Socapalm and Safacam are two companies controlled by Socfin, a multinational agribusiness specialized in the cultivation of oil palm and rubber. The group has financial and operating companies in Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland, which manage plantations in a dozen African and Asian companies. The group's aggressive expansion policy has led to land-grabbing, causing serious impacts on local communities' living conditions.
Bulletin articles
In southeast Cameroon, Baka Indigenous Peoples and their neighbours continue to be illegally evicted in the name of conservation, most recently for a game reserve set up in 2015 with the support of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). A video made by Survival International shows the testimonies of Baka men and women revealing the violence they have suffered at the hands of anti-poaching militias backed by WWF. This debunks WWF’s claims that the situation seems to have improved.
The agricultural force on the continent
In Cameroon as in many African countries, women daily endure practices that could be considered discriminatory in various areas of society, and especially related to land ownership. “In our family, a woman is a good, like a house or a plantation,” said Léon Mba, leader of the Pamue Congress in 1949. (1)
Oil palms are native to the forests of Central and West Africa and inseparable from the region’s peoples and their cultures. Communities in this part of the world have relied on oil palms for thousands of years— as a source of food, textiles, medicines and construction materials.
In 1969, at the age of 3 my parents were forced to move from the home in which I was born, in a neighbourhood of people of all colours, ethnicity and even class, to a sand dune cleared of all its vegetation and left naked except for poorly constructed block houses with no internal electricity, plaster or ceilings and crowned with an asbestos roof.
Despite India’s National Green Tribunal statement on early April affirming that POSCO’s Environmental Clearance is valid only up to 19th July 2017, the case has not been closed and it will have another hearing on early May of this year. Meanwhile, the state police have turned the area in to a repressive colony.
“Environmental racism” is a concept it's hard to imagine environmentalism ever having done without. It names a reality that can't be tackled “before” or “after” environmental campaigning, but has to be confronted every day in building movements against the ways oppressive societies organize nature.