by Fred Pearce
I was surprised at how peaceful Liberia was in 2011. You could walk the streets safely. But things could change quickly. Ordinary indigenous Liberians told me that, under Sirleaf and her Unity Party, the country and its natural resources had been grabbed back by the Americo-Liberian elite. They saw the civil war, at least in retrospect, as a rebellion against that rule. However disastrous Doe and Taylor had been, the natives had unfinished business.
That certainly was the message I got in the heart of downtown Monrovia from Alfred Brownell, the stern-faced and bullish boss of Green Advocates, an environmental law NGO. We spoke in the semidarkness of a power outage in his cramped second-floor offices opposite the Crown Hill Cinema. His staff sat round, sweating, till the power revived their computer screens.
Brownell told me that for the Americo-Liberian elite “the civil war was a tragic aberration. They see the return of peace as simply a chance to return to business as usual. The government is giving out large areas of land and throwing the people a few crumbs.” He estimated that $16 billion worth of investment had come into Liberia from abroad since 2005, but most of it was linked to exploiting natural resources—to land grabs. “Ministers are drunk with the idea that multinational investment will bring economic recovery. But it won’t. The multinationals just take our resources.”
Letting land to foreign concessions had “produced a small, reliable stream of government revenue, a large number of poorly paid jobs, and not much else in the way of development.” Firestone had been growing rubber in the country for eight decades and had “never manufactured so much as a rubber band here.” He fixed me with a stare in the gloom. “To question the government’s priorities is to be accused of being anti-development. But it is not. The big commercial model is not sustainable.”
Land is the central issue, the biggest threat to stability. Every week conflicts over land are reported in the papers. Land is being concentrated in ever fewer hands. Brownell argued for a revival of communal control of the country’s land and forests—something the government has sometimes seemed to encourage, but has failed to deliver. Its compromise has seen communities able to claim ownership of their soil, but not the trees that grow on it or the minerals beneath it. What use was that?
The multinationals, of course, see things differently. Karmorh at Firestone said simply: “I understand the significance of communal land. But you have to have private ownership to get investment.” Hickey at Buchanan Renewables went further. He said communally owned lands had failed the people. “This land could grow anything. It’s so fertile and the climate is good. They don’t even suffer from natural disasters like hurricanes or droughts. Everything is going for them. Yet they are hungry and poor. At some point this country has got to deal with the tribal lands issue,” he said. By “deal with” he meant take them over. Give them to the land grabbers. But if that happens, Brownell believes, “things will explode again. The peace here remains fragile, threatened by the unresolved issue of who will exploit and who will benefit from Liberia’s natural resources.” The resource curse, complicated by the social divide between natives and Americo-Liberians, persists.
It is possible to overplay the rigidity of this divide. The civil war did not have such neat battle lines, and neither does the peace. Doe was a native Krahn, it is true. But Taylor’s father was an Americo-Liberian. Sirleaf is half Gola, a quarter German, and a quarter Krahn. And the civil war has changed things. A third of the rural population moved to Monrovia. They came as refugees but want to stay, work, buy mobile phones, and watch TV. There is fanatical support for European soccer teams, which have provided a good living for a handful of black West Africans, most notably George Weah, who traded his celebrity gained at Chelsea, Manchester City, and AC Milan for a career in politics and almost won the 2005 presidential election.
Does this cultural confusion—between the Americo-Liberian elite and the rest, between old tribal loyalties and soccer-mad streetwise modernism—mean trouble ahead? I began to think so. A leading candidate in the 2011 presidential election was a senator named Prince Johnson. He was famous during the civil war for his brutality and sadism. A widely distributed video shot in 1990 shows him sipping a Budweiser as his men cut off the ear of Doe prior to killing him. By 2011, he claimed to be a born-again Christian and threw in his lot with Sirleaf in the second round of the election to ensure her victory. But his high political profile was disturbing nonetheless.
