The bad news came through at their weekly team meeting: a new decree (N°2019/4562 of 11 November 2019) had been issued, allocating 60,000 ha of Campo Ma’an forest in southwest Cameroon to CAMVERT, an agro-industrial giant producing and marketing palm oil.
The Green Development Advocates (GDA) team sprang into action.
This is the story of how a small but mighty Cameroonian organisation supported its community to take on CAMVERT and win, protecting 20,000 ha of this precious forest and its people.
Campo Ma’an National Park: exceptional biodiversity on the line
In southern Cameroon, a vast equatorial forest meets the Atlantic Ocean. This deep expanse of thick, evergreen canopy is Campo Ma’an National Park, which covers some 264,064 ha. Thought to be one of the few regions that persisted as a tropical rainforest through the Ice Age, it hosts an incredible array of biodiversity, with some of the world’s most charismatic animals, hundreds of species of reptiles and fish, and over 300 species of birds.
Some species are found nowhere else on Earth, and several are on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. The giant pangolin, the African elephant, the lowland gorilla, the chimpanzee, the buffalo, the panther, and the mandrill – a strikingly colourful primate – all fall into the latter category.
Alongside this, Campo Ma’an National Park is also home to a large local population who make their living from this protected area. For the Indigenous Bagyeli community, the forest is their resource.
This extraordinary heritage is threatened by the conversion of 60,000 ha of Campo Ma’an Park to agro-industry, primarily for oil palm plantations.
The mandrill is just one of many species threatened by habitat loss in the forest of Campo Ma’an. © iStock
Working together to fight destructive industry
This area has long been targeted for extractive practices from oil, logging, and plantation industries. In response, groups of local people have rallied together to protect the forest and resist the land grabs that encroach on it. A leading coordinator and voice of this resistance is Green Development Advocates (GDA) – a Cameroonian organisation empowering forest communities and Indigenous Peoples to protect forests from larger-scale destructive developments and support sustainable activities.
Focused on forests in Southwest Cameroon, GDA pushes for the inclusion of local community and Indigenous peoples’ rights in the development process, especially when parts of the forest are allocated to companies for economic projects. They use their legal expertise to carry out evaluations of current laws and practices, build the capacity of local and national civil society organisations, and develop initiatives to alleviate poverty.
Using community forestry to secure land, GDA works alongside communities to support them at every stage, from learning about Community Forestry Concessions to applying for titles and eventually managing the land.
Members of the local Bagyeli community. © Marie Claude Simard
Revealing the true cost of ‘development’
The first priority of the GDA team was to talk to the community to understand their views on the project. The team carried out a number of local surveys, meeting with local people and other stakeholders in the area. On returning to Yaoundé, the team analysed the legal texts in force, and very quickly sounded the alarm on the real threats posed by this project through four major publications.
The first study presented the various breaches of forestry law relating to the downgrading and allocation of the provisional concession. The second study, entitled Analysis of the negative impact of the CAMVERT agro-industrial project on the biodiversity of Campo Ma’an, shows the potential damage of the project to the fauna and flora of the Campo area. With Greenpeace Africa, GDA also produced a report entitled ‘Camvert: a recurring nightmare’, which enables local and Indigenous communities to express their fears about the project. These publications were widely shared on GDA communications platforms and at national and international meetings.