Yaoundé—Environment
watchdog and lobby group, Greenpeace has called on the Cameroon government to
suspend lease agreements with one of the country’s biggest rubber company; Sud-Cameroon
Hévéa (Sudcam) until clear preconditions and modalities of the sublet are
established.
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| Research reveals President Biya's family owns Sudcam rubber plantation |
In an article made public last Wednesday 24
August, the group said the rubber producing giant has been a threat to future
communities and the Dja Faunal Reserve, created in 1950 and registered a UNESCO
World Heritage Site in 1987.
The reserve
constitutes habitat for fourteen species of primate including Western Lowland
Gorillas and Chimpanzees. Nomadic Baka forest peoples have inhabited the area
for hundreds of years, possibly longer.
Greenpeace in the report said a recent analysis
of satellite images shows that Sudcam has clear-cut almost 6,000 hectares of
forest since 2011 with 42% of the deforestation carried out over the past one
and a half year.
“That’s
over 5,000 ha more than the clearing at the SGSOC palm oil plantation in
Cameroon’s South West Region, a project which has been the object of massive NGO
and media scrutiny since 2010,” part of the report read.
Sudcam officials were not reachable for
comments at the time of this report.
President of the Republic's family
Citing a report by the Center for
International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Greenpeace suggests that official
tolerance for SudCam’s apparent violation of Cameroonian land law may be due to
the fact that one of its shareholders is, an influential member of the
Cameroonian political elite.
The CIFOR research which Greenpeace has seen
says: “[the] allocation of a temporary concession to Sud-Cameroun Hevea SA
without taking into account the criteria specified in land regulations seems to
have been motivated by the personality behind the Cameroonian who holds 20% of
the company’s share.”
It adds that, “according to a local
representative of the Ministry of the Environment, the President of the
Republic's family owns the company. However we have learned only that an
influential member of the Cameroonian political elite, whose identity we do not
know, apparently owns 20% of the company’s shares.”
Sudcam whose plantation is located only a
dozen kilometers east of President Paul Biya’s native Mvomeka’a village was
established in 2010 as a joint venture company between the Singapore-based GMG
Global Ltd (GMG), a subsidiary of the Chinese state-owned company Sinochem (80%
of the shares) and the Société de Productions de Palmeraies et d'Hévéa (SPPH)
(20% of the shares), the Greenpeace report explained.
The environmental advocacy group said it has written
to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee to express unease about the lack of
attention paid to the threat created by the Sudcam plantation.
“The opacity and questionable legality of the
Sudcam project – by far the Congo Basin’s most devastating new clearing of
forest for agriculture – has been encouraged by donors’, media’s and NGOs’ near
total indifference to it,” the lobby group suggested in the report.
The group expressed lamentation that the
UNESCO World Heritage Committee was asked to vote on a draft decision to
inscribe the Dja reserve on the List of World Heritage in Danger on 14 July
2016, “unfortunately, only Finland voted in favor while all other delegations
opposed the measure,” Greenpeace said.
By Ndi Eugene Ndi
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