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UGANDA: NGOs Judging Oil Palm on Hearsay, Says U.N.

Paul Virgo

ROME, Apr 1 2010 (IPS) - Non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are guilty of judging a palm oil project in Uganda on innuendo rather than its merits, the United Nations poverty agency supporting the controversial scheme said, as the project starts to bear fruit for smallholder farmers.

Local civil society groups, however, are standing by a report they commissioned last year accusing a private-public partnership on Uganda’s Bugala Island on Lake Victoria of a series of environmental and social misdemeanours.

The palm oil industry has long been under fire for, among other things, its contribution to deforestation and the destruction of endangered animals’ habitats in Asia.

The U.N. International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) says this is behind what it considers an unfounded wave of hostility that the project it helped launch with a 10 million dollar loan has met since the first plantations were set up in 2003.

“There’s been a knee-jerk reaction to the word ‘oil palm’ because of the industry’s poor reputation in the 1990s,” Marian Bradley, IFAD country programme manager for Uganda told IPS. “There’s been an inability of the NGO community to acknowledge the efforts the industry has made in terms of cleaning up what it’s been doing.

“By innuendo this has been applied to Uganda. If a company in Malaysia is damaging a habitat of orangutans, the oil palm industry must be damaging a habitat in Uganda.”

The Kalangala NGO Forum (KADINGO) of local environmental and civil society groups disagrees. “The study was based on what was on the ground at that time and nothing much has changed,” David Mwayafu, programme officer with the Uganda Coalition For Sustainable Development and one of the report’s authors, told IPS.

Bradley accepted there was some truth in KADINGO’s charges in that the obligation to respect a 200-metre border of forest along the lake shore has always not been upheld. The border is needed to prevent soil erosion, and act as a buffer zone to stop fertilisers used on the oil palms from running off into the lake and distorting its eco-system.

But she said the problem concerned less than two percent of the project’s area and that remedial action had been taken.

“The 200-metre border is being maintained and, in places where it had been destroyed or did not exist, the private sector has had nurseries of indigenous trees and is replanting it,” she said. IFAD says allegations the project has eaten into protected lands are simply untrue.

KADINGO counters that the government had no right to include land allocated to the Uganda Land Alliance, a consortium of NGOs, in territory it handed over to the Oil Palm Uganda Limited (OPUL) private consortium in exchange for a 10 percent share in the Bugala plantation.

The NGOs are also unhappy that forest land was cleared to make way for the plantations. IFAD says this “mostly secondary” woodland accounted for under 40 percent of the total area. “We’re not talking about habitat for charismatic wildlife,” Bradley said, adding that critics had failed to give proper weight to the project’s benefits. Uganda, she said, needs to expand vegetable oil production to reduce its reliance on expensive imports so it can improve levels of nutrition by providing the oil at affordable prices for poor people.

“The amount of fats in diets remains very low, at 4.3 kilos per capita per year compared to a minimum estimated requirement of about 7.5 kilos,” said Bradley. “There are a lot of people in Uganda who are not getting enough calories in their diets.”

The project has brought new roads (mostly to palm oil sites), new health services (for palm oil workers) and a regular ferry service to the island which Bradley said has helped boost tourism. It has, she said, created thousands of jobs too, including the people employed at a mill on the island and at a refinery at nearby Jinja, although KADINGO says pay and conditions are poor.

“(Plantation) workers houses are small and in some places workers sleep in makeshift plastic shelters,” said Mwayafu. “The services provided are unevenly distributed.”

IFAD wants the scheme to give smallholder farmers the opportunity to capitalise on surging demand for vegetable oil, detergents and soaps from palm. It said over 700 smallholders have developed about 2,000 hectares of plantations and 1,500 more will be added over the next few years, compared to 6,000 hectares developed by OPUL.

The Kalangala Oil Palm Growers Trust (KOPGT), the association through which IFAD provides financial and technical support and the training smallholders need to cultivate oil palms, which take about five years to mature before becoming productive, says the project is gradually winning over locals.

“At first there was animosity,” KOPGT manager Nelson Basaalide told IPS. “In February 52 of the farmers who first joined started selling their fruit, and they are very excited. This has brought others to say it’s time to join and we’ve had lots of people coming forward to register in recent months.”

KADINGO says some smallholders have gripes about the strings attached, such as the inability to shop around for fertilisers and other inputs.

But not all of them are dissatisfied: “I’m very happy,” Samuel Ssonko told IPS. “The only problem we had were delays in getting credits but this has been solved. We didn’t have anything here before. There have been lots of improvements. I want people to come here and see. Ordinary people are planting. It’s a good project.”