The large majority of them were Temne – the prevalent ethnic group in this area – and Muslims – the predominant religion in Sierra Leone.

[1] Most houses of the village are along a dead-ending dirt road that approaches the Rokel River approximately at the right angles.

In 2013 a total of 265 children from Mabilafu and surrounding villages were enrolled at this school that also distributed a daily meal provided by the World Food Program.

Some women have established small temporary shops to sell petty commodities like soap, sweets, salt, cigarettes, top-up cares, drugs, vegetables or fish and two shelter serve as temporarily bars.

In 2010 Addax Bioenergy acquired 54’000 hectare land in this region to produce agro-ethanol or so called biofuel from sugarcane, grown on irrigated plots.

[4] Thereby, access to land and important resources for the hitherto prevalent subsistence oriented livelihood strategy in Mabilafu has been seriously limited.

However, compensations paid by the company benefit solely landowners but not the landusers who also lost access to previously used land and associated resources.

Due to organizational constraints and lacking consideration of the local context, the Farmer Development Program in Mabilafu failed.

Therewith, this acquisition of land by the company and the creation of wage-employment resembles primitive accumulation and capitalist exploitation as described in Marxist theories.

[1] In order to deal with this new situation of precarious working condition people had to develop alternative strategies, such as maintaining subsistence production or establishing informal economic activities.

[1] This reveals that the impacts of the Addax Bioenergy Project in Mabilafu are challenging for the people living in the village, even though the company praises itself to be a best practice example for sustainable large-scale land acquisition.