Local development

We are putting in place key initiatives to help create a real local economic network.

Since most of our activities take place in remote areas, some of which highly underdeveloped, rubber and oil palm cultivation are effective ways to promote local and long-term regional development.

We adopt an approach that integrates the development needs of local populations while promoting environmentally friendly agricultural practices. An approach that rebuilds local agriculture on a respectful basis, both economically, socially, and environmentally.

It is important to remember that our presence in these countries is often at the request of local governments, as in Cameroon and Sierra Leone, or of the World Bank, as in Liberia. In most cases, our Group has taken over former plantation companies to modernize and relaunch agro-industrial activities, after they fell into disuse due to a lack of investment capacity in the 1990s. Entire regions were gradually revived.

€ 50 million injected into local economies each year

through the purchase of rubber from smallholders

Our initiatives are based, among other things, on the implementation of partnerships that promote the development of smallholder plantations and thus reduce poverty in these regions. The plantations maintain close, region-specific relationships with rubber and oil palm smallholders. They encourage their inclusion and buy from them. Some have even set up support and supervision projects on their own initiative or as part of a government program.

We also support local entrepreneurship by using local SMEs and VSEs and by maintaining the access roads in these regions as much as possible.

Furthermore, we launch training initiatives to encourage the development of the local economic network/fabric, such as the opening of Agricultural Family Schools to train young people in rural trades, and training in soap making, sewing, etc. We also launch projects with and for the communities to improve their food security, such as fish farming and rice farming.