Caption: Outside a palm oil processing factory, workers sort the fruit that was collected that morning from local cutters in surrounding villages.
Read and comment on this story from the Standard Times on PCV Tate Munro who works in Agro-forestry in Cameroon. Munro is trying to place palm oil mills in strategic villages because palm oil is the single most appropriate and sustainable income-generating activity for this area. The palm oil business will enable the poorest of farmers to be able to provide for his family. And, Munro says, with income coming into a family, village, and community, people are enabling themselves to be productive and engage in appropriate and sustainable development in all areas of life: health care (building health posts, stocking affordable drugs, paying competent care-givers); education (building schools, rebuilding classrooms, acquiring desks, books, benches, pens); sanitation; religion; infrastructure; and organization. Read the story at:
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A 'bleeding heart' from NK makes a difference in Africa
By: Megan Speenburgh January 02, 2003
NORTH KINGSTOWN-When Tate Munro was in high school, he was the captain of his wrestling team.
For exercise, he made his team rake the leaves for the elderly, or shovel their driveways.
"He's always been sort of a bleeding heart," his mother Joset Munro says.
In college, Tate was a volunteer fireman and he majored in Youth and Leadership Development.
And for the past year or so, Tate has been serving in the Peace Corps in Cameroon, a country of West-central Africa.
He lives in a village called Nyen, and has seen firsthand the pain and suffering the people there face everyday.
Munro has another year and a half to go before his duty there is finished.
So far, he has been sick three times and survived a really bad car crash, his parents said.
His work there involves working with individual farmers, farming groups, or entire villages to establish or refine Agro-forestry techniques, which means incorporating trees into farming practices.
The people of Cameroon are extremely poor, and have virtually no economy.
The agriculture problem the country faces is that it rains for seven months, and then it is dry for five months.
The farming practices must use nitrogen fixing leguminous trees to replenish soil-depleted fields or use them to hold down the earth during the rainy season or dry season.
Munro has been working to come up with a sustainable and appropriate economy that will benefit the people of Cameroon.
According to Munro, Cameroon has been exploited both with-in and without for its trees, cotton, coffee, plantains, bananas, and cocoa.
As a result, Cameroonians have paid the price with their topsoil, forests, water supplies, land-pressure problems, and the extinction of native animals.
Poor villagers have remained poor or gotten poorer while wealthy exporters, politicians, plantation owners, and business people have gotten wealthier at the expense of the environment and the average farmer, Munro said.
The answer to many of these problems is palm oil.
Oil palm trees are temperamental trees that require certain elevation, temperature, and rainfall needs.
Munro is trying to place palm oil mills in strategic villages because palm oil is the single most appropriate and sustainable income-generating activity for this area.
The palm oil business will enable the poorest of farmers to be able to provide for his family.
And, Munro says, with income coming into a family, village, and community, people are enabling themselves to be productive and engage in appropriate and sustainable development in all areas of life: health care (building health posts, stocking affordable drugs, paying competent care-givers); education (building schools, rebuilding classrooms, acquiring desks, books, benches, pens); sanitation; religion; infrastructure; and organization.
Palm oil is a staple in most of Cameroon and West and Central African countries cooking.
According to Munro, there is a huge market for palm oil and only a few places that can produce it.
It is one of the few culturally appropriate "cash crops" that, if not sold, is consumed by the villagers.
Oil palm trees have other substantial income generating and household benefits including brooms that are produced from the leaves; firewood produced from the husks; kernel cake and waste oil are used as pig feeds; and palm wine is sold at the market.
When planted and cared for appropriately, oil palm trees greatly inhibit water erosion on hillsides, curb wind erosion, provide flowering buds for integrated bee farming, shade the ground and require less water than many other trees for watershed protection.
The oil palm trees start producing after only three-to-five years and can continue to produce for about 80-100 years.
Now the other challenge Munro is facing is money.
He needs money in order to begin the palm oil economy.
In order to begin, he needs a palm mill machine, a generator to run the machine, and a structure to house the machine, generator, and store the palm oil.
Munro has written to embassies all over the world asking for their support, and is also looking to his friends and family from back home to help spread the word and come up with ways to raise money for this project.
His parents are currently working to set up a bank account that Munro will be able to access over there, but the task is a lot harder than it sounds.
Another project Munro has helped with in Cameroon is the building of a library in his village.
So far he has the building and the librarian, but he needs books to put in the library.
Again, he looks to his more fortunate friends and family for their help with getting books sent over to Cameroon.
According to Munro, if anyone wants to send over books, the U.S. Postal Service has a special rate for shipping books at about $1 per pound.
The library just opened on December 20, and the books people have asked for include Educational/Training; Mathematics; General Science; Biology; Chemistry; Physics; Geology; Agriculture; Agro-forestry; Animal Husbandry (the raising and care of farm animals); Health; Medicine; Language (French, English, German, Spanish); Children's Books; and Magazines (especially National Geographic).
If anyone wants to send books to the library in Cameroon, you can send them to:
Mbengwi Public Library
C/O Tate Munro-PCV Nyen
Corps de la Paix
B.P. 215
Yaounde, Cameroon, AFRICA
To find out more about the Palm Oil Press project, call his parents, Joset and Lincoln Munro at (401) 294-5528.
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This story has been posted in the following forums: : Headlines; COS - Cameroon; Special Interests - Forestry