Profile: Green Advocates

Liberia is rich in natural resources, yet the primary beneficiaries of this wealth have been warlords and powerful multinational corporations. Throughout West Africa, natural resource extraction, environmental degradation, and land ownership are closely intertwined with human rights. For years, heads of states have enriched themselves through the sale of “conflict timber” and “blood diamonds” and used the profits to consolidate their power and fund brutal armed conflicts. Though Liberia is currently at peace, the extraction of natural resources remains a source of rights abuses. 

Communities in resource-rich areas are violently displaced from their lands to make way for rubber tapping, while timber and mining operations destroy natural resources on which rural people depend for their livelihoods. Resource extraction operations pollute the rivers and watersheds on which communities depend for their survival. In 1997, a group of Liberian law students started Green Advocates to work with impoverished, rural communities to ensure them a voice in decisions affecting their communities’ natural resources. The group also works to promote environmental protection legislation and to ensure that existing human rights and environmental laws are enforced. 

Since receiving its first grant from the Fund for Global Human Rights four years ago, Green Advocates has launched a growing, national grassroots movement to challenge violations of environmental and economic rights. Led by lawyer Alfred Brownell, Green Advocates provides financial support to emerging community-based organizations representing people directly affected by the abuses and helps these groups develop their human rights strategies and organizational strength. One such community group is the Concerned Citizens Movement of Owensgrove County (CCM).

In the photo to above: A young Owensgrove resident takes part in a protest against the Firestone rubber plantation’s use of toxic chemicals, which permeate the air and contaminate the water source for her town. 

The people of Owensgrove have suffered a long history of being displaced by rubber harvesting operations; the community was originally founded in 1926 by people who were forcibly displaced from their land to make way for the Firestone rubber plantation.  A rubber processing plant operated by the Firestone corporation has been dumping hazardous chemicals into the nearby Farmington River for over seventy-five years, and today virtually no fish or vegetation survive in the area.  The conditions under which people labor are dismal; children work to help their parents meet unrealistic quotas and in return receive little pay and substandard housing and education.  Thanks to the activism of Green Advocates and CCM, Firestone has been forced to commit publicly to improving its operations, and the corporation currently is installing a waste water treatment facility along the banks of the Farmington River.

Green Advocates also trains other community organizations living on or near the Firestone rubber plantation to document labor rights abuses, including the use of child labor.  Last year, Green Advocates convinced the United Nations to release a major report on human rights conditions on the Firestone plantation; the report confirmed local communities’ reports of child labor, pollution of the Farmington River, and miserable working conditions.  Green Advocates currently is providing critical documentation to the Liberian government, which is negotiating a resource concession agreement with Firestone that will require new protections for labor and environmental rights.

Brownell and Green Advocates also provide legal representation to community leaders who are targeted for harassment and imprisonment for standing up against the practices of rubber plantations. In 2005, Brownell secured the release of 107 community leaders who were illegally detained when they resisted violent displacement from their traditional lands to make way for expansion of the foreign-owned Liberia Agriculture Company rubber plantation.  More recently, Brownell helped free thirteen Firestone plantation workers who were arrested while striking to demand better working conditions and free and fair elections for a union to represent the interests of workers and their families. For decades, the existing union has been run by the Firestone company itself. Police detained and beat the striking workers and fired tear gas indiscriminately into densely populated settlements to break up the strike.

In the photo to the left: Ma Konwree, 75 years old, stands in front of her home in Nahn village in Grand Bassa County, near in a Liberia Agriculture Company (LAC) rubber plantation.  LAC decided to expand its plantation to envelop her community.  When the community refused to accept a ridiculously low payment in return for their land, Konwree says LAC security guards burned down their crops and destroyed villagers’ property.  Without crops to support themselves, she says most people had no choice but to leave for Monrovia, Liberia’s capital. But she refuses to leave, saying she has known no other life and doesn’t want to beg in the capital. Says Konwree: "These people will kill me before they can take away my land that me and my husband lived for the past sixty years. Even though the company has destroyed all the other houses except my own and surrounded me with rubber trees, I will not leave because this land belongs to me and my children."  She still lives in her house, is supported by family, and is surrounded by empty fields where LAC is planting rubber trees.

Green Advocates promotes national policies that would stem corruption and abuses related to natural resource extraction.  For example, Green Advocates pressed successfully for the passage of the Reform Forestry Law.  The new law promotes access to information, transparency and accountability; establishes safeguards for the environment; explicitly prohibits illicit activities in the forest sector, providing specific penalties for corruption; and provides for benefit sharing and greater participation of local forest-based communities.

In the photo to the left: Alfred Brownell, co-founder and director of Green Advocates, is bringing journalists to a community with which he works. Brownell regularly works with the national and international press to provide coverage of the abuses against rural communities, and to increase pressure on multinational companies to reform, respect the law, and make long-term change in the way they interact with the local communities. 

To generate increased public pressure for reform, Green Advocates founded two national networks, Publish What You Pay and the Civil Society Budget Network, to convene rights groups to press for transparency and accountability in the management of Liberia’s natural resources.  Under Brownell’s leadership, the Publish What You Pay Coalition successfully campaigned for Liberia’s entry into the United Nations’ Extractive Industry Transparency Initiatives (EITI), which will provide greater oversight of the management of Liberia’s natural resources.  Working with the Civil Society Budget Network, Green Advocates has started to bring an end to 159 years of secrecy associated with the national budget and helped local communities challenge corruption and demand that the government promote economic, social and cultural rights by allocating sufficient funding to education, health care and development. 

In a country where warlords’ plunder of natural resources funded its civil war, Green Advocates is helping develop the long-term ability of five rural communities to defend their rights to physical security, political participation, equality under law, dignity, a healthy environment, and health. Ultimately, victories gained will build a national legal framework and movement to defend the rights of communities and place a check on abusive powerful interests.

July 2007