The land by Boegbor, a town in district four in Grand Bassa County, Liberia has been leased by the government to Equatorial Palm Oil for 50 years. Credit: Wade C.L. Williams/IPS

By Wade C. L. Williams
BOEGBOR, Liberia, May 29 2013 (IPS)

Sackie Qwemie works for Equatorial Palm Oil, the company that took his land in northwestern Liberia.

He has been working on the EPO plantation for three years because the land that he once farmed was given away in a lease to the concession company based in Grand Bassa County, one of this West African country’s 15 political subdivisions.

His job is not a pleasant one, there is a taste of bitterness, but working for the company that has his land is the only way for him to survive.“The people came, they destroyed our bush, our living. Even the creek, the water we drink – they damaged it.” -- Joe Bah, chief of Boegbor.

The farmer, in his early 50s, is among the many villagers and community dwellers who have seen their land taken over by the company, and their crops bulldozed under.

“In the place I used to make my garden they came and cleared my whole bitterballs (a small species of round eggplant), my whole pepper, cassava, everything was destroyed,” Qwemie tells IPS as he sits under a palava hut in Boegbor, a town in district four in Grand Bassa County.

“I had the biggest farm here; I came from the hospital and heard the news that the machine had cleared my farm. Since then I’ve not been on my own farm.” Qwemie, however, does not know how much land he has lost.

The farmer looks weary and angry as he lays out his case, accusing the Liberian government of giving up the land to the company and ignoring the interests of the people it serves. He says this move has created serious hardship for them, as the money paid by EPO is small and cannot meet their families’ needs.

“Now before I eat pepper, I have to buy it. I don’t know what to say, I can’t fight this company because they say the government gave the land to the company,” says Qwemie.

EPO took over the Palm Bay concession area, clearing 34,398 hectares of land for the development of oil palms. The 50-year concession was negotiated and enacted into law in 2011 with the planting of the first new oil palms. It began expansion into district four in Grand Bassa County not so long ago.

This expansion has further upset the local community here, with many resisting any attempt at further expansion.

“The people came, they destroyed our bush, our living. Even the creek, the water we drink – they damaged it,” says an angry Joe Bah, chief of Boegbor.

Bah and his kinsmen maintain that they were not consulted in the leasing of their land to EPO. He says the company used bulldozers to clear the land, including ancestral land and sacred sites, without any remorse or respect for their local culture.

“All this bush here – that was our cassava farm … the people have destroyed it, even our rubber trees. There is no place here for us to make a farm, (to grow food) for us to eat,” he tells IPS.

Local people also accused the government of using the head of the National Traditional Council, chief Zanzan Kawar, the country’s most revered traditional elder, to scare them off from claiming their rights over the land.

“When Kawar is present in any community, all the Zoe people in Grand Bassa County and elsewhere in all the other counties can be present,” says Isaac Gartaryon, president of the youth in the district. The Zoes are traditional high priests who are believed to have supernatural powers and are feared by locals. People dare not speak against them for fear of the consequences.

“So they use that heavy influence … so nobody could talk,” he tells IPS.

Citizens of the land who have vehemently opposed the expansion of the company have come under strong criticism from community elders who hold positions in government and are close associates of company officials, alleges Gartaryon.

“The young people, the women and chiefs were not consulted (about the expansion), so we resisted. But the National Traditional Council still maintains its position and says that as far as they are concerned, the President of the Republic of Liberia has given this land to (EPO) … and anybody (who speaks out against it) will be arrested,” he says.

But EPO maintains that the land it currently occupies is the land that it was leased in negotiations with the government in 2008. The company says it is currently only operating on 13,000 hectares of the land, and has not even occupied the full territory because of the resistance by the local community.

With regard to allegations that the community was not consulted, Thomas Borshua Jr., senior accountant and administrator at EPO, said “I wouldn’t say that is true. We’ve had numerous meetings with the town chiefs, the surrounding villages and we’ve talked to them.