Liberia looked to me like the sort of place that other African countries could become if they succumb to the land grabbers. Its foreign corporations run enclave economies that provide a modicum of order and basic services for their staff and families, but suck the life out of the rest of the country. They take big profits but fail to pay enough taxes to allow the wider society to benefit from their presence. They don’t buy local services or produce, and take their own produce out of the country as swiftly as they can.
This is understandable. The chaos around these foreign enclaves encourages their isolation. But, as the fences are raised and the isolation increases, the chaos outside only intensifies. The companies are making money under siege. They are monopoly users of the country’s natural resources, and an impediment to its social, economic, and political development. This may not be inevitable. But those who argue that the arrival of foreign investment, of land grabbers, can hardly fail to improve local economies in Africa and elsewhere should take a close look at the reality of Liberia today.
At the airport, around the corner from Firestone’s headquarters, there was an executive jet on the tarmac. It was waiting to whisk away Tony Blair, who was in Monrovia as part of his African Governance Initiative. According to the Daily Observer he had come to “renew his commitment to the country’s progress.” As my flight took off, we climbed over a large military area where no fewer than twelve UN helicopters were parked. Their crews, too, were foreigners intent on preserving peace and bringing prosperity. But I had Brownell’s words ringing in my ears. What price progress when not a single rubber band has been made here in eight decades of foreign presence—not a single condom or tire with a “Made in Liberia” label?
Chapter 7. Palm Bay, Liberia: Return of the Oil Palm
I met Peter Bayliss in the bar of the Sparks Hotel in downtown Buchanan. Bald, British, and garrulous, he began with a bit of name-dropping. He got the Gettys and the Rockefellers into the first sentence. His company, London-based Equatorial Palm Oil (EPO), had acquired a lease on 418,000 acres of Liberia to grow oil palm. Much of the land had been in foreign hands before. The Rockefellers ran a cattle ranch here, he said, and the Getty family had an old oil-palm plantation that Bayliss was now in charge of reviving and extending after two decades of civil war.
I liked Bayliss. And, by comparison with most other big plantations that I visited, I liked his operation. “As good as it gets,” I wrote in my notebook the next day, after touring his main operation near Buchanan at Palm Bay. Bayliss is an old hand in the oil-palm business. He worked for many years for the Malaysian-owned New Britain Palm Oil company, which has 190,000 acres of plantations, mostly on the island of New Britain off Papua New Guinea. He went home to run a livestock co-op in Cornwall, but was enticed out to Liberia by Michael Frayne, the London-based chairman of EPO, to become managing director. “I couldn’t turn it down. It was a chance to develop my own plantation,” Bayliss said as we ordered a second Club Beer.
How did a start-up company in London manage to get its hands on two big chunks of West Africa? To some extent, they were the spoils of the civil war. The Getty family pulled out of Palm Bay in 1990, when the armed gangs moved in. They subsequently sold to LIBINCO, a company set up by a local Lebanese, Joseph Jaoudi, whose career also involved both working as an engineer on the Apollo moon program in the United States and running his family’s chain of supermarkets in Liberia. Jaoudi in turn sold to EPO, where he remains a shareholder and director.
EPO’s second chunk of Liberia,
the Butaw concession, is down the coast near the port of Greenville. It had been a government-owned oil-palm plantation. During the war, it was overrun by illegal diamond miners. In 2005, the Sirleaf government sold it to a newly formed outfit named Liberian Forest Products, set up by a syndicate of British investors, including Daniel Betts, who has been gold prospecting in Liberia. But after the new Sirleaf administration found “gross irregularities and non-compliance with the law” in the original negotiations, Liberian Forest Products was bought out by Nardina Resources, which became Equatorial Biofuels, which in turn became Equatorial Palm Oil. The terms were renegotiated and no one from the original syndicate is now involved.
