The bad news came through at their weekly team meeting: a new decree (N°2019/4562 of 11 November 2019) had been issued, allocating 60,000 ha of Campo Ma’an forest in southwest Cameroon to CAMVERT, an agro-industrial giant producing and marketing palm oil.
The Green Development Advocates (GDA) team sprang into action.
This is the story of how a small but mighty Cameroonian organisation supported its community to take on CAMVERT and win, protecting 20,000 ha of this precious forest and its people.
Campo Ma’an National Park: exceptional biodiversity on the line
In southern Cameroon, a vast equatorial forest meets the Atlantic Ocean. This deep expanse of thick, evergreen canopy is Campo Ma’an National Park, which covers some 264,064 ha. Thought to be one of the few regions that persisted as a tropical rainforest through the Ice Age, it hosts an incredible array of biodiversity, with some of the world’s most charismatic animals, hundreds of species of reptiles and fish, and over 300 species of birds.
Some species are found nowhere else on Earth, and several are on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. The giant pangolin, the African elephant, the lowland gorilla, the chimpanzee, the buffalo, the panther, and the mandrill – a strikingly colourful primate – all fall into the latter category.
Alongside this, Campo Ma’an National Park is also home to a large local population who make their living from this protected area. For the Indigenous Bagyeli community, the forest is their resource.
This extraordinary heritage is threatened by the conversion of 60,000 ha of Campo Ma’an Park to agro-industry, primarily for oil palm plantations.