The ever-potent, indomitable, and invincible Vanguard: The Student Unification Party (SUP) said, it has watched with “absolute disdain as Jeety Company, and other foreign-dominated cabals, launch a calculated campaign to criminalize and delegitimize hardworking Liberian smallholder farmers and proud indigenous export businesses.”
In a release issued over the weekend, SUP said, rubber farmers, tappers, buyers, and the locally-owned export enterprises, have at present, subjected to coordinated attempts led by Jeety Company and allied interests to obstruct legitimate local participation in the rubber exports.
While Jetty and others are yet to speak to the SUP concerns, the University of Liberia campus based student body added: “This is not a regulation, but naked sabotage, designed solely to preserve the centuries-old foreign stranglehold over Liberia’s rubber wealth and to crush the rightful emergence of a powerful, locally-owned rubber industry.”
The real enemy is not the farmers
“The true, historic, and ongoing enemy of Liberia’s rubber wealth is not the hardworking Liberian farmers, or the bold local entrepreneurs daring to build legitimate businesses. It is the century-old foreign monopoly system spearheaded by companies like Firestone and Jeety that has brazenly, extracted billions of dollars from the country, paid poverty-level wages to our people, caused catastrophic environmental destruction; siphoned profits overseas, and left entire Liberian communities impoverished, dependent, and humiliated.”
SUP has therefore declared that rubber farming and local export are legitimate, and constitutionally reliable.
The government has an absolute constitutional obligation to defend and promote these rights, not to suppress them at the behest of foreign overlords; SUP categorically rejects any attempt to criminalize the farmers, and exporters under the pathetic pretext of “regulation.” We will dismantle any law, policy, or directive that imposes blanket bans, punitive restrictions, or discriminatory measures against our people; equal standards must apply to everyone. Foreign companies will be held to the same strict environmental, labor, tax, and operational standards as Liberian businesses. No more special privileges. No more exemptions. No more colonial arrogance.” SUP demands immediate and uncompromising support for farmers and exporters, including the call for a national mobilization of public and private capital to establish large-scale, state-of-the-art rubber processing factories in the country so that value addition, jobs, and wealth remain in our country, not in foreign bank accounts.”
“To the rubber farmers, tappers, buyers, and exporters, you are not the problem. You are the future. Your determination to own and profit from this national resource is not sabotage, it is the highest form of patriotism. The Student Unification Party stands with you today, tomorrow, and always. We will mobilize the entire Liberian people and take every necessary peaceful, democratic, and revolutionary action to defend your right to participate fully and fairly in the national economy,” the release assured the farmers.
SUP has meanwhile, demanded the government to grant Liberian rubber exporters a protected and enabling period of four years to participate fully and competitively in the export market.
This, the release said, is a transitional period that will enable indigenous exporters to consolidate capacity, attract investment, and build efficient, modern rubber processing factories capable of competing sustainably at both regional and international levels.
“The era of foreign rubber cartels dictating terms to Liberia is finished. The era of Liberian ownership, dignity, and economic supremacy has begun.”