EPO briefly ran out of cash after the credit crunch. But in September 2010, an Indian industrialist named Chinnakannan Sivasankaran, who made a billion dollars pioneering cheap PCs and mobile phones at home in the 1980s and 1990s, came calling. He bought a big stake and injected fresh cash. His Siva Group “is investing worldwide in the palm oil industry,” EPO chairman Frayne, an Australian geologist, told me a few weeks before my trip, when we met in his modest second-floor office behind Fortnum & Mason in Piccadilly, London. “Siva can access banks in a way we could not.” Other backers since “accessed” include JP Morgan, Henderson, and Blackrock. The Siva cash means Bayliss can plant up to 25,000 acres of new trees each year from now on.
But there is a lot to do getting the existing plantation back to production. The fire in Getty’s oil-palm boiler at Palm Bay went out on April 21, 1990. As the civil war lurched on, rebels came and went, looting and wrecking, stripping Getty’s buildings and eating Rockefeller’s cattle. When I visited, the rusting boiler still contained the last ash, and the old Getty manager’s house stood roofless and gutted.
But much of the workforce stayed, harvesting and processing the oil palm on their own, boiling it up in small vats, skimming the oil off the top, and going to town to find buyers. “They didn’t know it would be twenty years before the plantation revived. But they waited. The loyalty that comes with that is humbling,” said Bayliss. “When we paid the first wages to women at the nursery recently, some of them said they hadn’t seen cash in their own hands for twenty years.”
Bayliss plans on repaying that loyalty. The concessions deal requires that the company sets up schools and clinics. When he opened a clinic in an old shack in 2008, it was the first health-care facility at Palm Bay for nineteen years. The resident doctor, in a reassuring white coat with stethoscope, told me he had seen nine hundred patients in the previous month, dispensing a few basic drugs; providing contraception, inoculations, dressings, and treatment for common diseases like malaria and diarrhea; and delivering babies. In practice the clinic was open to all comers, not just employees, he said.
Kids crowded round as we toured the primary school, a rough construction of cinder blocks with a tin roof. They showed off the pineapples, plantains, and cassava in their class garden. They were proud that the new benches were made by local carpenters. The nine teachers ran morning and afternoon sessions, each with 230 pupils. Bayliss promised that soon all children of employees could go there.
This was work in progress. Taxis wouldn’t come to Palm Bay yet because the road was so bad. But Cellcom was erecting a phone tower. Bayliss’s staff had started a couple of soccer teams, and there was basketball and volleyball. “It’s part of growing a community. Stability of communities is essential,” said Bayliss. I was struck by the contrast between Bayliss’s professional benevolence and the missionary cluelessness of Calvin Burgess’s dominion on the Yala swamp in Kenya.
Things were happening fast on site, too. As we talked, a local truck owner turned up to move some rusting bits of the old mill. But Bayliss told him to leave an old German tank from World War II that had somehow gotten parked in the main yard. Meanwhile, Malaysian contractors were installing a new mill. The $3 million worth of equipment had been shipped to Monrovia via Dubai, then brought on dozens of trucks bouncing forty-foot containers along the potholed roads and finally up a dirt track to the plantation.
The mill, standing about four stories high, was set to process five tons of the plum-sized fruit an hour, enough to produce one ton of oil. Soon, it would handle 15 tons an hour. Processing requires sterilizing the fruit with steam and squashing it in a screw press to extract the oil. Bayliss said the oil would all be sold in West Africa, where there is a big market for locally produced staple products containing palm oil, such as soap and shampoo and cookies. Process leftovers would become either fuel for the boiler or mulch for the fields.
The new stainless-steel mill was state of the art and highly automated. But elsewhere, a surprising amount of work was being done by hand. The effluent settling ponds had been dug with shovels. And in the nursery—run by Ian Horton, a weather-beaten old Southern Rhodesian who left when it became Zimbabwe—acres of seedlings were being laboriously watered by dozens of women with buckets. The seedlings stay there for twelve months before being planted out.
Bayliss wanted the plantation to be a catalyst for a wider revival of the local economy. The concession included new land around the old Getty plantation that would be set aside for tenant farmers, from whom he would buy palm oil. “But I don’t want them only growing oil palm. Prices are good now, but they are volatile. So they need to grow other crops.” As Frayne had told me in London: “We can make good returns, but there is a right way to do it.”
