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THE WITNESS
Like many activists, we ask lots of questions, and often these questions go unanswered in the hope that we’ll simply give up and stop asking.
US agribusiness Herakles Farms and its chief executive Bruce Wrobel think they can put their heads in the sand in the hope we’ll eventually stop pestering them. Why? Because they don’t like answering questions about how they intend to carve out 73,000 hectares of largely dense forest in Cameroon. Learn more about Palm oil’s new frontier. Continue reading
It is a 2 day drive from the capital Yaounde to the South West of Cameroon, to the area where the American company Herakles Farms is starting a huge new palm oil plantation. Going there we pass by several vast palm oil and banana plantations. Plantations seem to be big business already for years in Cameroon. But when we stop to visit the plantations, the only thing we see is poverty.Local people are driven away from their farms to make space for plantations, are forced to settle elsewhere, and plantation workers are imported from other areas in Cameroon. Plantation wages are low compared to a farmers income in this region. Also the occasional hospitals and schools supplied by the plantation companies don’t look very reliable.