Gabon

Governments are opening the doors to corporations for planting vast areas of land with oil palm plantations. This trend is not only happening in West and Central African countries, but is even expanding to parts of Eastern Africa. Large scale oil palm plantations are already causing serious environmental and social impacts in some countries, resulting in loss of community rights over their territories.

Only available in French By Franck Ndijimbi.

Tropical rainforests cover 85% of the total land area in Gabon. They are home to an immense diversity of species, on which some 300,000 people depend for their survival, through hunting, gathering, fishing and small farming.

ACTION ALERT - GABON  As many countries in Africa, Gabon is facing an alarming rate of expansion of oil palm and rubber plantations. The government has given the Singapore based company Olam 300,000 hectares of land to establish monoculture tree plantations.

Oil palm has traditionally been part of the culture of West and Central African communities, who have planted it on their own lands or collected its fruits, leaves or sap from the forest. The native crop has been locally processed to obtain palm oil for domestic use or sold in the local markets to produce palm wine (see the WRM briefing “Oil palm in Africa: Past, present and future scenarios”,http://wrm.org.uy/countries/Africa/Oil_Palm_in_Africa.html).

By Forests Monitor, 2001 Sold Down the River - The Need to Control Transnational Forestry Corporations: A European Case Study

The forest of the Congo Basin expands over an area of continuous tropical rainforest cover only second to that of the Amazon forest. Those forests are currently receiving a lot of attention within the Climate Change negotiations.

At a ceremony held in San Francisco, USA on 20 April 2009, Marc Ona Essangui was presented with the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize, which recognizes grassroots activists who take significant risks to protect the environment and communities in their countries.

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 Gabon, forests and the communities that depend on them for survival face a range of different problems. The logging industry is one of the most serious. On the one hand, it does not benefit local communities in any way. At the same time, the majority of the forestry companies operating in the country (particularly those from Asia, with China and Malaysia in the lead) do not respect any technical standards, and cut trees that do not meet the minimum diameter requirements, for example.

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.