Post 5 Gabon: The Environment and Human Rights
As noted in my previous blog, Gabon is struggling with water and air quality which in large is caused by pollution.
Water accessibility is so limited in Gabon that it is normal for individuals, especially those who live in rural areas, to walk “several hundred meters” to access clean water[1]. In an effort to alleviate citizens’ struggles, the Gabonese government collaborated with Intaka Tech, a South African company that provided more water treatment plants to make water more accessible in rural areas.
Three water treatment plants were built, which treated about 1,230,000 liters of water per day. While this doesn’t address this issue in every part of Gabon, this was a good start, however, these plants were constructed in 2012 and the statistics provided in my previous blog show that accessibility rates are still low nationally with urban and rural areas having a sanitization rate of 43% and 32% respectively in 2017. Gabon is still working toward its goal for more clean water as it is working with Acciona Agua, a “global company with a business model based on sustainability”[2], which focuses on water treatment and reverse osmosis desalination, which is the process of removing salt from water[3]. Their current project in Gabon is to construct the Ntoum drinking water treatment plant in Libreville, and their goal is to provide more accessibility to clean water by producing 280,000m³, or 280,000,000 litres per day, which would “supply more than 2 million people in the capital city”[4], as well as provide an opportunity to further diversify Gabon’s economy.
In response to Environmental concerns as a whole, Gabon made an effort to reach out to other African countries who were suffering from similar problems. Environmental conditions are raising concerns for populations across Africa, so in response the World Health Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme partnered with Gabon to hold the Interministerial Conference for Health and Environment in Africa in Libreville to discuss the Libreville Declaration, which is a plan that is intended to address and remedy various environmental concerns across Africa[5]. The main objectives of the conference were to demonstrate the important link between environmental conditions and health as well as to emphasize that to maintain sustainable development these interlinked issues must be addressed and there needs to be an integrated approach. After the conference, 52 African countries adopted the Libreville Declaration to show solidarity with the environmental cause.
To acknowledge concerns regarding deforestation, the government of Gabon made pledges to protect more of its rainforest in which Gabon signed an agreement with the Central African Forest Initiative in 2015 to protect the Congo Basin, especially from the expanding palm oil industry[6].
I would like to note that despite these pledges, in order to diversify its economy away from oil Gabon made a sizeable deal with Olam, a company that focuses on palm oil production. In total, Olam needed to occupy more than 69,000 hectares of land for its palm oil production projects, which required a considerable amount of forest to be cleared. While this deal was initiated a year prior to the CAFI agreement, the Olam company is currently undertaking more projects in Gabon that would require more deforestation which seems contradictory to Gabon’s environmental preservation efforts[7]. Overall, Gabon’s efforts for environmental consciousness are promising, but a majority of Gabon’s efforts do not continue past 2015 and the environment is still suffering greatly from pollution and degradation. While Gabon claims that it wants to prioritize addressing these issues, the state’s actions differ from its claims as it seems to focus more on economic diversification, but perhaps this is best for now. To truly remedy most of these issues, the government would need to invest more into its infrastructure and as a majority of all environmental projects in Gabon are collaborations from outside aid such as NGO’s and other African Countries, it doesn’t appear that Gabon has the resources to pool into infrastructure currently.
As well as suffering from environmental troubles, Gabonese citizens are also experiencing breaches to their civil rights. Prison conditions are a main source of concern over human rights violations due to various conditions such as overcrowding, poor sanitation and ventilation, inadequate food provisions, and poor healthcare[8].
Some individuals are also detained illegally and aren’t permitted to see family or an attorney for up to several days even when not officially charged with a crime, and this, along with abuse and even death became more common after the 2016 election because many in opposition were arrested which spurred more conversation over government corruption.
A Gabon human rights report also stated that cruel and unusual punishments are not only common inside of prisons, but also toward foreign or undocumented Africans. Child trafficking and labor were also concerns listed on the report[9]. To address conditions in prisons, the Gabonese Justice Ministry coordinated a seminar on “public health in places of detention” in Libreville with the International Committee of the Red Cross to “improve the system of public health in prisons”[10]. The seminar intended to explore different health concerns like contagious diseases, accessibility to medicine, nutrition, sanitation, and hygiene in prisons and to offer solutions. In response to child trafficking and labor, Gabon did enact a law that criminalized child trafficking in 2004, which has a strong correlation with child labor, and this did reduce the frequency of these occurrences, however, this is still an ongoing struggle[11]. There are some organizations that house groups of child victims of human trafficking for refuge, but this is only a temporary solution and no real safeguards have been put into place that would prevent children from being re-abducted and sold into labor[12].