“We are not interacting with people on an individual basis; they have their leaders that were presented to the company to speak on their behalf and those are the people the company dealt with,” he explains to IPS.

Despite Borshua’s assertions that the company only occupies a portion of the land, tractors can be seen moving around the concession, and the sight of newly-felled trees in areas that villagers allege are not part of the company’s 34,000 hectares of land is commonplace. The local residents have vowed to fight on.

“We will resist them in the bushes and we are very serious about that,” says an angry Gartaryon.

Speaking in conversation with Reuters Insider on May 17, in the United States, Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf said the government was taking steps to address the current land crisis.

“There’s no doubt about it, that once we say the communities have rights to what’s on their land. Even if we decide to negotiate concessions because they don’t have the resources to put the land to use, that in effect will benefit them with housing and jobs and social benefits but they will be full participants,” she had said.

Rights organisations here, such as the Sustainable Development Institute (SDI) Liberia, which works to raise awareness and increase public participation in natural resources sectors, believe the government should go beyond mere words and do the right thing.

“The issue of land in Liberia is more than just a legal issue; it is matter of livelihood especially for communities living in rural parts of the country,” Nora Bowier of SDI tells IPS.

“If the government is taking vast amounts of land from rural people and granting them to multinationals without ensuring or providing better livelihood alternatives, it is like taking away these people’s rights to live and increasing their poverty conditions.”

Children from one of the communities in Ocean Division, southern Cameroon, who lost much of their forestland after the government leased it to a logging company. Credit: Monde Kingsley Nfor/IPS

By Monde Kingsley Nfor
YAOUNDÉ, Apr 25 2013 (IPS)

Bordered by a rubber plantation in the west, a forestry plantation in the east and a palm oil farm in the south, the 18 local communities that live in Ocean Division, southern Cameroon, have had an uphill struggle for the rights to their land. 

In 2008, the government leased much of their forestland, about 47,000 hectares, to international company United Forest Cameroon.

But only through a sustained campaign and involvement by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a global coalition of organisations working to encourage forestland tenure, the communities were given back some of their land by a February 2012 prime ministerial decree.

Biang Marcelin is the chief of Adjab, one of the villages in Ocean Division. He told IPS that despite the turnaround by the government, the land given back to the community was not sufficient.

“This land was given for use to all 18 villages of this region, which has a total population of about 7,000 people. We asked for 17,000 hectares, but got 13,922 hectares.” Because the communities could not prove ownership of all 47,000 hectares, they had negotiated for the return of 17,000 hectares.

But the story of these communities testifies to the precarious nature of local communities’ land rights in Africa.

“Africa is indeed in a pivotal historic moment regarding who owns the land and, by extension, who owns Africa,” Andy White, the coordinator of RRI, told IPS.

Studies carried out by RRI show that, compared to other continents, Africa lags far behind with regard to meeting the main conditions for securing community tenure rights.

Less than 12 percent of laws recognising community and indigenous peoples land rights in Africa are adequate.

Governments in Africa own and manage 97.9 percent of forestland compared to 36.1 percent government ownership in Latin America and 67.8 percent in Asia.

Since 2009, the RRI has been working in West and Central Africa to stop landgrabbing and land allocations that do not serve a genuine public interest.

The group has also attempted to urge governments to legally recognise the rights of the rural poor, and to push for more equitable models that give forest communities a number of rights, including access to and usage of forest resources.

But only 13 countries out of the 24 in the two regions have undertaken appreciable efforts towards land tenure reforms.

“Some 13 countries have developed statutory tenure instruments. These include tools to formally establish new community rights, and to secure or strengthen existing rights.

“Some have also created institutional arrangements to recognise and secure rights such as local land charters, communal land certificates, and joint state forest management resources,” White said.

In East Africa, countries like Tanzania and Uganda have demonstrated a strong commitment to improving governance and curbing corruption by recognising both customary laws and community land rights.

