issues, organizing activities that help women regain their identity and autonomy, in order to improve their families' living conditions.  Marie Crescence, you organized four workshops on traditional oil palm in 2016. How did that work, and what did you observe in those meetings with women?