The “right way” is certainly to involve smallholders as outgrowers. Politically, that is a big test of the success of the project, because it can spread wealth and break down the enclave syndrome so long inflicted on Liberia by Firestone. But there are risks. Oil-palm fruit rots quickly. It needs to be turned into oil within twenty-four hours at the most, said Bayliss. That limits the potential for outgrowers to deliver fruit to his mill. It also raises the stakes in other ways. He told me he feared hundreds of farmers turning up at his gate loaded down with rotting bunches of fruit. “We are about to become the only palm-oil processing plant in the country. We don’t want trucks coming from all over the place, especially if we have to send them back. We could easily become public enemy number one—by trying to do good.”
A lot of native Liberians I met at Palm Bay were delighted the plantation was back in business. While watching workers wielding sharp knives on the end of long sticks to rip creepers out of the old oil palms, I met John Fon. He was sixty-five, wore a broad and infectious smile, and had spent many years out of the country during the troubles. “I was in London. I worked for Cadbury’s in Shepherds Bush. They bought cocoa from here. After that, I worked in Nigeria. But I have come back.” He had a new wife, and he showed me his lovingly tended garden in the shade of the plantation, full of cocoa plants. But like many an old man, he didn’t think much of the younger generation. “The mentality of the children here is not good, because they’ve been used to guns and not working. They think life should be easy.”
While some of the older workers were keen to resume plantation life, others want their independence and to keep land that the government has given to the new plantation owners. They are regarded as squatters. “The government told us that they would remove them, but we don’t want confrontation,” said Bayliss. He hoped to persuade the majority either to leave or join his workforce. But he admitted that he would act eventually against any remnant that remained. Whether dealing with the “squatters” is compatible with his ideals of creating community harmony remains to be seen.
Bayliss’s approach, while pragmatic, is not slash-and-burn profiteering. It seemed to me he had a better chance of success than a couple of Asian giants setting up shop elsewhere in Liberia. Both are taking over existing oil-palm plantations, and converting rubber plantations. Indonesia’s Golden Agri, part of the Sinar Mas group, has almost 620,000 acres in the far southeast of the country. And Malaysia’s Sime Darby, reputedly the world’s largest palm oil company, has almost as much. If all three foreign projects
proceed as planned, a total of one and a half million acres of Liberia could be under oil palm before long, more than 6 percent of the country.
But Sime Darby in particular hit trouble in 2011, with locals refusing to give up land and complaining that the company was engaged in illegal clearing. Alfred Brownell, the activist lawyer, had become involved. In October, an appeal to the industry watchdog, the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil, brought a promise that the company would “cease their operations immediately” on 10,000 acres claimed by the villagers and “open bilateral discussions.” Victory.
Before I left Palm Bay, and after walking around the nursery, I asked an idle question about where the seedlings came from. Horton said they had come from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Where in the DRC, I wondered. “From the old Unilever place,” he said. Wow. This was straight out of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. The seedlings, it turned out, had been germinated at a research station at Yaligimba in the far north of that vast country. Then they were taken on a barge for more than 600 miles down the River Congo to Kinshasa, before being flown east to Nairobi in Kenya and then west to Monrovia. Yaligimba had been established almost exactly a hundred years before as part of a huge oil-palm plantation set up by William and James Lever, from Warrington in England, the forerunners of Unilever.
Oil palm is a native plant of Africa. It grows wild in the jungles. The precious oil from its fruit turns up in flasks in Egyptian tombs. It went with slaves to the Americas and was sold to Europe in the nineteenth century for candle-making and as an engine lubricant. Lever Brothers needed huge amounts of palm oil to make their best-selling Sunlight soap, one of the world’s first global consumer brands. Initially they bought it from smallholders in British colonies in West Africa, particularly the Niger Delta, which was a source of palm oil long before petroleum took over there. But, when the brothers proposed setting up their own plantations, the colonial authorities balked, not wanting to upset their generally good relations with West African farmers.