Congolese farmers barred from own land for tree planting project by French oil giant Total Energies
Farmers living in the Republic of the Congo say that they have been barred from accessing their land so that the French oil giant Total Energies and the Congolese government can use it for a high-profile carbon offsetting project to plant 40 million trees in the next decade.
According to an investigation shared exclusively with Sky News by Greenpeace UK Unearthed and the SourceMaterial investigative group, the project on the Lefini land reserve in the Bateke Plateau appears to have come at a significant cost to an estimated 400 farmers and their families.
In interviews with a SourceMaterial journalist, several farmers said that since planting began in November last year, they have been blocked from their lands without consultation or payment.
“We used to go and collect Koko leaves [a Congolese vegetable], mushrooms,” Natacha Enta said.
“Now that they have forbidden us to enter, how will we cope?
“In the fields, the white man has bought the lands, and we can no longer work our fields. And the people who have sold our land now forbid us to go there.”
Clarisse Louba Parfaite said: “Now, if you are seen with your tractors, you are chased away.
“The crops that we had planted inside, in the middle of the fields, not harvested to date, they refuse to allow our tractors to come and do the work.
“It’s to kill us, to send us back to being slaves again like in the past.”
It’s left some worried about feeding their children.
Clarisse Louba Parfaite says she has been chased away from her land. Pic: SourceMaterial
‘They have taken everything’
Pulcherie Amboula said: “We were not able to go far with our studies, so we gave ourselves to agriculture.
“I was working the fields to feed my children and grandchildren as well. And one day, to my surprise, we are informed that we will no longer be doing our fields. If we see a tractor over there, we will send the tractor back.”
“I feel like these people came to kill us on our own land.”
Maixent Jourdain Adzabi said: “Today, populations are crying, and bitterly. And us, our children? We raise them based on our fields. We work, we find money to get them into school.
“Today, we don’t have space to work, they have taken everything.”
A few well-established families were paid, but not very much – the equivalent of around 80p a hectare.
And some of those who received money say there was not a great deal of choice anyway.
Olivier Calver Ngouba says he was ‘accused of having sold the ancestral lands’. Pic: SourceMaterial
Residents had little control
Olivier Calver Ngouba said: “In the village, I am accused of having sold the ancestral lands, when it is not the case. When [Forest Economy] Minister Rosalie Matondo came, she never consulted before. She arrived with her delegation saying that she came to pay us ‘a symbolic franc’.
“We told her that since the dawn of time, we never sold our land, even our ancestors did not do it. She replied that it is the state that has recovered these lands.”
Documents show that affected residents apparently had little control over what was happening to them.
By the time some had accepted money to give up their lands the government had already changed the law, more than a year earlier, to become the private owner of the Lefini reserve.
That land was then quickly subleased via a French forestry consultancy called Foret Resources Management (FRM) to Total Energies, with reassurances from the government that anyone else trying to use it would be evicted.
Total’s planting scheme. Pic: SourceMaterial
Complaints acknowledged
Other documents seen by SourceMaterial show that after Total’s planting scheme began in November 2021, the forest economy ministry acknowledged a range of problems with the project, including complaints from unpaid families, confusion over land rights and limitations and a lack of leadership.
The Congolese government declined to comment.
Total Energies and FRM defended what they described as an “ambitious” and “pioneering” partnership.
But in a statement they acknowledged issues with the scheme, telling Sky News that in the past few months they had “launched an assessment to identify the project’s potential impacts and to mitigate negative impacts that could not be reduced”.
They said: “This will establish a complete picture of those who are affected by the project in the overall project area… and will identify a remediation action plan, including livelihood restoration measures that comply with international standards. Results will be complete and made public in 2023.”
William McDonnell says local communities must be safeguarded
Example of much bigger problem
For those trying to reform the rapidly growing and poorly regulated voluntary carbon market, this is one example of a much bigger problem.
William McDonnell is the chief operating officer of the Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, which is trying to establish and govern a set of globally accepted standards for carbon credits.
He told Sky News: “Social impacts have increasingly over the years been seen as really central to high integrity carbon credits.
“You don’t want, in doing one good thing, to be doing another bad thing.
“Partly it’s about justice and human rights and making sure that the interests of the local communities are safeguarded.
“But actually part of it is also a virtuous cycle.
“If the local community is involved, that makes it much more likely that those climate benefits will be there in the long term.”
The UK has stopped sharing some intelligence with the US on suspected drug trafficking boats in the Caribbean following concerns over America’s strikes against the vessels.
The US has reported carrying out 14 strikes since September on boats near the Venezuelan coast.
The death toll from the US attacks in the Pacific and the Caribbean Sea has risen to more than 70, as the US escalates a military build-up in the Caribbean Sea.
Downing Street did not deny reporting by CNN that the UK is withholding intelligence from the US to avoid being complicit in US military strikes it believes may breach international law.
Britain, which controls several territories in the Caribbean where it bases intelligence assets, has long assisted the US in identifying vessels suspected of smuggling narcotics based on intelligence gathered in its overseas territories in the region.
The USS Gravely destroyer arrives to dock for military exercises in Port-of-Spain, Trinidad and Tobago on 26 October (AP Photo/Robert Taylor)
That information helped the US Coast Guard locate the ships, seize the drugs and detain their crews, CNN cited sources as saying.
But since the Trump administration started carrying out strikes on alleged drug trafficking boats in early September, UK officials have become concerned their intelligence may be used to acquire targets for the attacks they believe may be illegal.
The intelligence-sharing pause began more than a month ago, CNN reported, quoting sources as saying Britain shares UN’s human rights chief Volker Turk’s assessment that the strikes amount to extrajudicial killing.
