Cameroon

To establish a communal forest may look like a good proposal. However, it may be not, according to many local villagers from the district of Dzeng (Center Province, Department of Nyong and So'o), who have denounced the attempt of the current Dzeng’s mayor to make use of their forest lands for commercial exploitation. Some 25.182 hectares of forest lands would be classified as a "communal forest", an intermediate category between logging concessions and community forests. 

This new publication of the WRM Series on Plantations (* ) examines resistances of populations neighboring two of Africa’s largest industrial tree plantations: the rubber monoculture Hévéa-Cameroun (HEVECAM) and the oil palm plantation Société Camerounaise de Palmeraies (SOCAPALM). The report intends to contribute to fill a lack of information on the situation around commercial plantations in Equatorial Africa. 

(Only available in French) Populations locales versus plantations commerciales d’hévéas et de palmiers à huile dans le Sud-Cameroun By Julien-François Gerber Résistances contre deux géants industriels en forêt tropicale

Oil palm and rubber plantations occupy extensive areas in many countries in tropical Africa. In spite of their social and environmental impacts, until now they have received scant attention both at the national and international level.

In South-Western Cameroon, near Kribi, two giant industrial plantations cover a total area of 62,000 hectares. One of them, HEVECAM, is a rubber tree monoculture belonging to the Singapore-based GMG group, while the other, SOCAPALM, is an oil palm plantation, property of the French group Bolloré.

One of the main characteristics of Cameroon’s economic policies since independence is their institutional promotion of large-scale industrial plantations. Between 1971 and 1981, the state allocated to them no less than 60% of the public funds reserved for agricultural development. The most important feature of these large-scale plantations was – and still is – their domination by only a few agro-industrial firms, highly protected, oligopolistic, and dependant on capital-intensive technologies.

I visited Cameroon in December 2006 and again in September 2007. In both trips I was shocked by the sheer number of trucks loaded with huge logs of tropical trees that could be seen on almost any road. Most of them were on their way to the ports from where they would be exported –unprocessed- to mostly northern countries.

Indigenous peoples living in the tropical rainforests of Central Africa are widely dispersed and identify their groups by a variety of names. Numbering a total of 300,000 to 500,000 people, those members of communities from several ethnic groups characterized by their small stature are identified under the generic name of “pygmies” (see WRM Bulletin Nº 119).

The Indigenous hunter-gatherers of the central African forests, so-called Pygmy peoples, consist of at least 15 distinct ethnolinguistic groups including the Gyéli, Kola, Baka, Aka, Bongo, Efe, Mbuti, western Twa, and eastern Twa living in ten central African countries: Angola, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic, Gabon, Republic of the Congo (Congo), Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. Their estimated total number is from 300 000 to 500 000 people.

Last December I was travelling with three friends (a Cameroonian and a Swiss couple) along the public route that crosses the oil palm plantations belonging to Socapalm (Société Camerounaise des Palmeraies) in the Kribi region. On reaching the control post installed by the company – that we had crossed earlier on – we were stopped by a private security guard who demanded our identity documents. On asking him why he wanted them he informed us that Socapalm “secret agents” aware of our visit had ordered him to do so.

Southern Cameroon is red and green. Green like the forest of the Congo basin that breathes and has a heartbeat and that offers its inhabitants the biotic resources necessary to subsist; and red like the dusty roads where trucks run, transporting the bodies of forest giants that will be turned into furniture, flooring, doors, etc. Along Cameroon’s open veins flows its vital element to the port of Douala, where the vampire from the North comes to quench its thirst…

According to the FAO definition, rubber plantations are “forests.” Recently we visited one of these “forests” in Kribi, Cameroon and talked with the workers and local population. Unlike the FAO “experts,” nobody, absolutely nobody there perceives these plantations as forests.