How Europe’s greed for rubber destroys Cameroon’s rainforest, threatens livelihood of indigenous forest dwellers.

“When they destroyed the forest, they were actually destroying our homes.” Moise Ndjelee sits on a bamboo-made chair, surrounded by other Baka who squat before him to listen as he explains how “strangers” came and “forced them out” of the forest where they used to live.

Ndjelee is a Baka, an indigenous ethnic group spread through rain forests in Cameroon, Congo, Gabon and Central African Republic. They have been historically called pygmies, a term that is no longer considered respectful. There are an estimated 250,000-500.000 forest people, living in the rich forests of Central Africa.  In Cameroon, the Baka community represents roughly 40.000 individuals.

For millennia, the Baka have lived as hunter-gatherers, surviving off the forest’s bounty of plants and animals and using its natural herbs as medicine. But their way of life is dying – forcibly so. The territory is shrinking for the indigenous forest communities as agro-industries destroy forests, depriving them of their ancestral habitat and customs.

“We grew up in the forest. The forest is our patrimony,” says the 80-year-old in Nyabibété, a village in the South region of Cameroon. 

Ndjelee explains that about two decades ago, he had just returned from hunting and was about to prepare dinner when “strangers” arrived and informed the forest dwellers that they had to relocate. “They told us to come and stay here temporarily so that our children can attend school,” Ndjelee continues: “We agreed, and that changed our lives forever.”

That marked the beginning of another epoch for the indigenous community. The strangers Ndjelee referred to were rubber plantation operators. 

What used to be the Baka’s rainforest home has been cleared and is now covered by a 450km2 rubber plantation operated by Sudcam plantation.

Nyabibété village, where the Baka were forced to live after they were expelled from the forest, lies at the road that goes to the DRC. PHOTO, Nathalie Bertrams

Predator Rubber Multinational

In December 2011, a Singapore-based company, GMG Global Ltd, won a series of investment incentives from the Cameroonian government. It had acquired two land concessions in the South Region to create rubber plantations from the government through its local partner company, Sud Cameroun-Hévéa S.A.

According to the deal’s documentation, Sud Cameroun-Hévéa would get 450km2 of forest on a 50-year lease, which could be renewed for another 25 years. Regarding investment incentives, Sud Cameroun-Hévéa wouldn’t pay tax for the first 10 years, thereafter would pay a continuous flat tax rate of 15% for the next 40 years. The deal indicated that the rent, paid to the Cameroonian government, would be $1 per hectare and $0.5 for unplanted land.

The deal was sealed and then deforestation began.

GMG Global’s plantations soon attracted the interest of a rapidly expanding corporation with deep pockets.

In 2016, Halcyon Agri, a leading rubber manufacturing company from Singapore, merged with GMG Global and Chinese Sinochem Natural Rubber. By the end of 2022, Halcyon Agri had in total 395km2 of rubber under cultivation and was selling 1.4 metric tonnes globally. One of the companies in which Halcyon Agri acquired a 100% stake was Corrie MacColl, a British agricultural holding company registered in London. Besides the 45,217 hectares Sudcam plantation, Corrie MacColl also owns the Hévécam concessions consisting of Niété (40,992 hectares), Bissiang (7,643 hectares) and Elogbatindi (3,972 hectares) that are located in the Kribi Region. Halcyon Agri put both the management of the Sudcam and Hevecam plantations into Corrie MacColl’s hands.

A momentous change swept over Halcyon Agri on March 22 this year. The China Hainan Rubber Industry Group, a state-owned enterprise listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange, acquired Halcyon Agri with a controlling shareholding stake of 62.357%. Hainan Rubber is the distributor for 22% of the world’s rubber consumption, has 2,760km2 of rubber under cultivation and runs 72 processing factories.

The Sudcam plantation is now one of its assets.

Greenpeace Africa, an independent global environmental campaigning organisation, claims that an “influential member” of the Cameroonian political elite is reported to own 20% of Sudcam. The plantation lies roughly seven kilometres from the Mvomeka’a mansion of the Cameroonian President, Paul Biya.

Halcyon Agri's operations in Cameroon are expanding. Rights groups and activists have warned that the Sudcam rubber operations are encroaching and threatening the Dja Faunal Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The wildlife reserve is home to endangered forest elephants, chimpanzees, and gorillas. It contains 107 mammal species, five of which are threatened.

The Sudcam plantation and the adjacent Dja Faunal Reserve are in the northwestern part of the wider Congo Basin, which is the world’s second-largest rainforest covering about two million square kilometres. The rainforest is critical for the carbon cycle and can help to lessen the impacts of climate change worldwide. The biodiversity is immense: more than 10,000 plant and animal species, including endangered forest elephants and pygmy hippos. An estimated 60 million people depend on the basin for their livelihoods, including about 40,000 Baka.

Yet deforestation has accelerated since 2000 and the past five years have been particularly bad. The Central Africa Forest Observatory warns: “If the current pace of deforestation and forest degradation continues, 27% of the undisturbed moist forest in Central Africa (including Angola and Uganda) that existed in 2020 will have disappeared by 2050.”

“To the best of our knowledge, no rubber plantation has encroached on protected areas. Sudcam in the South region is close to the Dja Reserve,” says Jules Doret Ndongo, Cameroon’s Minister of Forestry and Wildlife.

The Baka sank into despair after they were expelled from the forest. PHOTO, Nathalie Bertrams

Lost Forest

Satellite data recorded by the University of Maryland’s Global Land Analysis and Discovery lab and visualised on Global Forest Watch sheds light on how much forest has been lost thus far. Between 2012 and 2018, Sudcam cleared around 12,700 hectares (127 km2)) of rainforest. According to Global Forest Watch, nearly all the forest cleared in the Sudcam concession was old-growth rainforest.

Cameroon is a telling example of how deforestation is fueled by ever-growing demand for rubber products. Global Forest Watch reports that from 2002 to 2021 nearly 8,000km2 of its primary forest disappeared, with the main drivers being urbanisation and commodity-driven deforestation. The price of cocoa, rubber, palm oil and other agricultural products is axiomatically a factor in deforestation rates.

According to Corrie MacColl, deforestation stopped at the Sudcam plantation in December 2018. After independently examining satellite images, Digital Earth Africa concluded that deforestation at Sudcam did indeed stop in 2018, albeit after eight years of intense clearing.

There might be a sleight of hand in play. Instead of clearing even more of its land to grow more rubber trees, Corrie MacColl has started an outgrowers programme, where it aims to buy rubber from up to 13,000 small-scale farmers. The company states that it will only buy rubber planted on degraded land, which will total 270 km2.

Greenpeace Africa’s Ranèce Ndjeudja is afraid that the programme “might mean that those smallholders will now be the ones deforesting on behalf of the production of rubber. And, of course, at the end of the day, benefiting Sudcam.”