By Monde Kingsley Nfor
DOUALA, Cameroon, Mar 19 2013 (IPS)

The fruit farmers in Njombe, a small town in the coastal Littoral Region of Cameroon, learned a life lesson about “making lemonade out of lemons” – or rather “dried fruit out of fruit” when their land was taken from them by the government and leased to an international farming company.

In 1998, 34 fruit farmers lost 70 hectares of their land to Plantation de Haut Penja (PHP), to which the Cameroonian government leased 4,500 hectares of land to grow bananas.