According to Felician Kilahama, Tanzanian chairperson of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization committee on Forestry: “In Tanzania, where wildlife and fishery resources are found on community land, a village land act, which empowers that village to own that land, is issued by the national commission of land.”

“The land title is given to the village, and the village government or council with 25 members is in charge of overseeing that all resources are for the village and must benefit them,” Kilahama told IPS.

Uganda has also registered similar successes, according to Eddie Nsamba, the executive director of Consult Surveyors and Planners Uganda, an environmental impact assessment firm.

“Land governance in Uganda has changed; the state invested land in the citizens of Uganda instead of investing in itself. The state has 10 percent ownership of the land. What the government does is play the regulatory and control role over the land,” Nsamba told IPS.

In 1998, Uganda recognised customary and traditional ownership of land. It is estimated that some 80 percent of land in the country is owned in this way.

But these are far from perfect models.

“Wherever the reforms took place in West and Central African countries since 2009, it didn’t cover a whole bundle of rights,” Michael Richards, a natural resource economist with NGO Forest Trends, told IPS.

“The reforms that took place usually cover what appears to be a weaker and mostly revocable set of rights (access, usage, management, and extraction rights) but not ownership rights.”

The challenges that African countries face are steep and progress is slow, Phil René Oyono, an independent expert on natural resources, told IPS.

“In Gabon for example, the new land laws passed in 2012 revise the structure of land tenure rights mainly to provide a more flexible regime for commercial transaction on the land,” he said.

While governance of forest resources in Africa is plagued by serious conflicting choices, the flow of foreign capital into the continent is ever tempting.

In Liberia, for example, the Community Rights Law of 2009 was lauded as a major innovation because it recognised customary ownership of land.

But in 2012, the government negotiated a large-scale land acquisition with Malaysian-run Sime Darby and Indonesian Golden Veroleum. The companies were given about 220,000 hectares each of land – a significant portion of the country’s land. It rendered locals’ rights moot before they were implemented, Alfred Lahai, director of Green Advocates Liberia, told IPS.

White said that government structures across West and Central Africa were now “in a bind and divided, with some ministries choosing to hand over natural resources to agribusinesses and mining, and others seeking to protect the rights of their citizens.”

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.

Ndomi Magareth, sows bean seeds on her small piece of land in Njombe. Credit: Monde Kingsley Nfor/IPS

By Monde Kingsley Nfor
DOUALA, Cameroon, Mar 14 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), a subsidiary of French company Compagnie Fruitiere, to which the Cameroonian government leased 4,500 hectares of land to grow bananas.

But in 2003, thanks to the assistance and loans from the local NGO the Network for the Fight against Hunger (RELUFA), the farmers were able to purchase farmland in Njombe. The NGO also assisted the farmers with loans to buy fertilisers and chemicals and organised them in a cooperative called the Common Initiative Group (CIG) Esperance.

Bika Sadi is one of the farmers who has been growing bananas, pineapples and papaya on his new land and selling it to the dried fruit manufacturing business that RELUFA set up in 2009.

“We supply our products at set prices to the dried fruit project. A kilogramme of fresh papaya is sold at less than 20 cents on the local market, but the project buys it at 31 cents. And a kilogramme of fresh banana and pineapple sell for 10 cents on the local market but the project buys them for 24 cents,” Sadi told IPS.

The initiative, called the Fair Fruit project, sells oven-dried pineapples, mangoes, bananas and papaya. But it was born out of failed attempts by the farmers to obtain compensation for the loss of their land.

The Fair Fruit project, sells oven-dried pineapples, mangoes, bananas and papaya. But it was born out of failed attempts by the farmers to obtain compensation for the loss of their land. Courtesy: Monde Kingsley Nfor

The farmers took PHP to the Wouri High Court in Douala in 2005, and after five court appearances over three years, the company and the farmers reached an out-of-court settlement in 2008. However, only 28,000 of the 120,000 dollars promised in the negotiations were paid to the farmers.

