- More than 25 million people in the Democratic Republic of Congo suffer food insecurity, largely due to insecurity and inadequate infrastructure.
- South Ubangi province is mostly free of the armed conflict prevalent in the eastern part of the country, but nearly three-quarters of its residents face high levels of food insecurity.
- Agriculture is the livelihood for 80% of people in the province and the government is exploring ways to reinforce their production.
- For the most part, this means incentivizing massive agro-industrial plantations, even at the expense of overlooking smallholder farmers, but some experts say this won’t guarantee improved food security.
BUDJALA, Democratic Republic of Congo — “We are in a province with an agropastoral vocation,” says Jean Guillaume Ngbanga Masolo, provincial inspector for agriculture in South Ubangi province. From his office in the capital, Gemena, Ngbanga Masolo oversees a territory facing chronic food insecurity.
”We have around 987,000 farming households [in the province],” he says, “everyone lives off agriculture. The community in the countryside is hardworking, but they face difficulties relating to tools, finances and technical skills.”
More than 25 million people across the Democratic Republic of Congo face acute food insecurity due to armed conflict, poor infrastructure, and shocks to the national economy, according to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) scale developed by the U.N. While the worst-affected areas are in conflict-wracked provinces in the country’s east, like Ituri and North and South Kivu, the IPC’s most recent analysis found nearly three-quarters of South Ubangi’s population face crisis levels of acute food insecurity or worse — amounting to more than 2.4 million people.
We traveled through the province on an overloaded motorbike for seven days to see firsthand the challenges facing its inhabitants and to examine the impacts of large plantations on food security and the communities that live around them.
What we found is a territory that — despite 80% of inhabitants working as farmers — struggles to feed itself, and worrying signs that government support for industrial agriculture may create as many problems as it solves.
Community farms vs. large plantations
Budjala is a small rural town, its modest buildings dusted with red dirt from its unpaved streets. A few kilometers outside the town’s center, Gilbert Mohukwalembi Abutiama points to a ramshackle wooden shed in the middle of a field. “We still don’t even have a warehouse to store or process the products,” he says.
Mohukwalembi Abutiama is the coordinator of a group of farmers growing peanuts, beans, soybeans and bananas here. They work their 10 hectares (25 acres) using basic equipment such as shovels, rakes and traditional sticks with hollowed-out tips to place the seeds. The farmers eat their harvest themselves or sell it in neighboring villages; with no facilities for storage or processing, and poor transport links to more distant markets, they have little choice.
The group is a participant in a project run by the local development NGO SAD, which supports small-scale agriculture, in partnership with Italian NGO GSI Italia. The project provides 350 family holdings in South Ubangi province with small loans to purchase seeds and better tools, as well as training to help farmers organize themselves into more productive groups and cooperatives.
As well as making small loans of up to $350 to farmers’ groups, SAD and GSI have also funded construction of some small infrastructure projects in their first year, including a well and a poultry incubator.
Eighty kilometers away, about 50 miles, we find a very different model of agriculture. The route south from Budjala can hardly be called a road, with sandy stretches where the wheels of our motorbike struggle, and giant potholes filled with muddy water conceal treacherous depths. Along the way, we pass a couple of huge trucks hopelessly stuck in particularly deep chasms.
Dense forest towers over either side of the track, and we pass through a series of villages, small clusters of earthen houses teeming with children, and wooden shacks selling peanuts, beans, cans of petrol, and phone top-ups.
But then the forest and the shacks give way to thousands of orderly rows of rubber trees: we have entered the Miluna concession. Founded in 1911, this is the only colonial-era plantation in the province whose production has returned to full capacity. A Belgian-Congolese family, the Hoolans, bought it in 2007, and today the plantation’s management says it’s growing 5,000 hectares (about 12,400 acres) of rubber trees. There’s also nearly 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) of oil palms, 500 hectares (1,240 acres) of cacao, 100 hectares (250 acres) of coffee, and around 300 head of cattle. The plantation’s output is not for local consumption. Most of it is transported on barges down the Mongala and Congo rivers to Kinshasa, the national capital.
At the heart of the Miluna concession is a large processing plant. Gathered around it is the village of Gwaka, where the company has built and manages almost everything, including a school and a hospital. Most residents of Gwaka work for the company, which employs around 2,000 people. Some villagers tell us that many work without a contract, while others complain about their pay and working conditions.
“They employ people, that is something. But they pay them badly,” one former employee tells us. He says an ordinary worker makes the equivalent of $16 a month — except salaries are only paid every six months. “This doesn’t allow him to feed his family and let his children study, but since there are no other companies, they are forced to work like this.”
Miluna’s management did not respond to a request for comment on working conditions.
The impact on communities
We pushing on to our destination, Kuma, where the contrast — and interaction — between the two models of agricultural production becomes clear. Shortly after our arrival in the village, we meet a group of farmers suffering the same problem of poor yields we encountered in Budjala.
“We mainly produce food crops. We grow corn, peanuts … we work a lot but the output is too low,” Norbert Besambea, an agronomist who works with SAD and farmers in Kuma, tells us. He blames this largely on the fact that they can’t afford to buy better seeds.
But the village’s most pressing problem, he tells us, is access to clean water — or rather, the lack of it.
