The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth

by Fred Pearce

  Sirleaf cautiously began giving out new logging concessions. The old ones, of course, were null and void. In 2011, she signed a deal with the European Union, Liberia’s largest market for timber, aimed at placing timber sales on a permanently legal footing. Starting in early 2013, the EU will require companies importing timber from anywhere in the world to demonstrate that the timber has been legally harvested. Liberia plans to achieve that using a unique national timber-tracking system. Every legally harvestable tree and every cut log will carry a barcode, so it can be tracked from stump to port and beyond.

  The system is as simple and as foolproof as checking out at the supermarket, says Ivan Muir, a South African forester in charge of the system. He is the local boss of SGS, the Swiss specialists in forest certification systems. In late 2010, when I visited Liberia, some 220,000 trees were being tagged in time for the first wave of exports to Europe. But Muir said it remains to be seen whether the system can defeat pirates smuggling illegally logged timber across the country’s notoriously porous borders for sale outside the EU.

  Much will depend on the integrity of the new loggers. Local NGOs suggest that not all of them meet government rules on being open about their backers and associates. One company switched from Korean to Malaysian ownership shortly after winning its concession. Another is accused of links to the North Eastern Logging Corporation, which felled timber under Taylor. And a third turns out to be partly owned by Wael Charafeddine, someone Sirleaf had barred from logging.

  Whatever the teething troubles, Liberia is open for business again. The capital, Monrovia, is filling with international investors returning in pursuit of the country’s resources. A few never left. I went to see what, for most of the past century, has been the world’s largest rubber concession: Firestone’s million-acre world of rubber.

  The main plantation is at Harbel, about an hour’s drive from Monrovia. The rubber trees stretch for miles in all directions close to the U.S.-built Roberts Airport, which gets its electricity courtesy of Firestone’s power plant. During the civil war, the plantation was largely abandoned to squatters, militias, and charcoal burners. But now it is in operation again. Passing through its gates is like entering a different country. From the ramshackle chaos of roadside shacks and bush outside, it comes as a shock to find roads without potholes, shoulders mown, and junctions signposted.

  This is an enclave controlled by a company with many times the resources of the host government. Liberia may be a free state, but Harbel is like a U.S. colony. The dried latex from some 8 million rubber trees is trucked down the road to the company’s port outside Monrovia and exported to the United States in Firestone ships. The company’s senior managers are mostly expats, and judging by the local company magazine, The Pepper Bird, most local agreements are signed only when the American managing director shows up from Nashville.

  Inside a fenced office compound, I met Rufus Karmorh, the company PR man, who had a Book of Mormon on his desk. Outside was the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses, plus several Methodist churches, and that great secular cathedral of American managerial culture, a golf course. The familiarity was completed by the old yellow U.S. school buses that transport workers around the plantation.

  The Firestone fiefdom dates back to 1926. It was established by U.S. rubber baron Harvey Firestone to ensure supplies for his tire-making factories, which were expanding fast owing to the soaring popularity of driving in the United States. The British chancellor at the time, Winston Churchill, had tried to organize a price cartel to exploit the country’s control of the big rubber plantations in Malaya, which then produced 75 percent of the world’s rubber. Firestone’s friend Henry Ford tried to break the cartel with his Fordlandia project to grow rubber trees in the Brazilian Amazon. It failed. But Firestone’s operation in the forests of Liberia took root.

  His deal with the Liberian government gave Firestone 4 percent of Liberia’s land for ninety-nine years. It made the company the country’s largest private employer, responsible for 40 percent of the Liberian economy by the 1950s. But Firestone was often overbearing, taking over community-run forests, desecrating burial grounds and sacred sites, obliterating water sources and hunting grounds, and clearing villages and farms. Along the way, it exacerbated tensions between Americo-Liberians and natives.

  Firestone did good works within its own territory, but its benefit to the national coffers was always small compared to its profits. The annual rent was set in 1926 at a laughable five cents per acre. And the agreement included a notorious “Clause K” that required the Liberian government to take out a large loan from Firestone. As one expert on the country told me, “it gave the company control over the country.”

