Cameroon Village Life

However, Socfin boycotted the dialogue, and negotiations stagnated as a result.“We only speak to recognised bodies,” said Socfin’s CEO Luc Boedt in Douala in 2015 when asked about Socfin’s absence at the roundtable discussion.

Fitness buffs received a massive knock to their workout routines mid-March as the coronavirus swept through California and across the nation. “[Saying] that the smallholders should render Africa self sufficient is easy, making them do it is another matter.”Earthworm Foundation’s Erith Ngatchou visited Mbonjo with his team in 2018 and noted several problems with plantation operation remained, including unresolved issues surrounding land rights, poor housing conditions for workers and a low integration of the local population into the workforce.While Emmanuel Elong and Synaparcam say these problems have been entrenched in Socapalm’s operations near Mbonjo for more than a decade, Ngatchou remains optimistic that things are moving forward, as “the HQ is now convinced that something must change”.Still, critics say the company hasn’t shown much commitment to change. In May 2019, several NGOs “There are issues on the ground [in Cameroon] that have been there for years,” Ngatchou said in their first year of working with Socapalm. “We, the villagers, are in the shallows, in the swamp areas, the areas they weren’t using. “Again we found ourselves without work.

“And because we have never had any contact with the representatives of this group, Socfin, we are reaching out to you to help us solve this.”Elong, a 51-year-old farmer from a tiny village in Cameroon called Mbonjo, decided to bring his grievances to the table of one of France’s most influential businessmen, Vincent Bolloré, CEO of the French multinational Bolloré and ranked 451 on the Forbes billionaires list.

“But this is corruption,” Ngatchou said.Emmanuel Elong and the communities around him are still waiting for a resolution to their case. 52,000 children in Bolloré is active in logistics, plastic production, media, telecommunications, advertising and tropical plantations in West Africa. Over 50% of children in Cameroon live below the poverty line and child mortality rates for the under fives are on the increase. The Groupe Bolloré is a key shareholder of Belgian multinational Socfin (holding 38.75 %), which owns rubber and oil palm plantations in West Africa and South East Asia. United Nations projections are also included through the year 2100. Socfin was one of the first companies to take advantage of this opportunity, acquiring what have become the two largest agroindustrial projects in the country.At first, community residents had hope that these changes would improve their lives.

Mbonjo sits in the heart of Cameroon’s country’s largest oil palm and rubber-producing region.

We have provided a few examples below that you can copy and paste to your site:Your image export is now complete. “They know only one local stakeholder: the government. We have provided a few examples below that you can copy and paste to your site:Your data export is now complete. In 2014, Elong’s written complaints to Vincent Bolloré prompted an invitation by Bolloré to a round table discussion in Paris. However, in Cameroon, there is no binding legal framework regulating the procedure of land acquisition and plantation development, which critics say allows companies to do what they want with impunity.“The companies don’t communicate, they don’t like to engage,” said Napoleon Bamenjo, chairman of the civil society organization Relufa, which is based in Cameroon’s capital city Yaoundé.

“The problem is not about denying, it is about moving forward.”Mongabay is a U.S.-based non-profit conservation and environmental science news platform. This concerned residents who subsist off small crops of cassava, potatoes and oil palm.“I said no. In a recent interview, EF’s country manager in Cameroon, Erith Ngatchou, told Mongabay that the company needs to undertake managerial changes to solve its issues and that the land, while relinquished to the government, has not been returned to the communities that reside on it.There is also the issue of Free, Prior and Informed Consent (FPIC), a principle defined by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)’s guidelines for foreign investment and protected by international human rights law.

But the fear that someday the company will return and try again to take their land persists in Mbonjo as issues surrounding the concession boundaries have remained unresolved.In a 2020 interview, Socfin CEO Luc Boedt told Mongabay that the company decided not to expand its operations in the area around Mbonjo as ”lots of it was (a) forest [and] (b) already occupied illegally by villagers and we did not want a conflict on that.”“Subsequently the concession was reduced, the land went to the government,” Boedt said, adding that “today we are formalising the boundaries agreed with the Government and in agreement with the villages around our estates.”However, Elong insists that the 20,000 ha in question is still being used by the company “without paying rent.”Years into the conflict, Socfin hired the Earthworm Foundation (EF; formerly called the Forest Trust) to implement their new responsible management policy, which was adopted in 2017. In Cameroon, Socfin leased about 78,400 hectares of land from the Cameroonian government.Mbonjo sits in the heart of the country’s largest oil palm and rubber-producing region, an island of tin-roofed huts surrounded on all sides by thousands of oil palm trees reaching 15 meters into the blue Cameroonian sky. Many countries require companies to obtain FPIC before developing a project on occupied or ancestral land. Elong founded the landowners’ initiative Synaparcam in 2010 with the aim to enter into a dialogue with the company. Today, the company owns some 58,000 hectares of oil palm and rubber plantations in the region, which are managed Socfin’s local subsidiary Socapalm.Sandy roads lead from the highway through the monoculture plantations to the enclave where Elong’s struggle started several years ago.“In 2012, Socapalm decided to replace the old palms with new ones,“ Elong told Mongabay during a visit to Cameroon in 2015.