Nigeria

By Friends of the Earth US, Environmental Rights Action, Nigeria.

REDD: A Collection of Conflicts, Contradictions and Lies presents summaries of reports from 24 REDD projects or programmes with a common characteristic: they all show a number of structural characteristics that undermine forest peoples' rights, or fail to address deforestation. As offset projects, they all fail to address the climate crisis because by definition, offset projects do not reduce overall emissions: emission reductions claimed in one place justify extra emissions elsewhere.

In late 2013, a group of representatives of African, Indonesian and international NGOs met with members of La Via Campesina and the African Biodiversity Network in Calabar, Nigeria, to address the massive expansion of industrial oil palm plantations on the African continent and discuss, in particular, the situation in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cameroon, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabon.

Okomu Oil Palm Plc, the Dangote Group and United Food Industries Ltd representing Indonesia's Salim Group are to benefit from plans by the Edo State Government to allocate 410,000 hectares of forest land belonging to community people in order to establish large scale monoculture plantations. Only 30,000 will be left for the over 170,000 local farmers in the communities who earn their livelihood from farmlands and forest resources.

In Nigeria, a coalition of social and environmental justice organisations including Environmental Rights Watch/Friends of the Earth Nigeria, Green Alliance Nigeria, the Host Communities Network of Nigeria, and Students Environmental Assembly Nigeria, have stepped up the pressure on elected politicians to approve an improved, "pro people Petroleum Industry Bill", PIB2012. On 25th February 2014 the coalition demanded that the government adopt the "PIB not as it is currently but with an amendment proposed by the civil society coalition."

"Bleeding Oil" is a documentary about the ecological disaster in Nigeria caused by global oil corporations.  

   

   Also available in French We, members of communities affected by industrial monoculture oil palm plantations, including peasant movements, as well as other civil society organizations from Africa, Europe, the Americas and Asia, and signatories to this declaration, met from 2 –5 November 2013 in Calabar, Cross River State, Nigeria,