  In 2008, the Sirleaf government extended Firestone’s franchise until 2041, while reducing its size to closer to the area actually used. Firestone now operates 120,000 acres, and pays two dollars an acre in rent. Members of the militias who occupied the plantation during Liberia’s long civil war are still camped out there in places. “We have mostly cleared them out,” says Karmorh. “But the roads through here are public roads, so we have a security issue.” Locals told me the company has employed some old soldiers, known as Gravel Ants, to keep the peace.

  Whatever the security concerns, Firestone has seven thousand employees back on the payroll, most of them earning a little over three dollars a day, roughly double the national minimum wage. Hundreds of women work in its two larger nurseries, grafting new saplings to replace old trees that no longer yield latex. In the plantation itself, thousands of male tappers daily remove the white fluid that has dripped into red cups attached to the bark of their allotted 750 trees. Then they carry the latex in buckets hung over their shoulders to weigh stations. The central processing plant removes water in a centrifuge and creates great piles of dried latex for shipping. It is a routine virtually unchanged since the plantation began.

  Firestone is paternalistic, outwardly confident of its purpose and always ready with a barrage of statistics to defuse any criticism. “We are doing more than any other private entity for the quality of life in Liberia,” Karmorh said. “We have twenty-six schools with sixteen thousand students. All the children of our employees are educated at no cost to their parents. About five hundred get to go to the Senior High as far as twelfth grade. We are constructing or renovating nineteen hundred houses. Our three-hundred-bed hospital has reopened and treats nine thousand patients a month.” The company has its own radio station. I gave them an interview.

  The housing compounds I saw were rudimentary. They contained rows of single-story dwellings, with four rooms but no plumbing. Outside were communal latrines and hand pumps to provide water—typically two for five hundred people. At the hospital, most non-emergency services were restricted to employees and their families, though the chief medical officer, Lyndon Mabande, was proud that he allowed any local woman to go there to give birth. He told me he just could not stomach the number of maternal fatalities that had occurred before in the neighborhood. Medical hygiene was not all it might have been, I thought. There were bloody sheets on the operating tables. In one room, dirty garbage was stacked right next to a sink where surgery instruments were being washed. We inadvertently opened a door on an amputation under way in an operating room. But for Liberia, this was a good, well-equipped, and well-organized hospital.

  The company has been accused of polluting local water supplies and of abusive labor policies. Such claims are hard to substantiate. I saw a new water treatment plant—built in response to the complaints—that now cleaned up effluent. The treated water now flowed sweetly down a small canal and was extracted by a farmer to irrigate his corn. The water’s apparent cleanliness created problems. “It’s not drinking water, and some people think it is,” said Karmorh. Meanwhile, decades of untreated effluent continue to lurk in local wetlands.

  What saddened me most on my tour was something probably not in Firestone’s control. Drop
ping by the library in the Firestone high school, I wondered what books they had about Liberia. None. They did have a pile of old Glencoe World Geography textbooks. They had one sentence on Liberia, describing how it was “a colony of former slaves.” The natives, who make up the great majority of the country and most of the school’s students, didn’t get a mention.

  I turned right out of the Firestone plantation, forsaking the cut lawns, golf club house, and yellow buses for the African hinterland. If Firestone’s enclave is having an improving effect on the community at large, I thought, it should be here. I drove past a new Lonestar cell-phone tower, one of hundreds that dot the landscape in a country without a functioning landline system, but saw little else that suggested outside investment. The nearby village of Glarkon looked especially forlorn with its dilapidated school, unusable soccer field, abandoned church, and gutted industrial unit.

