The Philippine government has sold the land of thousands of indigenous peasants to a foreign company who plans to build a palm oil plantation
“The guards came one day and pointed their guns at me. I watched helplessly while they sprayed my banana and coconut trees with chemicals, so that they eventually died. They uprooted my cassava crops. Then they bulldozed a part of my land to make way for the palm oil plantation.”
-Amadeo Paylo, 66 year-old farmer in the Philippines
Sign this petition to the Philippine government to return the land in Opol to the peasants who rely on it to make their livelihoods!
Indigenous farmers have been violently and injustly removed from their land to make way for a palm oil plantation, operated by A Brown Company, Inc. in Opol, an area in the Philippines. Farmers have been intimidated and threatened in efforts to make them give up their land.
Palm oil is increasingly a desired global commodity. Because palm matures quickly to a point where oil can be extracted, palm plantations are springing up all over the world – particularly in the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia. However, rather than supporting the people working on the land, plantations only serve an export market, providing raw material for food or fuel manufacturing.
Land in Opol has been farmed by indigeneous peasants for the last ten years, since they took it over from landlords who had deforested tens of thousands of acres by logging. The Philippine government had a deal to legally grant the land to the peasants, who had certain rights after farming on it, but at the last moment, the government sold the land to A Brown Company, right from under the peasants’ feet.
A Brown, besides unjustly expelling peasants growing food for the community, also does not even have a permit to operate in Opol, making the deal technically illegal!
Sign this petition to the Philippine government to return the land in Opol to the peasants who rely on it to make their livelihoods!
For more information, see this report from Pesticide Action Network Asia and Pacific.