The violation of human rights of indigenous people is another concern because of disagreements over resource usage. There are multiple indigenous hunter-gatherer-farming communities in Gabon which are comprised of different ethnic groups which include but aren’t limited to the Baka, Babongo, Bakoya, Baghame, Barimba, Akoula, and the Akwoa[13]. The exact number of indigenous people in Gabon is uncertain as the Gabonese government does not include the indigenous population in the national census. As of 2003, it was estimated that the indigenous population made up about .1% of the whole population[14], and it was approximated that there are anywhere between 7,000 to 20,000 indigenous people[15], although these numbers are often disputed. Most indigenous communities rely on Gabon’s forested areas, and increasing rates of deforestation damage important ancestral land as well as threatening the survival of indigenous groups because of increased competition for resources. A lot of these struggles arise from the implementation of more infrastructure such as the construction of roads and railways, and although Gabon devoted more efforts towards conservation, this created another problem because some designated protected areas had indigenous populations occupying those spaces. While this didn’t mean that these populations were evicted from the area, it did put in place restrictions on land usage and protectionist policies for biodiversity which interrupts indigenous lifestyles, making it more difficult to sustain themselves and their cultural practices[16]. This idea of endangered cultures, which can be related to the similarly important concepts of an ethnosphere and a biosphere. An ethnosphere is the “sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions, brought into being by the human imagination”[17]. Much like how the decimation of one biosphere can affect how life flourishes elsewhere, so too can the erosion of ethnospheres because differences in culture are in part what makes groups of people unique which orchestrates different modes of functioning, and changing these systems of operations, or rather how people think and act, can affect larger systems outside of these. Erasing these differences is considered a form of human rights violation because it would essentially be the elimination of what makes us human. To look at a wider scope of this view, the indigenous concerns in Gabon exemplify another reason why climate change can be so devastating because it not only creates a concern for the sustainability of life, it also creates a concern for the preservation of who we are and our cultural connection to Earth.
A corresponding topic to these issues that looms over cultural identity is Western ethnocentrism, also referred to a Eurocentrism. Eurocentrism, which is the belief held by many in the Western world, whether consciously or not, that Western values and beliefs are universal and superior[18] according to Farish Noor, a political scientist and associate professor at the Rajaratnam School of International Studies as well as Nanyang Technological University[19]. Some major points that Noor makes in his piece “Beyond Eurocentrism” is that Eurocentrism has created conflicts with human rights and fundamental individual liberties and that it is important to be aware that cultural differences impact individual’s perspectives and that this is no exception to the topic of human rights. The attempt to impose one cultural outlook on universal human rights is a way of destroying other group’s cultural identities because, in order for this shift of ideology to be successful, the adopting cultural group would need to assimilate to the cultural atmosphere of the ideological benefactors. In most cases, this transfer of ideas is almost never successful because the adoptees can’t adapt to the changes necessary because the changes didn’t evolve around the adoptee group’s socio-historical background, in which Noor suggests societies need to address issues using their own cultural resources for such things. In this practice of being mindful of cultural differences between groups and of where, to what, and why cultural beliefs are being utilized to address various issues, a multitude of ethnospheres can continue to thrive globally.
[1] http://www.infrastructurene.ws/2012/05/17/south-african-solution-to-solve-gabons-water-pollution-crisis/
[2]https://www.acciona-agua.com/about-us/
[3] https://science.howstuffworks.com/reverse-osmosis.htm
[4] https://www.acciona-agua.com/in-the-world/africa/gabon/
[5] http://www.aho.afro.who.int/profiles_information/index.php/Gabon:Progress_on_the_Libreville_Declaration
[6] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gabon-climatechange/gabon-pledges-to-protect-forests-in-regional-drive-to-save-congo-basin-idUSKBN19J1JL
[7] https://olamgroup.com/locations/west-and-central-africa/gabon.html
[8] https://borgenproject.org/better-human-rights-in-gabon/
[9] https://www.state.gov/documents/organization/277245.pdf
[10] https://www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/news-release/2013/04-22-gabon-health-care.htm
[11] https://m.news24.com/Africa/News/gabon-struggles-to-stem-tide-of-child-trafficking-20180704
[12] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GqmuWRrH9Yg&list=PLDAhxGYoC0ljRBIcZvCg-9YwirbW46QT2
[13] https://www.iwgia.org/en/news-alerts/archive/143-uncategorised/715-indigenous-peoples-in-gabon
[14] http://siteresources.worldbank.org/EXTINDPEOPLE/Resources/407801-1271860301656/Gabon_brief_0328.pdf
[15] https://www.iwgia.org/en/news-alerts/archive/143-uncategorised/715-indigenous-peoples-in-gabon
[16]https://www.culturalsurvival.org/sites/default/files/GabonUPRReport2017.pdf
[17] www.ted.com/talks/wade_davis_on_endangered_cultures/transcript#t-111356. 2:16
[18] Noor, Farrish A. Beyond Eurocentrism. Westview Publishing, Oxford. 2001
[19] https://www.rsis.edu.sg/profile/farish-badrol-hisham-ahmad-noor/#.W7qoAWhKhPY