A year later, Fair Fruit was created. The dried fruit packaging is clear about the reasons for the business. The label reads: “Fair Fruit is grown by Cameroonian farmers who were forced off their land by a transnational company seeking to establish its vast plantations. The fruit is cultivated and harvested in a just and environmentally friendly manner and traded under fair terms”.

Daniel Mahatma, a local fruit farmer in Njombe, manages the project that employs 10 people to work in the small processing plant built by RELUFA.

“The workers in this plant earn 2.50 dollars a day for five hours of work, which is a modest income for a youth who has the rest of the day for other activities,” Mahatma told IPS.

The dried fruit is packaged and then distributed to supermarkets, hotels and airports.

“We also sell the product to potential buyers through trade fairs and agro-pastoral shows,” Michelle Danleu, Fair Fruit’s sales and marketing officer, told IPS.

The profits have been ploughed back into the project and will fund a second phase.

In a country where an increasing number of smallholders have been forced off their land, the expansion of the project could help many more farmers like the ones in Njombe.

“Fair Fruit … could also tell the story of other marginalised farmers all over Cameroon,” Jaff Bamenjo, the assistant coordinator for RELUFA, told IPS.

“We are concerned about the new wave of investments in land and the negative impact on local food production and rural communities’ access to land,” Bamenjo added.

According to a 2012 Food and Agricultural Organization report titled “Investment Policy Support, Foreign Agricultural Investment Profile Cameroon”, the general foreign direct investment inflow into Cameroon was less than 113 million dollars in the 1990s, but reached 337 million dollars in 2009.

While there are no official figures on foreign agricultural investment in Cameroon, the report notes that some 48 percent of Cameroon’s population depend on agriculture for a living.

Even the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development is concerned about the number of large agricultural plantations in the country that have pushed smallholders off their land.

“Large plantations have a negative effect not only on local food production and supply, but they also affect the social economy of the locality where they exist. Added to the fact that most local farmers are usually evicted from farm lands, the farmers in most cases are restricted from farming close to the boundaries of plantations for fear that they might steal from the plantation farms,” Collette Ekobo, the agriculture inspector of the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, told IPS.

As an agriculture inspector, Ekobo evaluates the performance of agricultural services, rural productivity and development in the sector and has authority to represent the ministry’s views.

“The complaints from farmers (kicked off their land) have been overwhelming in the Littoral and Southwest Region of the country, where most plantations are located,” she said, adding that she was unable to provide figures for the number of farmers affected.

She said the country’s current land tenure system “does not protect the interests of the locals who have been using these lands since the time of their forefathers.”

The land tenure system in Cameroon makes it difficult for private individuals to acquire title deeds. The 1974 Ordinance No. 74/1 on land tenure stipulates that private land must be titled and registered. All remaining land is classified as national land, which includes most unoccupied land, unregistered land, communal land held under customary law, informal settlements and grazing land.

However, obtaining a land right certificate is a costly and long administrative procedure.

Samuel Nguiffo, from the Centre for Environment and Development, Cameroon, told IPS that as a result most villagers had no formal land titles to their customary agricultural land.

“Land agreements given to large companies do not respect customary land rights or informal land holdings. The laws and the institutions in place do not protect their interests,” he said.

An inter-ministerial committee from the Ministry of State Property and Land Tenure is currently revising the land tenure law, and a bill will be introduced in parliament. But civil society groups complain that the process has not been participatory.

Nguiffo added that there was an assumption that foreign investors created more jobs than local smallholders, but said it was not a proven fact.

“If communities are given support through access to land, capital and technical assistance you will see them create jobs and wealth and contribute to national development more sustainably than large companies,” he said.

Meanwhile, on Jan. 16, PHP finally agreed to pay out the remainder of the settlement to the Njombe farmers. The reasons for this are unclear, but it could have had something to do with the labels on the dried fruit.

“As a precondition for the company to pay this money, they said we must remove the message that is on Fair Fruit packages. The farmers have agreed to this condition,” Bamenjo said.