This is a summary edition of the booklet “Promise, Divide, Intimidate and Coerce: 12 tactics palm oil companies use to grab community land”, launched in 2019 by the Informal Alliance Against Industrial Oil Palm Plantations in West and Central Africa. In this edition, you will find one tactic per page, together with an illustration.
This publication aims to support communities who want to strengthen their resistance and better prepare themselves to stop corporations from establishing industrial oil palm plantations on their lands.
Oil palm companies need large areas of fertile land to set up their industrial oil palm plantations. Therefore, their plans include taking over land that communities are already using. Often families will feel 'fenced in,' and when it becomes unbearable to be surrounded by industrial plantations, they may leave one by one. Furthermore, companies use large amounts of toxic chemicals on the industrial plantations. These agrotoxins pollute the farmland and water on which communities depend.
Companies know that all these practices will cause serious conflicts with communities. That’s why wherever they operate, they use very similar tactics to take control over community lands. Violence is part and parcel of the industrial plantation model.
Content:
- Beware! Companies come ready to take over the land
- The importance of being united and in contact with other communities
- Tactic 1: Companies secure approval and support from high-level government officials
- Tactic 2: Companies get local elites on their side
- Tactic 3: Companies get people that the community trusts on their side
- Tactic 4: Companies try to co-opt chiefs into making community lands available for the company
- Tactic 5: Companies try to silence community leaders and activists who oppose the company's plantations
- Tactic 6: Companies promise improved roads, schools, health facilities
- Tactic 7: Companies promise employment, especially for young men
- Tactic 8: Companies organise meetings to create the appearance of community support
- Tactic 9: Companies try to silence local opponents of the plantation project
- Tactic 10: Companies exclude and marginalize women
- Tactic 11: Companies turn a blind eye to violence and abuse against
- women on plantations
- Tactic 12: Companies forge signatures and falsify documents
- Tactic 13: Companies withhold important documents
- Tactic 14: Companies take control of community lands through fraudulent land certificates and surveys
- Tactic 15: Companies create or exploit land boundary disputes between communities
- Tactic 16: Companies destroy markets for locally produced palm oil and create food insecurity
- Tactic 17: Companies cut off community access to forests
- Tactic 18 Companies promote out-grower 'partnerships' to control villagers' lands
- Tactic 19: Companies claim that farmers can 'get rich planting industrial oil palms'
- Tactic 20: Companies partner with NGOs and 'Sustainable Palm Oil' labels to create a 'green' image