Bruce Wrobel, the chief executive of Herakles Farms, claims his company’s efforts to flatten a chunk of Cameroon’s dense rainforest to develop a palm oil plantation are borne of a desire to address a “dire humanitarian need”. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Palm Oil
Forest destroyer gets kicked out of the club
It was one of those days when we felt like change was in the air – even if it was a small victory it was an important one.
Yesterday, we confirmed that notorious palm oil producer and forest destroyer, Duta Palma, has (finally) been ejected from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil – an organisation with the declared aim of ensuring environmentally responsible palm oil production. Continue reading
Demanding a straight answer from Herakles Farms
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
Challenging year ends in hope for Cameroonian environmental activist
Original blogpost by Alexa Phillips, Greenpeace Africa
For many people thoughts are already turning to the festive period and a well-earned rest. All Nasako Besingi wants for Christmas is for Herakles Farms to say they are leaving him and his fellow villagers’ land alone.
2012 has been a tough year for the Cameroonian activist, the director of the NGO Struggle to Economize Future Environment (SEFE), which has been leading resistance to Herakles’ proposed palm oil plantation in the country. While preparing a peaceful demonstration last month, he was arrested with other SEFE activists and detained without charge. For months he’s been subjected to constant harassment culminating in a court appearance this week where he again left without any charge being laid. Continue reading
Still hope for Papua New Guinea’s forests
With logging and clearing for oil palm threatening many forests in Papua New Guinea, some communities are still standing strong and protecting their forests.
This week I’ve been out with a Greenpeace team filming and photographing ‘Ecoforestry’ as a solution for a community in the province of East New Britain.
Tavolo community and two neighbouring village communities are protecting 32,000 ha of forest in a Wildlife Management Area together with 4,000 ha for ecoforestry.
Ecoforestry protects the forest ecosystem while at the same time providing an income for the community from small-scale portable sawmilling. Continue reading
Africa’s False Dilemma
Originally appeared at The Huffington Post.
These seeds are ready for the press. The fruit itself is turned into "Palm oil," while the nut is used for "Palmiste oil." This is the local variety grown by smallholders.
Ecological and economic welfare are two sides of the same coin and having to choose between developing economies and societies on one hand, and protecting the environment on the other, is a false dilemma. This false dilemma is often used by private companies to dismiss civil society and local communities, mislead policy makers, and then carry on with questionable practices.
Let me explain. Sub-Saharan Africa has been the scene of a huge land grab in recent years, with overseas governments and businesses buying up or securing long-term leases on large tracts of land. Some of the deals are straightforward acquisitions but many are contentious to say the least.
According to a number of the agribusiness corporations that are investing heavily in developing vast palm oil plantations throughout Central and Western Africa their primary aim is bringing much-needed revenue to local economies, providing jobs and improving the lives of the people living there. Don’t let yourselves be fooled by this seemingly altruistic discourse: we rarely hear any mention of the millions to be made in trying to satisfy the unquenchable global thirst for palm oil. Could this be the real motivation?
Cameroon debates legality of a new American palm oil plantation
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.
How to make forest destruction look like “development”
Frédéric Amiel is head of the Forest Campaign for Greenpeace France
Bruce Wrobel is a man with his heart in the right place. You see, Bruce is in the agricultural business and he plans to solve the world’s complex food security issues by creating sustainable, community oriented projects. He is the CEO of Herakles Farms – a corporation with some very wealthy friends. Continue reading
Herakles Farms and How a US Agri-Corporation Sparked Anger in Africa
by Filip Verbelen
Palm oil is the world’s cheapest edible oil and a key ingredient in some biofuels. Global demand is booming and agri-corporations are grabbing large swathes of land to expand palm oil production in a new frontier: Africa.
One of these corporations is Herakles Farms, a New York-based agri-corporation with links to one of the world’s largest private equity firms, Blackstone. Herakles is steaming ahead with its palm oil plantation in Cameroon, which is set to affect tens of thousands of people in dozens of villages and, covering around 70,000 hectares, would flatten a forested area larger than Manhattan Island between four protected areas.
Portraying itself as a benign benefactor, Herakles Farms says it “aims to meet growing global demand for food by developing sustainable and environmentally benign projects with full support of the local people”.
But in Cameroon, this is hardly the case.
During a Greenpeace field trip to Cameroon this month, I witnessed widespread local opposition to Herakles Farms’ highly controversial yet potentially lucrative palm oil plantation. Continue reading
Herakles Farms is cutting the heart out of Cameroon’s rainforest
by Irène Wabiwa
Within the past few weeks, rainforest destruction has begun once again in one of Africa’s most important biodiversity hotspots: the coastal rainforest of Cameroon, at the fringe of the Congo Basin region. Herakles Farms, the American company behind the operation, is now pressing ahead with the establishment of a palm oil plantation in this precious area despite major social, environmental and legal concerns.
A Buma tree (Cieba pentandra), standing in the middle of one of Herakles’ nurseries. These trees are considered to be sacred, and are a symbol of power in many African regions. The bulldozer that tried to fell it crumpled under the impact. Despite having fixed the bulldozer, the company decided to leave the tree so that it now stands alone in the middle of a devastated landscape. © Jan-Joseph Stok / Greenpeace