  Goll’s Town was no better. The people moved here long ago, after their old community at Korweleh had been obliterated by Firestone’s development. But Goll’s Town, named after the first settler on the new site, had also lost most of its forestland to Firestone. The village had a Baptist church and a hand pump, but no latrines or bath house. The nearest school was two hours’ walk away. The nearest clinic was on the Firestone plantation. Villagers said they had to pay twenty-five dollars as a “nonrefundable gate fee” to go in, with more due in return for any treatment they received. Some families in Goll’s Town live by selling latex from rubber trees grown on their own patches, while others turn old trees into charcoal. Many send their youth to Monrovia in search of jobs.

  Firestone is a very large, visible, and American target for political activists. Fair enough. But conditions are often worse on other rubber plantations. Down the road, closer to Buchanan, I passed the 30,000-acre concession run by the Liberian Agriculture Company (LAC). The land was originally given to a construction company in 1959 in payment for building the road from Monrovia to Harbel and Buchanan. LAC briefly came under the wing of two U.S. companies—Uniroyal of Greenville, South Carolina, and Keene Industries of Ukiah, California. But it is now owned by the Luxembourg-based Socfin group, which specializes in growing rubber and palm oil.

  The LAC concession has expanded into the Bassa people’s tribal reserve. According to a UN report in 2006, the expansion destroyed seventy-five villages, with crops burned and houses demolished, before compensation terms had been agreed with the government. It concluded there had been “serious human rights violations” there.

  Before long my driver got stuck behind a truck shedding small pieces of chipped timber. I recognized it as belonging to Buchanan Renewables, based in the town I was headed for—Mr. Gus’s old stronghold of Buchanan. The company had a contract to chip old, unproductive rubber trees on the Firestone plantation and export them to fuel power stations back in Europe.

  Buchanan Renewables was started by a Canadian hedge-fund entrepreneur, Joel Strickland, who scouted Liberia in 2006 as peace broke out, looking for business opportunities. He reckoned there were half a million acres of rubber trees that had ceased to be productive during the civil war. He figured they could become a source of timber instead. He went into partnership with John McCall MacBain, a Canadian billionaire who founded the Auto Trader publishing empire.

  Their first plan was to put the lights back on in war-torn Liberia. The men wanted to harvest the old rubber trees from small farms and burn the chips in power stations across the country. The farmers would be recompensed with new rubber saplings. But the focus has shifted.

  When I visited, most of the trees being chipped were owned by Firestone and LAC, rather than small farmers. It was cheaper and quicker to harvest from large plantations. And quicker mattered, because there was a big new shareholder in the company. The Swedish government’s energy company, Vattenfall, had bought a fifth of Buchanan and wanted to burn the chips in its European power stations. That required 2 million tons delivered annually to Europe by 2017. The company’s general manager in Liberia, Irishman Liam Hickey, told me that required clearing up to 30,000 acres of rubber trees a year. Though even at that rate, he assured me, the country had more than twenty years’ supply.

  But what about the promised local electricity? Monrovia was still full of billboards advertising Buchanan Renewables with the slogan: “Light up Liberia.” In three years after chipping began, the promised power plant had not been built. Hickey blamed local bureaucracy and told me he hoped to break ground on the project in September 2011. But the deadline slipped again and critics were beginning to say that, like logs and latex, the wood chips were just another Liberian natural resource being hijacked by foreigners and shipped out of the country at the earliest opportunity.

  Some environmentalists are surprisingly optimistic about Liberia’s future. They believe it can break the resource curse. Frank Hawkins, the Africa head of Conservation International, told me the country’s rebirth gives it a chance to become the poster child for a new green economy in Africa. “They start from a fresh place. Liberia has an opportunity to show the world how it is done.” His lobbying in Liberia is partly funded by a foundation set up by Buchanan Renewables’ MacBain, and he sees the potential for foreign concession holders to spread their influence in a manner good for both the Liberian people and its environment. “They have the money and land to do good stuff.”

  But even Hawkins admits that the perils of the resource curse remain. “In Liberia the specter of private-sector asset strippers is clearly very real. There are people with very large checkbooks,” able and willing to bribe government officials so they can ransack the country. “The short-term temptations are so large, and the people involved are so unscrupulous.”

