The growers and driers of our Fair
Fruit come from the agricultural community of
Njombe Penja, an area in the coastal region
often referred to as Cameroon's food basket.
Life was fairly good for most of these
producers until the early nineties when a
foreign agro-business affiliated with Dole
Foods Inc. began usurping their land to expand
the company's banana plantations, a practice
that still continues today. In light of the new
treaty the EU struck with some of its former
African colonies like Cameroon, the
multinational's unmistakable objective is to
acquire as much land as possible, allowing
Dole, through its French subsidiary, to
continue expanding its colossal share of the
international banana market.
Our
producers are small fruit farmers who were
forced off their fields by these takeovers.
With their livelihoods in ruins, some have
tried to pick up the pieces and rebuild their
lives. However, rebuilding has not been easy as
the multinational has increased its hold on
land in the area. Many farmers now must walk
long distances to rented land that they barely
can afford.
One of our fruit
farmers has twice been evicted from rented
land. He has been forced miles from his home
and beyond the boundaries of the banana
plantations in an attempt to stay outside of
the business' reach and avoid further
evictions. Others manage on small plots nearer
by, but they face inflated prices on their
leases. Due to a lack of capital, a few of the
afflicted farmers merely subsist on a small
remainder of land, unable to resolve their past
debts. There are even farmers who no longer
have the opportunity to participate in our
project because after they lost their land,
they were forced to quit farming altogether
because they lacked the resources to reinvest
elsewhere.
Without title to the land
that was swept out from under their feet, the
farmers could only hope
to claim compensation
for their destroyed crops. Unfortunately, any
payments received have fallen short of what
they were entitled to according to valuation
reports. A group of producers have taken their
fight to court, but their case has made little
progress. The proceedings have been infected
with corruption, and for the last several
years their case has been stuck in the Supreme
Court. PJT is working with our Cameroonian
Trade Partners, the Network Fighting Hunger in
Cameroon (
RELUFA), to
ensure that these producers earn a fair price
for their fruits and to employ a pro bono
lawyer who has taken on some of the farmers'
individual cases.
Our driers are mostly
young people who often must slave away as day
laborers in the company's plantations. The
group members are youth from different Catholic
and Protestant Churches who have grown up
together in the town of Njombe. Originally
operating as two separate groups, Jeunes de
Bonandam (Bonandam Youth) and Jeunes de Njombe
(Njombe Youth), they have come together to form
the collective GIC L'Esperance (Common
Initiative Group Hope).
Together, they not only reap the
fruits from their common drying activities, but
also participate in a
tontine in their neighborhood.
Every month they invest about $20 of their
revenue to share in the
tontine, and
when it is their turn to collect the funds,
they have a lump sum of about $240 to spend on
one of their common projects. It helped them to
build new drying facilities to work together as
the driers collective GIC L'Esperance. The
facilities were completed in February 2009
thanks additionally to a loan from RELUFA, just
in time to prepare its first official dried
fruit order.
*A
tontine is
an informal loans and savings activity by a
small trusted group of people who know each
other from work, from the neighborhood, as an
ethnic minority in another part of the country,
etc. Once a year, every group participating in
the
tontine gets its turn to take
home the full pot of savings. In this way
hundreds if not thousands of
tontines are
organized throughout Cameroon.
Shop GIC
L'Esperance's products
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