By Eugenie Tailhandier
Palm oil is known to be the most versatile oil in the world. It is used in the manufacture of so many household goods including food, cosmetics or candles. It provides the foaming agent in almost all shampoos, liquid soaps or detergents, raises the melting point of ice cream and is increasingly used as a cheap feedstock for agro-fuels suitable for cars, ships and planes, especially in the European Union. The palm kernel is also used as animal feed.
Furthermore, it is a highly productive crop that is capable of producing more oil with less land than any other existing vegetable oil: a palm oil plantation produces 10 times more oil than a soybean field and six times more than a rapeseed field, according to the French Alliance for Sustainable Palm Oil.
Between 1995 and 2015, annual production quadrupled, from 15.2 million to 62.6 million tons, and the plantations which produce it represent 10% of global farmland.
The actual expansion of industrial palm oil plantations in Africa has all the characteristics of a new colonial occupation: lands are taken without consent and frequently with the use of violence, destroying communities’ ways of living as well as the local biodiversity, polluting the waters, and exploiting locals as workers in undignified working conditions.
“The former white settlers used these international institutions to come back and make huge profits while forcing Africa back into poverty. It’s nothing more than neocolonialism,” Emmanuel tells me.
Fortunately, palm oil industrial plantations are facing resistance. Communities all over the continent are organising to defend their rights. Emmanuel is an important part of this movement. When, in 2012, SOCAPALM announced that it would expand its plantations to Mbonjo’s wetlands, threatening the villagers’ access to cultivable land, Emmanuel decided to contact Vincent Bolloré – France’s most influential businessman, CEO of the French multinational Bolloré, a key shareholder of SOCFIN, owner of SOCAPALM – to complain about the situation.
By Eugenie Tailhandier