Palm oil |
Several years ago,
when Golden Veroleum Liberia (GVL) and Sime Darby, Malaysian palm oil
companies, entered Liberia, they pledged to introduce value-added
products, such as cooking oil, Vaseline and other cosmetics products for
export to world markets.
The Daily Observer
hailed this pledge. For too long, Liberian raw materials, especially
rubber and iron ore, have been exploited solely for export.
In 2026, which is
less than a decade away, the Firestone Plantations Company would have
been producing and exporting Liberian rubber as pure raw material for a
century, and still the country cannot yet produce a simple rubber band!
How the Tubman and
Tolbert administrations, which ruled the country since 1944--that is
only 14 years after the advent of Firestone in Liberia--and were manned
by educated people, could have allowed Firestone to treat the country
like that, is mindboggling (unbelievable).
The only
explanation we can give is that Firestone got away with this corporate
rape of a country simply because it encouraged top Liberian officials to
plant rubber, making them rich. These included President C.D.B. King,
during whose administration Firestone came. King's grandchildren insist
that the former President started his farm long after leaving
office--1935. King's Secretary of the Interior, James (Jimmy) Francis
Cooper, was already in the mid-1940s reputed to have become the first
Liberian to "cry" millionaire.
Other top
government officials who made serious money from rubber included
President W.V.S. Tubman, whom Firestone helped plant huge rubber farms
in Totota, Bong County, and Boneken, Maryland County.
Other Liberian
officials who also became rubber planters also included other Coopers,
Vice Presidents C.L. Simpson and W.R. Tolbert, the Dennises, Brights and
Shermans.
The king of all
these Liberian rubber planters was, of course, Harry L. Morris, who
started planting rubber in his late teens or early 20s, following the
death of his father, John Louis Morris. Harry was yet a high school
junior in the United States when, in the early 1930s, as the eldest of
several children, he had to return for his father's funeral and to care
for his aging mother, Mrs. Maude Morris. Harry did not return to the
USA, but remained to manage his father's small rubber farm and to
develop Harry's own rubber plantation in Kakata and Todee. Shortly
following the outbreak of World War II, when rubber was in great demand,
Harry and several other Liberian rubber planters struck it rich. By
1955, Harry Morris was declared "the Rubber King of the World," and had
more than 10,000 acres planted in rubber. The farm, which today exceeds
25,000 acres, is still the world's largest by one family. It is now
operated by Harry's son, Bill.
Harry Morris had
the power to help the Liberian government convince Harvey Firestone to
start adding value to rubber. But he and his family were close family
friends of the Firestones. A photograph of Harry, his wife and Bill,
then a boy, with Harvey Firestone is displayed at the farm home.
So Harvey Firestone
had a free ride in Liberia, and almost a century later, after trillions
of tons of exported rubber and billions of US dollars in earnings,
Liberia cannot produce a rubber band or latex glove.
The same thing
happened with our iron ore beginning 1946 through 1990 with Landsdell
Christie's Liberia Mining Company (LMC) of Bomi Hills, Bomi County, and
later LAMCO, in Yekepa, Nimba County, and Bong Mining Company (BMC).
Since then, until now, Liberians have had to import all their steel rods
and other steel products, at exorbitant prices.As we said in an earlier Editorial, "Let this not happen to Liberia's oil palm!"
We hope that the
incoming administration, following the 2017 elections, will work with
all the oil palm companies--GVL, Sime Darby, Equatorial Palm Oil (EPO)
and Maryland Oil Palm Company (MOPC), etc.--and encourage them to keep
their promises to add value to Liberia's oil palm and begin our palm
oil-based industries.
In that same
Editorial, we mentioned a young, enterprising Liberian woman, Maisie
Dunbar, who runs a successful cosmetics company in the United States. We
mentioned also two other young Liberians, Richelieu Dennis and Nyema
Tubman, who are also running a great skin care products enterprise in
New York and have made millions. Another Liberian, Mahmud Johnson, is
making waves with his locally produced Kernel
Fresh body lotion,
made from palm kernel oil. Like Mahmud, the others should be encouraged
to return and use Liberian palm oil to expand their industries, right
here in Liberia.
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