Gabon

In 2014, the Gabonese government passed a new "Sustainable Development" Law, which authorizes companies to compensate for the destruction they cause in forests or traditional lands by buying offset credits. These are divided into four different kinds of credits: carbon credits, biodiversity credits, ecosystem credits and community capital. The latter is defined as "the sum of natural and cultural assets belonging to a community."

"In these supposedly win-win contracts, I would like to know what our communities are gaining. On the contrary, we are losing and even dying a slow death." With this cry of despair, Célestine Ndong (1) describes the bitter situation in Mouilla, Gabon, where the GRAINE ["seed" in French] program has been underway for several years.

The Congo Basin in Central Africa contains the second largest forest in the world. Its extensive territory is shared by six countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo, Gabon, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, and Equatorial Guinea. With this Bulletin we seek to explore in depth and report on the intense land-grabbing that people are confronted with and resist in this region—a forested area that houses and provides the livelihood and sustenance for around 30 million people.

This report aims to draw attention to violations and threats that environmental justice defenders in Central Africa are facing, specifically in the Congo Basin. The report is based on two studies. The first concerns the legal framework for the protection of environmental justice advocates in Central Africa. The second focuses on the inclusion of communities' rights in Central African countries. Read the report in French.

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A video produced by GRAIN shows how rural women in West Africa are working to protect traditional palm oil production in the face of the destructive expansion of industrial oil palm plantations. Watch the video here.

A report from the Rainforest Foundation UK, shows how attempts of community based forest management in the Congo Basin thus far have not been able to transfer meaningful rights or benefits to local communities. Only around 1% of the total Congo Basin is under the formal control or management of local communities while industrial-scale logging represents by far the biggest land use in the region.

In late 2013, a group of representatives of African, Indonesian and international NGOs met with members of La Via Campesina and the African Biodiversity Network in Calabar, Nigeria, to address the massive expansion of industrial oil palm plantations on the African continent and discuss, in particular, the situation in Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Cameroon, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Gabon.