The Palm Oil Land-grab

Palm oil is the planet's new "super oil and  is present in about half of all products in supermarkets in Germany. It's in cakes, margarine, make-up and ice cream. It is also used as a bio-diesel in the European Union (EU). The global consumption of palm oil is growing and is forecasted to continue to grow.  The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) predicts that consumption will double by 2050. The oil is versatile and is cheaper to produce than other plant oils such as canola or sunflower. So it is not surprising that investment in palm oil is climbing. However, the oil is controversial. Sierra Leone possesses massive amounts of land where oil palm production could thrive and a government that is willing to hand over this land to investors for not that much money.

When a multinational palm oil company expanded into Sierra Leone, rainforests were leveled and local livelihoods disappeared. Some say that this is the price of development while others want their land back.

"People say that even our elders want to give the land away," said Crespo. "They also say that the company has also offered to buy our lands as well. But then we would be suffering just like the people from Sahn Malen." In Sahn Malen, oil palm plantations dominate the landscape with their low, uniform shape for as far as the eye can see. "All of this land was taken by the company," said Crespo, "all of it."

Socfin, which is registered in Switzerland but has its headquarters in Belgium, in the past four years has planted 12,432 hectacre (30,720 acres) of oil palms in Sierra Leone. The company came to Sahn Malen in 2012 and leased swaths of land. It planted oil palms and built an ultra-modern processing plant. Before Socfin arrived, farmers used to grow palm oil but also cocoa, cassava, potatoes, pineapples, beans and rice. Most were able to provide for their daily needs with their own harvests. But these times have passed since the local chief sided with the newcomers.

"The chief pressured us to sell our lands," said Fascia. "We did not have a choice. Even if we said no, he still handed it over." said Fascias in Kasseh, a village in Sahn Malen. When the bulldozers came, Fascia stood in front of her house and was able to save this small plot of fertile land that helped feed her family and send her children to school. She is the only one in the whole village who did so.

Mattia Limbe, one of the founders of the Malen Land Owners Association (MALOA) which formed after protests against Socfin in 2012 said there is another reason why the people are quiet. "My people are scared," he said. "The chief would not tolerate any opposition," said Mattia. Many people are scared of being arrested so they meet in secret. Mattia has already been arrested numerous times.

The spread of palm oil plantations is a threat to rainforests and the indigenous people who live there. Greenpeace has been warning for years against the clear-cutting of rainforests in Malaysia and Indonesia to make way for palm oil. More recently they have expanded their warnings to Africa.

http://www.dw.com/en/palm-oil-profits-trump-self-sufficiency-in-sierra-leone/a-35917146

The other oil grab

The scramble for land is part of a global rush to increase food supply. Palm oil is the cheapest and most widely used vegetable oil, found in about half of all packaged supermarket products, from biscuits to soap and lipstick. Demand has doubled since 2000 and prices have tripled to more than $930 a metric tonne for Malaysian palm oil. Hungry for foreign direct investment, many governments have offered cheap land. Liberia has taken the lead, awarding more than 600,000 hectares of land for palm oil.  Sime Darby is the biggest investor, along with Golden Veroleum, controlled by Singapore-listed Golden Agri-Resources through its majority investment in the US-based Verdant Fund, which also has a 220,000-hectare concession. Equatorial Palm Oil, listed on the Aim index in London, has 89,000 hectares, and is in talks for a further 80,000 hectares.

Sime Darby is one of the world’s largest palm oil producers. In 2009, the Malaysian company secured 220,000 hectares of land in Liberia on a 63-year lease, marking its first expansion outside south-east Asia. It was not alone. Deals involving big Asian palm oil companies such as Golden Agri-Resource, Wilmar and Olam as well as US funds and European companies, have been signed across west Africa in recent years.

Since 2008, governments from Sierra Leone to the Democratic Republic of Congo have awarded concessions for some 1.5m hectares of land for commercial palm oil plantations, mostly to foreign companies. A further 1.3m hectares of land is reportedly being sought.

87 per cent of the $20bn-a-year production comes from Indonesia and Malaysia. But tighter environmental standards and a shortage of suitable land for expansion has caused planters to look elsewhere. Tropical west Africa is attractive. Oil palms originate there, although most production is small-scale. With domestic economies growing fast and palm oil used extensively for cooking, there is a ready local market. Big customers in Europe and the US are close, compared with Asian plantations.

“There are significant opportunities for the development of commercial oil palm operations in west Africa,” said Doug Hawkins, head of agribusiness at Hardman and Co. “But there are also very real concerns in some countries over security of title, and in respect of the environmental and social impact that some of the very large-scale concessions may produce.”

Land ownership is complex and controversial in Liberia, with fuzzy lines between government land and communally owned land that has been used for subsistence farming for generations. John Nelson, African regional co-ordinator at the UK-based Forest Peoples Programme explained “If they give up their land for palm oil, the leases are for so long that they are basically giving it up forever.”

When Sime Darby started clearing land to plant, local communities protested that their crops and sacred sites had been destroyed. “The government created the impression that this concession land is unencumbered, and companies chose to believe them,” said Silas Siakor, director of the Sustainable Development Institute, in Monrovia. “Nobody thought to first talk to people on the ground.”
Late last year, the company agreed to stop operations at the disputed site, and enter talks with villagers about remediation. It agreed to hire an extra 600 permanent workers from the community, bringing the workforce to more than 3,000. The lowest-paid staff get $5.51 an hour. “The job is hard,” said Doa Massaley, 45, one of the new hires, as he cleared undergrowth from a field. “But there is no other work here.”

