Large-scale Oil Palm farms cover an area in excess of 500 hectares. These are state owned enterprises which were established to meet the internal consumption needs of the country and provide a surplus for export. The estates are well run and maintained. They employ the best farming techniques and employ highly skilled professionals to work their operations. Unfortunately they are always considered intruders in the communities where they operate, simply because they employ people who are not natives of the immediate catchment area.
Most estates are being privatised or sold to private interests in an effort to wean the respective governments from directly engaging in competitive businesses. Most estates had nucleus farms with out-growers and private smallholders supplying raw palm fruit to the central processing factory. The processing facilities were generally in the large-scale category.
Because of privatization exercises some large-scale processing operations have closed, leaving plantation output to be sold to small-scale processors. It is not unusual today to find many small-scale processing operations exploiting the splitting up of a plantation estate. The Republic of Benin, Cameroon and Ghana abound with examples of this type of take-over by small-scale operators.