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LIBERIA: Wild West – the Sinoe Rubber Plantation

Rebecca Murray

Greenville, LIBERIA, Apr 8 2009 (IPS) - "We organised security throughout the camp. If there was noise in the plantation we would call the person and carry out an investigation," the man known as ‘White Flower’ tells IPS. "Then the superintendent said they should arrest me and my crew."

The Sinoe Rubber Plantation (SRP) is one of Liberia’s largest at over 242 hectares. It was the site of fierce fighting during between Charles Taylor’s government forces and opposing militia the brutal civil war.

After the war’s end in 2003, former fighters eventually led by Leon Worjlah, the 32-year-old ex-combatant everyone calls White Flower, took control of the lush plantation through a local association called the Citizen’s Welfare Committee (CWC).

"Before you can go and buy some rubber from that plantation, you had to pay $100 (U.S.) to the CWC," explains local journalist Patrick Kamor. "Then, besides that, when you are transporting rubber to town, for every twenty bags you had to give them five bags."

"When [White Flower] left people were feeling bad about him… Why do people have to pay money before you can operate on the plantation? Why when you transport your own crops do you have to pay every time by dropping bags?"

Both the area’s small-time rubber purchasers and the CWC transported the latex to giant commercial buyers Firestone and Liberian Agriculture Company (LAC) in Greenville.

"It was said that the fees [CWC] collected would go to benefit plantation communities, but accusations often flew about misuse of funds by committee members," stated a joint government and United Nations Rubber Plantation Task Force report in September 2007.

Hard times on the plantation

The SRP lies thirty kilometres from the coastal town of Greenville, thirty km of rutted dirt road and damaged wooden bridges that are barely navigable during the rainy season. Bordering the mineral-rich forest of Sapo National Park, it is home to the indigenous Wedjah community, and an influx of ex-combatants and civilian families looking for work.

The plantation is not prospering: with a recent drop in global rubber prices and the majority of trees bled dry from overexploitation, the coummunity lacks basic services like clinics, schools and access to clean drinking water. A tonne of rubber worth $1,200 in Greenville a year ago collects $282 there today.

"For the past three months we’ve had a problem with food," says Robert Reeves, a rubber tapper from Gartey Village on the plantation's edge. "We depend on the rubber, and the rubber is not productive again for the entire farm – it has broken down – and we can’t survive." He says tappers now climb over four meters up the tall rubber trees to bleed them for latex; exhausting and hazardous work for little gain.

Reeves is building the area’s first clinic as a mason at $7 a day for the U.N., now the SRP’s largest employer. Many of his neighbours are also enrolled in the U.N.’s Reintegration, Rehabilitation and Recovery (RRR) programme, which has employed over 700 workers so far, clearing brush and maintaining roads.

Between a rock and a hard place

The Liberian government intends to find a suitable concessionaire willing to invest long-term in the plantation’s trees and workers, but the Agricultural Ministry first has to wait on a lagging resolution to a contentious land dispute filed in the courts by former President William Tolbert’s family, toppled from power by a violent coup in 1980.

Meanwhile, at local level, Greensville's County Superintendent Sylvester Grisgby, along with local law enforcement, masterminded the arrest of White Flower and eight associates last November, accusing them of criminal intent to commit murder and arson, and shutting down all CWC operations.

"There was a conflict between the worker’s group [CWC] and the community police," explains White Flower’s attorney, Gelplah-Tiklo Konton. "And in the process, there were gunshots, and somebody was wounded, a vehicle was burned, and a house was burned. And the state is saying the worker’s group was responsible for that."

White Flower is currently out on bail after months behind bars, released without being formally charged. Warned by his lawyer to stay clear of the SRP, he finds himself with little to do at his decrepit Greenville home, though he hopes to be considered for a future management team at the plantation.

And rubber tappers and small-buyers have not seen their lot improve. Rumours of Grigsby’s corrupt practices and monopoly on buyers have exacerbated tensions among SRP workers, who are now forced to pay $100 per tonne of rubber to CWC’s replacement, Grigsby’s brainchild, the Sinoe Trust Fund.

"We are on the verge of moving in, and we don’t want to create a confused situation," said Toe. "And we also don’t want to do anything that can be destabilising, because some of the measures that I’ve heard that were put in place are measures that could be basically for the long term – it would be difficult to uproot…"

"We want to get all of this done before the heavy rains. We need to do that to give enough time for the interim management team to put itself into place," then-minister of agriculture Chris Toe told IPS in March, shortly before his resignation.

A few years ago, not everyone on the plantation was happy with the renewed attention from government.

"I cannot tell you the community was hostile – it was a mixed reception," says Eric Perry, a U.N. RRR programme officer who accompanied the first Joint Task Force into the SRP in 2006. "The local community residents were begging for intervention because since 1990 there has not been any social service provisions – there were no schools, no clinics, absolutely nothing."

"However," Perry says, "for the former combatants who at the time were running the plantation… they were a little hostile, and they wanted to form part of any eventual management team or concession what was coming."

President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s government has aggressively looked for companies to invest in Liberia’s most valuable resources – rubber, iron ore and timber – but the global economic meltdown in September 2008 has hit the country's concessions particularly hard.

"It is devastating," said Toe. "Even those investors, or potential investors, who have expressed interest in not only rubber or oil palm, are doing a couple of things. They are either scaling down their plans, or asking for more incentives from government, or one or two of them have bowed out."

A future off the plantation

The future of the community may not lie in rubber production at all. The UK-based charity Landmine Action is setting up an alternative agricultural program for ex-combatants from SRP in nearby Panama, modelled after their project in Guthrie Rubber Plantation, also supervised by former fighters after the war.

Building a campus of classrooms and housing, the NGO is planning an initial three-month course for over 200 former fighters, teaching a variety of alternative crop and livestock farming able to sustain families for years to come.

James Davies was a former fighter with Charles Taylor’s NPFL, and at 36 is a natural leader for many of the workers cementing bricks on the Panama construction site.

"I was in the plantation before here. There was a time the government told everybody in the plantation they should leave. Especially ex-combatants. So that’s why I decided to call a meeting in the plantation, with my brothers, and said, ‘I want for all of us to go to Panama and work.'"

"If you mingle with civilians and take good care of them, they will show you how to move in the community," he laughs. "If you treat them bad, you will make enemies."