Ivory Coast activists scupper palm oil project

Ivory Coast’s main palm oil company, Palmci, on Friday announced it was abandoning a major plantation scheme in the south of the country after opposition by environmentalists to destruction of a forest.

“Palmci has decided to abandon this project in the face of the refusal of certain NGOs to accept the coexistence of environmental preservation and the development of economic activity,” the firm said in a statement.
Scrapping the project would lead to the loss of a potential 1,000 agricultural jobs, 300 more in industry and an investment of 18 billion CFA francs (27.4 million euros / 36.3 million dollars), the statement added.

“It’s a shame for the region,” Franck Eba, Palmci’s spokesman on sustainable development, told AFP, but he explained that opposition from non-governmental organisations had made the scheme “too complicated.”

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