“There’s a spring some distance away, but the water quality is poor,” Basembea says. The Lumu, the small river that flows past Kuma, rises from a spring in the Miluna plantation, 3 km (about 2 mi) upstream from the village. “Waste products from the factory contaminate the water right up to this point. If you try to drink it … the state of it, the color of the water — it’s not drinkable. There’s a smell.”
All the people we meet in Kuma tell us about episodes of pollution of the Lumu and its spring by activity on the plantation.
“The population can no longer use that water for drinking,” says Floribert Avonyima, a priest originally from Kuma, where he co-founded SAD. “Sometimes when they dump waste into the water, people see dead fish in the water and don’t dare to drink it.”
In 2020, technicians conducting a feasibility study for a project to pipe clean water to the village analyzed water from the river and found concerning levels of E. coli and other bacteria, as well as chemical pollution. The study attributed some of this to the presence of other settlements along the Lumu, but also cited the “risk of contamination of the [river’s] source, which is located in the immediate vicinity of the plantation.”
“In the samples I took both up and downstream in the Lumu River, I noted chemical elements and some heavy metals which could not be explained,” Baby Le Vent Banunginikwau, the author of the report, tells us in Kinshasa. “The only explanation is that this is chemical waste from processing of hevea [latex] which has been spilled into the water, polluting it.”
Who feeds the DRC?
In recent years, the DRC government has backed numerous initiatives to support the country’s agriculture sector, the most prominent backing going to large-scale producers. In 2021, the government established a special economic zone (SEZ) in the Miluna concession to encourage the development of more large-scale agricultural projects, create new roads, wells, and power plants, and a preferential tax regime to attract foreign investment.
That SEZ is a public-private partnership aiming to raise $60 million, with support from USAID, the DRC’s National Investment Promotion Agency, and the province of South Ubangi. The zone will be managed by a company called Green Congo Development, whose main shareholder is Michaël Josy Hoolans, co-chief executive officer of Miluna.
“We are in agroindustry. We develop plantations, but at the same time we also work with communities,” Hoolans tells Mongabay. In November, at a conference in Kinshasa, he said the government should focus on developing large-scale agriculture in the DRC, because plantations like the one he runs can produce better yields, higher quality, and have greater ability to reach the market than small, family operators.
“It’s a very good project,” Daniel Samba Mukoko, the DRC’s economics minister, wrote on X on Oct. 31, after a visit to Miluna with Belgian Ambassador Roxane de Bilderling. “Starting from the existing (the concession #MILUNA), evolving towards a green SEZ … to create more added value from the enormous natural resources of South Ubangi.”
But the government’s support for large-scale agriculture has provoked some criticism: “Almost all the governments are more committed to industrial agriculture, which is why we hear so much about agro-industrial parks,” Simplex Malembe, program director of CONAPAC, the DRC’s national farmers’ union, tells Mongabay at his office in Kinshasa. He says overall public funding for agriculture is insufficient, and while most of it goes to large industrial projects, “family farming, if well supported, can adequately feed the Congo.”
In South Ubangi, Ngbanga Masolo agrees that small-scale farmers aren’t properly supported: “There are some projects for those 987,000 farming households that I mentioned before, but they are always limited in terms of duration and coverage,” he tells us. “But you have to start somewhere. If there was a project that could back even half of these farmers, that would help a lot.”
The impact on forests
According to forest monitoring program Global Forest Watch, the DRC lost 6.86 million hectares (nearly 20 million acres) of humid primary forest — an area about the size of Ireland — between 2002 and 2023. In 2023, a record 526,000 hectares (1.3 million acres) of forest were lost: agriculture was the second-leading driver of deforestation, behind logging, according to GFW.
Traveling across this stretch of South Ubangi, we note that large agro-industrial projects are still few and — so far — located in areas that were deforested and converted to agricultural use more than a century ago.
“We had several agro-industrial units before. We need to find other investors who will take them over and revive them, because the land is there,” says Ngbanga Masolo, listing a number of large concessions in the province.
“We should also create more, because we have plenty of space. We have forest, we have savanna, we can create more.”
A study published in January found that small-scale agriculture is a dominant driver of deforestation in Africa, responsible for 64% of forest loss between 2001 and 2020. In the DRC, the proportion is even higher, with 85% of forest loss linked to small-scale cropland.
Visiting small farmers and cooperatives in South Ubangi, we didn’t find best practices in terms of forest management. “A farmer can use the same land three, four or even five times, without ever changing crop,” Simplice Basusu Manzikolo, SAD program officer, tells us in Budjala, referring to the common practice of exhausting the soil and then clearing a new patch of forest. According to Manzikolo, promoting agroecology among farmers is one of the objectives of the SAD/GSI project: “Our training seeks to help small farmers to produce better and more.”
Retracing our route through the forest and villages from Kuma to the provincial capital, we can feel the pressure on this landscape. The pathways the government chooses to support agriculture have consequences in terms of food security, but they will also have an impact on the tropical forest which covers most of this region of the DRC.
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center Rainforest Reporting Grant.
Banner image: A farmer in Budjala territoire, Sud-Ubangi, Democratic Republic of Congo. Image by Francesco DeAugustinis for Mongabay.
DRC food sovereignty summit yields support for agroecology, local land rights
Citation:
Masolele, R. N., Marcos, D., De Sy, V., Abu, I., Verbesselt, J., Reiche, J., & Herold, M. (2024). Mapping the diversity of land uses following deforestation across Africa. Scientific Reports, 14(1). doi:10.1038/s41598-024-52138-9.
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