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RougeCongo the Sustainable Palm Oil

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Introduction

RougeCongo aims to produce sustainable palm oil that will be consumed locally and made with respect for humans, communities, and the environment. Its economic viability will ensure its sustainability and replicability. It will contribute to solving recurrent problems in the Kimpese region and the DRC: recurrent shortages of palm oil, lack of well-paid jobs, low energy availability, and the difficulty of farmers to valorize their production. Between the giant single-crop plantation and the small artisanal oil mill, new models of production of this oil, meeting high social and environmental requirements, are to be invented. RougeCongo is responding to this challenge in the following way:

  • By developing oil palm cultivation in a savannah region, without causing deforestation, and on land with little ecological value that is not currently cultivated.
  • With an oil mill model on a human scale, replicable, self-sufficient in energy and whose effluents are treated and recovered.
  • With an innovative supply model for the oil mill: cultivation of palm trees by various producers rather than by only one, avoiding monoculture and poorly paid wage labor.

Palm oil is the best vegetable oil

Palm oil has the best yield per hectare, more than four times than any other vegetable oil.

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While in 2018, 38% of the world’s vegetable oil production was palm oil, thanks to these exceptional yields, palm cultivation occupied only 6% of the land concerned by these crops. Moreover, unlike soybeans, rapeseed, or sunflowers, whose intensive cultivation requires repeated chemical plant protection treatments, oil palm is generally very healthy and is cultivated without these very environmentally damaging products. As long as monoculture on large surfaces and deforestation are avoided, its potential to feed the populations of the regions where it grows is therefore important.

RougeCongo consists of 2 distinct phases 

The Team

Marie-Hélène Pingoud

Marie-Hélène Pingoud

Antoine Pingoud

Antoine Pingoud

In 2014 they founded JauneCongo, a social agricultural enterprise which produces fruits and vegetables at the Kapangu 34ha agroecological farm 15 km from Kimpese and distributes them in Kinshasa.

Impacts of the projects

Jobs

More than 1400 direct and indirect jobs created by 2035

Production

1,000 tons of oil produced per year by 2030, covering the needs of more than 100,000 people in DRC

Income

17 million dollars of income generated for workers and planters by 2037

Cultivation

1'000 hectares of palm groves planted by 2027 by more than one hundred planters

Carbon captured

40'000 tons of carbon captured by these palm groves by 2045

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