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Community organizers seem to have kept palm-oil plantations out of Africa’s tropical forests


GVL clearing and planting in HCS patch of low-density forest in the Nitrian area in Liberia. Photo: Milieudefensie
GVL clearing and planting in HCS patch of low-density forest in the Nitrian area in Liberia. Photo: Milieudefensie

Only a decade ago, palm-oil plantations appeared likely to devastate the Africa’s tropical forests, repeating the pattern of ecological destruction they brought to Malaysia and Indonesia — including this year’s epic rainforest fires.

Yet African community organizing has turned back the tide of the slash-and-burn agriculture that comes with palm oil.

Exhibit A is the $5 billion Malaysian company Sime Darby, which gained a massive, 63-year concession in Liberia to develop industrial palm oil plantations.

Nine years later, the company is backing out in the face of organized local opposition — for “failing to secure consent from community members, undercompensating them for destroyed crops, and clearing areas used for religious rituals,” as well as the massive damage that land-clearing would have done to local biodiversity.

One analysis commissioned by the advocacy group Global Witness found that a proposed palm oil plantation in Liberia would cost locals US$7.3 million in value from the farming, hunting and building supplies they’d access from the existing regional ecosystem. The plantation itself would only add US$3.8 million to the local economy.

Faced with these shortcomings, at least 27 palm-oil plantations have failed around Africa.

Sources: Mongabay, Quartz

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