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Uganda: Oil palm plantations that brought
high winds and low wages
The accelerated
destruction of rainforest and indigenous woodland in Uganda, making
way for palm oil and sugar production, follows an all too familiar
pattern that has been seen in other parts of the world, especially
South Asia.
Widely reported
(in the local media) was the government release of five thousand
hectares of protected woodlands from its statutory care to BIDCO,
a palm-oil producing firm that originates in South Asia, in 2001.
These forests, on the Ssese Islands in Lake Victoria were then
removed in short order.
Currently,
there is a new storm brewing over a proposal to hand seven thousand
hectares of virgin forest to the east of the capital to a sugar
manufacturing outfit that already owns thousand of hectares of
plantations nearby.
Uganda straddles
the Equator in the heart of the Great lakes region, and holds
a natural extension of the rich Amazon-like biodiversity of the
Congo to her west. Her long periods of state-inspired political
violence have given her a mixed legacy. On the one hand, there
remains a pervasive sense among the elite and political class
that the 1966-1986 period of war and insurgency as well as subsequent
disturbances have left the country “backward” and faced with a
responsibility to “catch up” with the rest of the world.
This has
given rise to a particularly pernicious form of self-righteous
economic planning-by-diktat, where anyone questioning the
grand scheme for development is immediately dubbed “unpatriotic”;
being secretly enamored of the previous brutal regimes; and/or
just plain stupid.
In my own
experience, I recall our President Museveni retorting “Are you
a romanticist? Do you want to go back to Nature?” in response
to my probing about the philosophical basis of his “development”
plans for the country.
That was
back in 2001, in a radio interview during the then presidential
elections. Unfortunately, the quality of official public discourse
around the issue of the environment has not evolved much further
since then.
Dr Margaret
Kigozi, head of the Uganda Investment Authority (the principal
agency for attracting foreign capital), is on record as having
dismissed opponents of the hydroelectric dam project being planned
for our river Nile as being “obsessed with frogs and butterflies”.
More recently,
the Government Minister for Investment asked angrily “aren’t Palms
trees?” in response to my repeated questioning, in a bruising
radio interview, of the wisdom of the decision to give BIDCO a
free hand in hacking down large areas of ancient woodland to make
way for their palm plantation.
On the other
hand however, Uganda was actually “left behind” in the scramble
by global capital to convert the natural assets of the poor Southern
countries into “investment” fodder. The country remained relatively
more green (a situation similar to the Congo and Southern Sudan,
all of which is now under threat) than other parts of the South
that were deemed at the time “stable” enough for rapacious foreign
investment. This is an enduring irony of the situation we find
ourselves in.
And so we
are really only at the beginning of this process. There is plenty
of eco-wealth to be ravaged and plundered by these international
short-termists, and there is plenty of avarice, ignorance and
self-righteousness at government level to make access to it incredibly
easy.
A few brave
souls in the Uganda forestry department opposed these developments
from the start. They even found allies in unexpected quarters
(such as DFID, the UK development arm), when they argued that
the promised jobs were virtual “slavery” and therefore no fair
exchange for the loss of these forests. They were ignored.
There is
nothing new in this process of destruction. The workings of the
globalised financiers are not new anymore. The only issue therefore,
is what can be done before it is too late, or before the cost
of potential restoration is too high?
The answer
lies in the strengthening of activist’s voices that are trying
to first of all access and publicize all new information related
to these scandals; to be able to work together on a forum that
enables actions (such as court injunctions, demonstrations, media
education campaigns and community education) that will politically
raise the cost of such policy-making.
This will
take organized people pooling their skills and information. Already,
we are starting with a media expose on how the Ssese Islands are
being destroyed by high winds and low wages since the forests
of the Bwendero Peninsula were cut down. BIDCO have reportedly
requested another three thousand hectares of the remaining forest.
They say they were promised a total of ten thousand hectares,
and keep the Ugandan government jittery by threatening to pull
out if this promise is not fulfilled. The threat to the forests
is only growing larger.
It is important
to learn that we are not alone in these efforts, and what we can
learn from the efforts of others faced with the same challenge.
By Kalundi
Serumaga, e-mail: kalundi@yahoo.com
Kalundi Serumaga spent many years as a community activist,
and now works as a media columnist and radio talk show host in
Uganda. He produced and presented a weekly environmental programme
on national television throughout 2003. His ancestral burial grounds
were part of the land recently taken over by a large-scale palm
oil plantation on the Ssese Islands.
