Five months after the World Bank’s private investment arm submitted its action plan to address community grievances against a rubber plantation it funds in Liberia, affected residents are still waiting for its implementation. The case goes back to a 2019 complaint filed by four Liberian NGOs with the internal watchdog of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the Compliance Advisor Ombudsman (CAO). The complaint was filed on behalf of 22 communities in Margibi and Bong counties who live around a Salala Rubber Corporation plantation, alleging sexual harassment of workers, inadequate compensation for crops, pollution of groundwater sources, desecration of sacred sites, and land grabbing. The CAO validated these allegations in its investigation report in December 2023. It took the IFC until March 2025 to issue a management action plan (MAP). Since then, community representatives told Mongabay, no progress has been made toward addressing the violations. “We are concerned about how the implementation of the MAP is going,” said Windor Smith from the Alliance for Rural Democracy (ARD), one of the NGOs representing the communities. “Until now we have not seen any tangible differences in the communities, at all.” Smith added the IFC hasn’t communicated with them since March. At the time of the complaint in 2019, Salala was owned by Luxembourg-based multinational Socfin, but it sold the plantation to India’s Jeety Rubber just after the CAO investigation concluded in 2024. It’s unclear whether and how Socfin, or Jeety, will engage in the remedial action. The MAP includes commitments to implement community…This article was originally published on Mongabay

From Conservation news via this RSS feed