  That is all too clear. Liberia discovered in 2011 that a third of U.S. food aid was being stolen by corrupt staff at the local office of World Vision. They had been allocating containers full of aid to towns that did not exist, and pilfering the contents on the road to nowhere. It was also common knowledge that a hundred cars donated by the mining company ArcelorMittall to help government officials get around the country had ended up instead, through no fault of ArcelorMittall, in the garages of the legislators who had signed off on a deal that gave the company mining rights in the north of the country.

  Even by African standards, Liberia is in a bad way. More than 80 percent of the population live on less than $1.25 a day. Only a quarter have access to clean drinking water. Of every thousand babies born in the country, seventy-six die before their first birthday. A whole generation has missed out on education, and almost half of all adults are illiterate. The country produces fewer than forty agriculture graduates, eighty medical graduates, and sixty teachers a year. It has virtually no trained secondary school teachers, and only one doctor for every twenty-five thousand people. “Even finding mechanics is hard,” said Hickey at Buchanan. When I told the boss of one of the plantations that I had found a reliable driver, he immediately called him up and booked him for a week taking around VIPs.

  Most of Liberia’s feeble infrastructure was wrecked in the long civil war. Locals say only two factories survived—those producing Coca-Cola and Club Beer. Putting the place back together again has barely started. Monrovia’s fire station has three vehicles, one out of commission with its front end dragging on the ground. The main hydroelectric power plant at Mount Coffee, which was destroyed by Charles Taylor in 1990, is still derelict.

  “Doing business here is hard,” Hickey said. “It’s not 20 percent more expensive; it’s 150 percent more expensive.” And what does work is frighteningly dependent on foreigners. The UN and the wider international community dominate the economy of Monrovia—the bars, new apartment blocks, restaurants, and prostitutes. UN purchases inflate local prices for everything from real estate to avocados. The main construction projects are embassies, with the Chinese and Americans competing to build the biggest.

  Communications are precarious. Even on the country’s mai
n coastal road, safe driving stops at Firestone. It is so difficult to get fresh food from the countryside to Monrovian stores that, despite the country’s rich soils, the city sells mostly rice from Niger, peppers from Guinea and Mali, and cabbages from the Netherlands. Liberia is the only country in the world without a functioning landline phone system. During my visit, it had just two ATM machines that accepted international cards.

  Liberia badly needs enterprises that do not depend on foreign agencies, governments, and concessionaires—some bottom-up development. Aid agencies have been trying to set up small businesses to meet obvious needs. In Monrovia’s West Point beachside slum, Oxfam has given sewing machines to seamstresses to make school uniforms. It has also obtained 75 acres of countryside north of Monrovia, where a group of war widows are growing cucumbers, cabbages, and watermelons.

  I met Rebecca Sumo, a computer science graduate who heads the fifty-strong Gbalin women’s cooperative, as she was tending rows of cabbages in a small nursery. “This was empty land before,” she said. “Nobody was using it till Oxfam bought it for us from the local villagers.” The widows, mostly from Monrovia, employ local men to do the hard labor in the fields. At lunch, they watched appreciatively as the men, stripped to the waist, hoed the fields before breaking off to barbecue a pile of freshly caught field rats and a snake.

  To me, this felt more like a sustainable future for Liberia than any number of American-owned rubber plantations or Malaysian-backed logging operations. More sustainable, certainly, than the 25,000-acre Libyan rice farm near the border with Guinea that wrecked existing village paddy fields, but ran out of funds and collapsed in late 2010.

  Making the Gbalin project work will be hard, however. The women said there were not enough local markets for their goods, and without refrigeration, fresh produce swiftly rotted. Some members hadn’t been tending their plots recently. But Rebecca had high hopes for making hot peppers a hot sale. As we sheltered from the rain, she showed me a stack drying in the co-op farmhouse. “Everyone in Liberia uses hot peppers in their cooking every day,” she said. It was a start.