- 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.
By Francesco De Augustinis
BUDJALA, Democratic Republic of Congo — “We are in a province with an agro-pastoral 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],” the inspector says, “everyone lives off agriculture. The community is hardworking working in the countryside, but they face difficulties relating to tools, finances, and technical skills.”
Over 25 million people in DRC face acute food insecurity and South Ubangi is not an exception. We travelled through the province on an overloaded motorbike for seven days to see first-hand the challenges facing its inhabitants, 80% of whom are small-scale farmers, 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 struggles to feed itself due to extreme poverty and an imbalance between programs to support industrial agriculture compared to community agriculture, and the threats of both models to one of the last green lungs of the earth.

Community farms Vs large plantations
Budjala is a small rural town, its modest buildings dusted with red dirt from its unpaved streets. A few kilometres outside the town’s centre, 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 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 neighbouring 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 Solidarité pour Assistance au Développement du Congo (SAD), a local NGO supporting small-scale agriculture, in partnership with the Italian NGO GSI Italia. The project is providing 350 family holdings in South Ubangi province with small loans to purchase seeds and better tools, as well as training to help farmers organise themselves into more productive groups and cooperatives.
As well as making small loans of up to $350 to farmers’ groups, the project has also funded construction of some small infrastructure projects in its first year, including a well and a poultry incubator.
Eighty kilometers away, a very different model of agriculture has established itself. The route south from Budjala is difficult to call a road, with sandy stretches where the wheels of our motorbike struggle, and giant potholes filled with muddy water concealing 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 offering peanuts, beans, cans of petrol, phone top-ups for sale.
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 of rubber trees, nearly 1,000 hectares of oil palm, 500 hectares of cacao, 100 hectares of coffee, around 300 cattle. The plantation’s output is not for local consumption. Most of it is transported on barges down the Mongala and the Congo rivers to Kinshasa.
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 told us the salary of an ordinary worker is 16 dollars a month — 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.”

The impact on communities
Pushing on to our destination, Kuma, the contrast — and interaction — between two models of agricultural production becomes clear. Shortly after our arrival in the village, we meet a group of farmers, with the same poor yield problems 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, in large measure because they can’t afford to buy better seeds.
But, he tells us, most pressing problem in the village is access to clean water: “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, three kilometers 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, the color of the water — it’s not drinkable. There’s a smell.”
All the people we met in Kuma told 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,” said Floribert Avonyima, a priest originally from the village of 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 study, told Mongabay 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?
For several years, the Congolese government has backed initiatives to support the country’s agriculture sector, the most prominent support 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. The SEZ in Gwaka is a public-private partnership aiming to raise $60 million, with support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), the DRC’s National Investment Promotion Agency, and the province.
The SEZ will be managed by a company called Green Congo Development, owned by Michaël Josy Hoolans, co-chief executive officer of Miluna.
“We are in the agroindustry, we develop plantations, but at the same time we also work with communities,” Hoolans told Mongabay. Speaking at a conference in Kinshasa in November, he argued the government should focus on developing large-scale agriculture in DRC, because plantations like the one he runs can produce better yield, higher quality, and have greater ability to reach the market than small, family operators.
“It’s a very good project,” Daniel Samba Mukoko, Minister of Economy of the RDC, wrote on X on October 31, after a visit to Miluna with the 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” in DRC, Simplex Malembe, program director of CONAPAC, the DRC’s national farmers’ union, told Mongabay in his office in Kinshasa. Maleme 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 told 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 forest
Travelling across a stretch of South Ubangi, we noted that large agro-industrial projects are still few and located in areas that were already deforested and converted to agricultural use in the early 1900s.
“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 savannah, we can create more.”
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 equatorial region of Congo. According to forest monitoring program Global Forest Watch, the DRC lost 6.86 million hectares of humid primary forest between 2002 and 2023. In 2023, a record 526 thousand hectares of forest were lost: agriculture was the second-leading driver of deforestation, according to GFW.
A study published in Nature in January found that small-scale agriculture is a dominant driver of deforestation in Central Africa, responsible for 64% of forest loss between 2001 and 2020. In DRC the proportion is even higher, with 85% of forest losses related 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 3, 4 or even 5 times, without ever changing culture,” Simplice Basusu Manzikolo, SAD program officer, tells us in Budjala, referring to the common practice of exhausting 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.”
Riding back along the road from Kuma to Gemena, we pass through forest and villages again, feeling around us the growing pressure on this fragile ecosystem. What we take with us as baggage from this journey is a greater understanding of what is at stake with the agricultural production in this territory, and how important the choices we are called to take are, to properly feed the people, without compromising irreplaceable natural resources.
This story was supported by the Pulitzer Center Rainforest Reporting Grant