Alex Rose-Innes
The Congo Basin Forest, Africa’s biggest tropical forest and the world’s second largest rainforest, is under severe threat of deforestation. In the southern region of Cameroon, Sudcam, a supplier to the world’s largest rubber trader, Singabore-based Halcyon Agri, had been responsible for clearing intact the indigenous Baka people and demolishing their villages.
While the Deutsche Bank (DB) is being accused of financing Halcyon Agri, Greenpeace had called for Sudcam to stop unregulated deforestation and compensate those who had been displaced from their land. With the DB to transfer its second tranche of a multi-million US Dollar loan mid-2021, global environmentalists and conservationists had called this “one of the most devastating deforestations on the continent of Africa, to date.”
Last year, the DB approved a $25 million loan to the Asian-based business through its subsidiary Corrie MacColl, to finance investments for its plantations in Cameroon and Malaysia, promising “a new standard for the rubber industry.” This would be the second time in one year that the DB would be violating its own Environmental and Social Policy Framework, while at the same time, undertaking to spend 200 billion Euros on sustainability and addressing climate change on the African continent.
Satellite images showed that Sudcam had, since 2011, cleared more than 10 000 hectares of rainforest, a mere kilometre from Dja Faunal Reserve, a UNESCO World Heritage site. For seven successive years, more and more indigenous Baka people had lost their land and been displaced. Since July 2020, Earthsight, the Center for International Forestry Research, the Rainforest Foundation in the UK and UNESCO, had already called for the cancellation of the loan and asked the European Union to get involved.
Meanwhile, Greenpeace had ascertained that the Sudcam plantation is adjacent to Cameroon’s President, Paul Biya’s mansion and that his son and successor, Frank, is a 20% shareholder in Sudcam.
“Deutsche Bank’s champion company kicked indigenous Baka People off their ancestral lands without the slightest attempt at obtaining their free, prior a nd informed consent. Dressing up its loan as sustainable is a textbook case of green washing*,” according to Ranèce Jovial Ndjeudja, Greenpeace Africa campaign manager in Cameroon.
* Green washing is the process of conveying a false impression or providing misleading information about how a company’s products are more environmentally sound. … Green washing is a play on the term “whitewashing,” which means using misleading information to gloss over bad behaviour.
