US finance firm destroys rainforest and jobs in Cameroon

News

 

 

Environmental scientists and activists are calling for a halt to a massive agricultural development project in Cameroon.

In a report out this week they charge that a plan by a US-owned firm to create a 73,000-hectare palm oil plantation, which the promoters claim will rehabilitate degraded land and provide jobs, will instead destroy livelihoods and rainforest, and disrupt a globally important biodiversity hotspot.

In 2009 SG Sustainable Oils Cameroon, owned by the New York-based Herakles Capital, signed a 99-year lease on the land with the Cameroon government.

The plan is to plant oil palm. Palm oil is in growing demand as food and biofuel worldwide.

Rich investors are acquiring rights to massive tracts of farmland in poor countries worldwide, in anticipation of rising land value as growing population and demand for food and fuel drive up crop prices. The trend is being called landgrabbing.

The company claims the project will lead to environmentally sound economic development and jobs in Cameroon. It has partnered with a development organisation called All for Africa that aims to plant a million trees on the continent, saying revenue from the trees will fund development.

However the report, by the Oakland Institute, a research group based in California, and global environmental group Greenpeace International, calls this “greenwash”: environmental claims meant to camouflage environmentally damaging activity.

They point out that Herakles and All for Africa are headed by the same man, and that “there is actually a big difference between planting forest and planting palm oil trees” in a single-species plantation.

They note that in August, the company left the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil, an industry group that imposes some environmental standards on palm oil producers. Frédéric Amiel of Greenpeace says the RSPO does not allow producers to chop down prime rainforest and replace it with oil palm.

They report’s impact may depend on the firm being American, with investors sensitive to environmental concerns.

“Palm oil buyers like Kraft, Unilever and other biog food companies are asking for higher environmental standards for palm oil,” says Rolf Skar of Greenpeace.

“If Herakles doesn’t meet them they will have to answer to investors as to why.”

Amiel denies company claims that the plantation will mostly involve land that has already been logged and degraded. It is very near several protected areas in Cameroon, including the famed Korup National Park, the richest rainforest reserve in Africa.

In April, eleven top conservation scientists agreed, independently calling for the Cameroon government to stop the project until the terms improve.

They said its environmental impact assessment surveyed only 0.003% of the area involved, and “seriously misrepresented the state of the forests”, the “vast majority” of which, they say, is not degraded but prime rainforest, in a “biodiversity hotspot”.

Far beyond the direct environmental impact, though, the project will deny thousands of local people – 14,000 by the company’s estimate, 45,000 according to Frédéric Mousseau of the Oakland Institute – the right to farm land and gather forest resources in the area.

In return the plantation plans to create 7500 jobs, but the net impact could be more poverty rather than less.

Moreover, the report charges that the company has the right to pay less than Cameroon’s minimum wage, dismiss workers at will, and is exempt from other national laws. Mousseau charges that the company has ignored Cameroonian court orders to stop cutting timber.

The report cites a study this year by Cameroonian non-governmental organisations, which found that if their government paid existing small-scale farmers to produce food, instead of subsidising imported food and large-scale plantations growing food for export, it would create 96,000 farming jobs on only 15,000 hectares of land, requiring little deforestation.

Herakles argues that its selectively bred, improved palm oil trees produce 5.5 tonnes of oil per hectare, while the existing farmers produce only one tonne.

But, the report argues, government-funded research in Cameroon has developed a variety suited to smallholders that produces 4.5 tonnes per hectare – for lower costs, on family farms that employ more people, maintain biodiversity and are less at risk of crop diseases than massive single-species plantations.

Few farmers use the improved variety of palm. As in most African countries, Cameroonian agencies that used to introduce such improvements to farmers were gutted under government austerity programmes aimed at repaying foreign debt.