Controversy has also dogged Cameroon’s palm oil sector. Herakles Capital, a New York investment fund, plans to plant oil palms on 60,000 hectares of its 99-year concession, which is surrounded by national parks and protected zones.  The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil is a certification body set up to improve the industry’s environment and social standards,  RSPO insists that its members obtain “free, prior and informed consent” from locals. Herakles’s withdrew from the RSPO, saying the body lacked the technical expertise and resources to evaluate its project and said the venture was going ahead

Taken from here

Palm Oil Fuels Land Grab

By next year palm oil is forecast to be the world's most produced and internationally traded edible oil. India and China are the world's biggest palm oil users. Apart from its use as a cooking oil, it's also found in a of processed foods and cosmetics. One in ten supermarket products contains palm oil. Government targets for the use of agrofuels in Europe, China and North America are making palm oil, which can be used to produce biodiesel, an even hotter commodity.

In Liberia, a country that was ravaged for years by war, an estimated 5.6 per cent of the total land mass has been leased out to foreign investors for palm oil production. Sime Darby has a 63-year lease for 220,000 hectares of land for oil palm plantations in the country. Singapore-listed Golden Agri Resources has another 220,000 hectares for palm oil estates, and Equatorial Palm Oil, a UK-listed palm oil developer has another 170,000 hectares. This, in a country that still has to import 60 percent of its staple rice needs.

In Sierra Leone European and Asian firms are securing long-term (50 year) leases on at least half a million hectares of farmland, almost 10 percent of the country's arable land. Of that amount, close to 300,000 hectares have been acquired for oil palm plantations by corporate investors from Europe and Southeast Asia.

In Cameroon, foreign investors from Asia, the US and Europe are rapidly securing enormous land banks, often in fragile forested areas, for palm oil estates. The same is true in Benin, Nigeria, Gabon, the Republic of Congo and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where a Chinese company is reportedly working to secure 2.8 million hectares for oil palm for biodiesel production.

African governments that are endorsing and enabling this wave of large land acquisitions. They are not just allowing but actively encouraging the foreign industrialists and speculators to repeat the same grave injuries committed by colonists and capitalists of yesteryear. Governments and traditional rulers seem indoctrinated by the myth that allocating large tracts of land to foreign investors will lead to 'modernised' agriculture. They and others promoting the land deals as a form of agricultural investment would have us believe that anyone who defends smallholder production is succumbing to 'romanticism'. They appear equally oblivious, wilfully so, to the enormous risks these land deals incurs for their people and their nations. When foreign corporations and nations descend on Africa to get at the continent's oil, they tend to cause massive environmental, social and political disruption, and also conflict. But when they descend on the continent to get hold of massive amounts of arable land to produce palm oil for the world market, they are doing something even more egregious. They are taking control of the land and water on which the local people depend for their food production, livelihoods - their very survival.

Local growers and consumers in Africa do not refine, bleach and deodorise the oil into the commodity that industry produces for the world market.

In West and Central Africa the indigenous oil palm is invaluable in the region. Oil palm is often grown by rural people in 'tree-crop plantations' just one or two hectares in area, in diverse stands of other important trees in and around their farmland and at forest edges. The tree flourishes in natural association with other key food crops such as cassava and yam. It grows well in forest fallows and in agroforestry stands that include kolanut, citrus, indigenous fruit and timber trees, banana and plantains, and cocoa and coffee. The rich red oil that is extracted manually from the palm fruit is a staple in diets, second in importance only to rice or other staple grains or cereals. It is used in soups and sauces, for frying, and in dough made from customary foods such as cassava, rice, plantains, yams and beans. The fruit can even be boiled and roasted with a bit of sugar, tasting very much like a delicious date. It is an excellent source of Vitamins E and K and full of carotenes, which can be converted in the body to Vitamin A. It is also medicinal. Wild and cultivated stands of oil palm in West and Central Africa are also the source of one of the region's great delicacies - palm wine. The clear oil that is extracted, mostly manually, from the palm kernel is used to make soap. The pressed cake left after extraction can be used for fodder. Palm fronds are used for thatch.

Grown and used the way it traditionally has been in Africa, the oil palm also performs environmental services. It can help reclaim degraded lands, as a valuable shade tree in biodiverse cocoa and coffee tree-crop plots, and the residue left in boilers after oil extraction can be used to fertilise soils. But all of this relates to oil palm only as smallholders grow and use it. Once the foreign industrialists got their hands on it and took it away, the oil palm became something very different. In the hands of corporations, palm oil was transformed into a highly profitable commodity for the world market and its industrial production has caused immeasurable environmental damage in Southeast Asia. It appears poised to do the same in Africa. Prevailing economic dogma emphasises economies of scale and increased profitability through sheer size of oil palm estates. It does not take into consideration what is lost from the land when it is transformed into endless rows of oil palm clones, or the environmental damage caused by heavy pesticide and fertiliser use required in monoculture plantations. Massive amounts of productive smallholder farmland and precious woodlands, forest fallows and biodiversity reserves are being taken over by Asian, European and North American investors. They're keen to capitalise on the latest oil boom - one involving the humble African oil palm that is, sadly, threatened by the push to cultivate its 'improved' varieties on millions of hectares of precious African farmland.

The burgeoning demand for palm oil is fuelling a new scramble for land in Africa.

Adapted from here , an article by Joan Baxter