How Simple Palm Oil Undermined Liberia's Efforts to Contain Ebola
Dec 9, 2014
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Sara Jerving, Mic
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Timothy Yeabah heard a noise ringing from the forests surrounding his village in central Liberia one morning in April 2013. It was the sound of slashing, accompanied by unfamiliar voices. Yeabah, a 27-year-old father of four, along with others from the Jogbahn Clan, who live in a series of villages in a remote part of the Liberian forests, crept into the dense bush in search of the source of the noise.
Yeabah and his clanspeople found strangers with machetes hacking down their cassava, rubber and rice crops. They were stomping through the bush and destroying the only source of livelihood of Yeabah's people, who live in a small village connected by a dirt road to neighboring villages. Later that night, bulldozers came in to clear the remaining crops and sections of the surrounding forest. The villagers were told that these people were subcontractors of Equatorial Palm Oil, a publicly-listed company in the United Kingdom that the Liberian government granted two 50-year leases and a Memorandum of Understanding to build palm oil plantations on over 400,000 acres.