Struggles Against Tree Monocultures
Corporate profit drives land grabs to install industrial tree monocultures. Where industrial plantations take root, communities' territories and lives are violently invaded, their forests destroyed and their water polluted. When communities resist, companies tend to respond with aggression. Despite this extreme violence, communities around the world are resisting, organizing and joining forces to defend their territories. Every September 21 the International Day of Struggle against Monoculture Tree Plantations is celebrated.
Articles
2 April 2025
On March 25, the palm oil company Socapalm, a subsidiary of the multinational Socfin-Bolloré, carried out a violent operation with security forces against a rural community that is demanding the return of its lands, in Apouh A Ngog village, in the Litoral Region of Cameroon. In an open letter, more than 50 organizations from different countries demanded that the country's authorities investigate and stop these atrocities and find an inmidate solution in favour of the community.
Bulletin articles
15 December 2024
The just-released “Mouila Declaration” is a message of resistance, solidarity and unity from communities and grassroots organisations of the Informal Alliance against the expansion of Industrial Monocultures.
Bulletin articles
24 October 2024
Besides the direct impacts on communities’ lives, eucalyptus monoculture plantations represent absurd and obscene inequality. A group of 45 community people with whom we spoke was shocked to learn that it would take them 2,300 years of non-stop work to collectively earn the same amount that a single Portuguese family, one of the owners of the plantation company they work for, earned in one single year from the profits of their shares in the company.
Bulletin articles
22 August 2024
The company is in the process of renewing part of its oil palm plantations in Edéa. At the end of last year, communities started to mobilize against this process. The community resistance has led the sub-prefect to request Socapalm to stop its activities. This is a first victory of the community but the struggle will continue until SOCAPALM returns the lands to the communities!
Bulletin articles
22 August 2024
Action alerts
13 August 2024
Press release. SOCAPALM, a subsidiary of Socfin, must immediately cease replanting operations at Edea 1, in Cameroon.
Bulletin articles
19 December 2023
The Afrise women's association launched an international petition to stop the replanting of oil palm monocultures around their homes and over the grave sites of their ancestors. They are denouncing decades of sexual abuse, land dispossession and misery. They are demanding that their territory be returned to them, so that they can lead a life of dignity.
Action alerts
28 November 2023
Sign this petition against the replanting of oil palm by Socapalm (Socfin/ Bolloré) in the vicinity of the homes and tombs of the neighbouring village Apouh à Ngog, in Edea-Cameroon.
Bulletin articles
25 October 2023
Exchanges between activists put the voices of those who fight to defend their territories at the center of the conversation. In September, members of communities from Brazil and Mozambique united their struggles and connected their histories once again, helping to strengthen solidarity in the fight against industrial tree plantations.
Bulletin articles
30 March 2023
At the foot of Mount Mabu, Mozambique, the expansion of rubber tree monoculture plantations has restricted Manhaua communities’ access to their own territory. This process has occurred by means of systematic abuses, thus depicting the contrast between the different ways the population and foreign capital relate to the environment where they find themselves.
Bulletin articles
11 October 2022
The Informal Alliance Against the Expansion of Industrial Oil Palm Plantations in West and Central Africa released a declaration to keep breaking the silence of the many abuses around industrial plantations and to reaffirm their strong commitment to resist their expansion in the defence of their territories and lives.