Cameroon

Au milieu d’un désert vert de 60 000 hectares de plantations de palmiers à huile se trouvent 150 hectares de terres agricoles et boisées qui appartiennent au village d’Apouh A Ngog de la région d’Edéa, au Cameroun. Le village en question, comme tant d’autres, est encerclé par les plantations et, depuis des années, est en conflit avec Socapalm, filiale locale du groupe français Bolloré [1].

Most Baka, Bagyeli and Bakola, recognised as “people of the forest,” still rely on hunting and gathering to secure their livelihoods, and even though some also cultivate annual crops, the majority still rely on the forests. For them, the forest is their ancestral home, their reliable grocery, the root of their existence, and their customary right (seeWRM Bulletin Nº 87).

After French industrialist Vincent Bolloré filed two lawsuits against Radio France Inter, both for alleged defamation regarding plantations operated by SOCAPALM (Société Camerounaise de Palmeraies), photographer Isabelle Alexandra Ricq and researcher Julien-François Gerber addressed ten lies typically used to defend Bolloré, one by one.

To establish a communal forest may look like a good proposal. However, it may be not, according to many local villagers from the district of Dzeng (Center Province, Department of Nyong and So'o), who have denounced the attempt of the current Dzeng’s mayor to make use of their forest lands for commercial exploitation. Some 25.182 hectares of forest lands would be classified as a "communal forest", an intermediate category between logging concessions and community forests. 

This new publication of the WRM Series on Plantations (* ) examines resistances of populations neighboring two of Africa’s largest industrial tree plantations: the rubber monoculture Hévéa-Cameroun (HEVECAM) and the oil palm plantation Société Camerounaise de Palmeraies (SOCAPALM). The report intends to contribute to fill a lack of information on the situation around commercial plantations in Equatorial Africa. 

(Only available in French) Populations locales versus plantations commerciales d’hévéas et de palmiers à huile dans le Sud-Cameroun By Julien-François Gerber Résistances contre deux géants industriels en forêt tropicale

Oil palm and rubber plantations occupy extensive areas in many countries in tropical Africa. In spite of their social and environmental impacts, until now they have received scant attention both at the national and international level.

In South-Western Cameroon, near Kribi, two giant industrial plantations cover a total area of 62,000 hectares. One of them, HEVECAM, is a rubber tree monoculture belonging to the Singapore-based GMG group, while the other, SOCAPALM, is an oil palm plantation, property of the French group Bolloré.

One of the main characteristics of Cameroon’s economic policies since independence is their institutional promotion of large-scale industrial plantations. Between 1971 and 1981, the state allocated to them no less than 60% of the public funds reserved for agricultural development. The most important feature of these large-scale plantations was – and still is – their domination by only a few agro-industrial firms, highly protected, oligopolistic, and dependant on capital-intensive technologies.

I visited Cameroon in December 2006 and again in September 2007. In both trips I was shocked by the sheer number of trucks loaded with huge logs of tropical trees that could be seen on almost any road. Most of them were on their way to the ports from where they would be exported –unprocessed- to mostly northern countries.

Indigenous peoples living in the tropical rainforests of Central Africa are widely dispersed and identify their groups by a variety of names. Numbering a total of 300,000 to 500,000 people, those members of communities from several ethnic groups characterized by their small stature are identified under the generic name of “pygmies” (see WRM Bulletin Nº 119).

The Indigenous hunter-gatherers of the central African forests, so-called Pygmy peoples, consist of at least 15 distinct ethnolinguistic groups including the Gyéli, Kola, Baka, Aka, Bongo, Efe, Mbuti, western Twa, and eastern Twa living in ten central African countries: Angola, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic, Gabon, Republic of the Congo (Congo), Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. Their estimated total number is from 300 000 to 500 000 people.