Large-scale companies and smallholders in Liberia engage in planting oil palm, often at the expense of tropical forests or other agricultural land uses. This practice disrupts the local population, leads to biodiversity loss, and contributes to climate change. Companies and governments worldwide recognize this global issue and are formulating commitments and policies to address it. These policies encourage the import of deforestation-free commodities, such as palm oil. Nonetheless, the implementation of such policies and ensuring inclusiveness of smallholder farmers are yet to catch up.
From 2016 to 2018, VOSIEDA partnered with the Ministry of Agriculture and the World Bank to rehabilitate the Dube Oil Palm Plantation in Southeast Liberia. The plantation had been abandoned during the civil war, causing harm to smallholders and promoting harmful cultivation practices. Our collaboration with forest-dependent communities and small-scale oil palm farmers helped rehabilitated the plantation and avoided deforestation. We implemented a climate-smart landscape approach that proved transformative for the plantation and improved the livelihoods of its smallholders.
Funded by the World Bank, the Smallholder Tree Crop Revitalization Support Project has been implemented to accomplish the objective of augmenting the accessibility of finance, inputs, technologies, and markets for smallholder tree crop farmers in Liberia. Further to this, the project has set out to foster a long-term development program for the tree crop sector by reinvigorating the production and marketing of predominant tree crops such as cocoa, coffee, oil palm, and rubber in identified counties. Under this initiative, institution building has also been implemented in preparation for future large-scale smallholder tree crop development programs for the betterment of Liberia.
In partnership with the Ministry of Agriculture, VOSIEDA has taken extensive measures to renew and encourage sustainable production practices for food crops and palm oil through conscientious value chains at the notable 600-hectare plantation in Grand Gedeh County, situated in the Southeastern region of Liberia.