The reports could provide an awkward backdrop for a meeting between Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper and her US counterpart Marco Rubio, expected on Wednesday at the G7 foreign ministerial summit in Canada.
A Number 10 spokesman did not deny the move when asked about the pause in intelligence sharing.
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“We don’t comment on security or intelligence matters,” the official said in response to repeated questions.
“The US is our closest partner on defence, security and intelligence, but in line with a long-standing principle, I’m just not going to comment on intelligence matters.”
He added that “decisions on this are a matter for the US” and that “issues around whether or not anything is against international law is a matter for a competent international court, not for governments to determine”.
A Pentagon official told CNN the department “doesn’t talk about intelligence matters”.
On Monday, US secretary of war Pete Hegseth said on X that the previous day, “two lethal kinetic strikes were conducted on two vessels operated by Designated Terrorist Organizations”.
He said: “These vessels were known by our intelligence to be associated with illicit narcotics smuggling, were carrying narcotics, and were transiting along a known narco-trafficking transit route in the Eastern Pacific.
“Both strikes were conducted in international waters and 3 male narco-terrorists were aboard each vessel. All 6 were killed. No U.S. forces were harmed.”
The United Nations human rights chief has described the US strikes on alleged drug dealers off the coast of South America as “unacceptable” and a violation of international human rights law.
Venezuela says they are illegal, amount to murder and are aggression against the sovereign South American nation.
World
Hundreds of Russian troops roll into key frontline Ukrainian city ‘Mad Max-style’, video appears to show
Hundreds of Russian troops have pushed deeper into eastern Ukrainian cities ‘Mad Max-style’, video released by the Russians appears to show.
The troops were seen rolling through the fog on motorbikes, with some on the roofs of battered cars and vans, apparently into the city of Pokrovsk, as Russia said its forces had also pressed further into Kupiansk on Tuesday.
Ukraine has acknowledged the presence of the troops on its territory, although Reuters news agency says that when the video was shot is yet to be verified.
The fight to gain hold of Pokrovsk, a strategic point on a large road and rail artery in the Donetsk region, has been raging for well over a year, in Vladimir Putin’s push to gain control of the whole of Ukraine’s industrial east.
Situation on the battlefield
The Donbas region comprises the neighbouring regions of Luhansk and Donetsk.
Ukraine’s military said around 300 Russian soldiers were now inside Pokrovsk and that Moscow had intensified efforts to get more troops in over the past few days – using dense fog for cover from drones.
It said Ukrainian forces were fighting Russian groups in the city.
Russian soldiers enter Pokrovsk in this screen grab obtained from a social media video released on 10 November, 2025. Pic: Reuters
Moscow says taking Pokrovsk, dubbed “the gateway to Donetsk” by Russian media, would give it a platform to push north towards the two largest remaining Ukrainian-controlled cities in the Donetsk region – Kramatorsk and Sloviansk.
Posting on X on Tuesday, Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said: “The front: our main focus right now is on the Pokrovsk direction and the Zaporizhzhia region, where the Russians are increasing the number and scale of assaults.
“The situation there remains difficult, in part because of weather conditions that favor the attacks. But we continue to destroy the occupier, and I thank every one of our units, every warrior involved in defending Ukraine’s positions.”
Destruction in Pokrovsk on 1 November. Pic: AP
Moscow and Kyiv have given different accounts of the battle for Pokrovsk. Moscow has for days said the city is surrounded, while Kyiv has denied Moscow controls the city and said on Monday that it was still able to supply neighbouring Myrnohrad.
Moscow has been threatening Pokrovsk for more than a year, attempting to surround it and threaten supply lines, rather than use the deadly frontal assaults it used to take the city of Bakhmut in 2023.
Russian war bloggers published a video on Tuesday showing what they said were Russian forces entering Pokrovsk along a road enveloped in fog, in what some Telegram users said looked like scenes from the Mad Max action film series, many of which are set in a post-apocalyptic landscape.
The date of the footage has not been independently verified.
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Satellite image shows armoured vehicles in the eastern Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk, Donetsk region, on 3 November, 2025. Pic: Reuters
Russia said it had taken 256 buildings and that Moscow’s forces were actively advancing to the northwest and east of Pokrovsk as well as around the railway station.
Russia has executed a pincer movement around the city and was close to closing it, open-source battlefield maps from both sides show, though Kyiv has counter-attacked around the town of Dobropillia.
Ukraine’s top military commander, Oleksandr Syrskyi, said in an interview with the New York Post that Russia was concentrating some 150,000 troops in a push to capture Pokrovsk, with mechanised groups and marine brigades forming part of this drive.
Russia said its forces had taken full control of the eastern part of Kupiansk in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region. A Russian commander, who gave his call sign as Hunter, said his troops had taken control of an oil depot on the eastern edge of Kupiansk.
In a video statement issued by Russia’s defence ministry, he said his forces had also taken control of a series of train stops along the railway to Kupiansk Vuzlovyi, a settlement around 6km (4 miles) south of the centre of Kupiansk itself.
Russia also said its troops had taken control of the settlement of Novouspenivske in the southeastern Zaporizhzhia region.
Ukraine withdrew from some villages, including Novouspenivske, due to intense attacks involving more than 400 artillery strikes per day, RBC-Ukraine news agency cited a military spokesperson as saying.
Russia’s military says it now controls more than 19% of Ukraine, or some 116,000 square km (44,800 square miles), up from 18% nearly three years ago, according to Ukrainian maps tracking frontline changes.
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