The United Nations says about 30,000 people living near Liberia’s second largest rubber plantation need urgent assistance now that former combatants no longer lord over the site.

The government of President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, backed by UN peacekeepers, repossessed the Guthrie Rubber Plantation, some 35 km northwest of the capital, Monrovia, last month.

The former combatants had been illegally occupying, tapping and selling latex from Guthrie since 2003 after a peace deal was signed to end 14 years of civil war. Before Sirleaf assumed office in January, the former transitional government, which included rebel leaders, ignored the activities of the fighters on the plantation.

Andre Tamagnini, head of Reintegration, Rehabilitation and Recovery with the UN Mission in Liberia, told IRIN on Thursday that NGOs had been reluctant to work around Guthrie because of the presence of the former fighters. Two weeks ago, ex-combatants commandeered a vehicle belonging to another plantation that had gone to Guthrie to purchase latex.

UN peacekeepers have set up security checkpoints around Guthrie to stop harassment and intimidation of civilians, and to prevent illicit latex tapping and selling.

Urgent needs

Tamagnini said the former combatants had extracted millions of dollars worth of latex from the plantation.

"During their three years of occupation, those occupants of Guthrie earned between US $5 to US $10 million dollars and such a huge amount is not visible around the plantation as health services, schools and other social services … are in a desperate state right now," Tamagnini said.

After the re-possession of the plantation, one former fighter told IRIN that each ex-combatant earned about US $150 a week from the sale of latex. The World Bank estimates that the average Liberian lives on less than US $1 per day.

Tamagnini said the humanitarian needs of the 30,000 residents around the plantation were urgent.

"There have been instances where school teachers go around from hut to hut in search of benches or chairs just for students to sit on, while the walls of classrooms were used as blackboards," he said.

Major export earner

The plantation stretches for 15 km along the main road from Monrovia to the Sierra Leone border and lies between two northwestern counties, Bomi and Grand Cape Mount, where large numbers of returning IDPs have been resettled.

Rubber remains a major export earner for Liberia. Although UN Security Council sanctions on timber have been temporarily lifted, logging operations are yet to resume. The country's iron ore industry collapsed during the civil war.

A quarterly economic bulletin released by the Central Bank of Liberia showed a large increase in rubber exports in the second quarter of the year, ending in June. It said export earnings rose by 25.9 percent to US $36.5 million, from US $29.0 million in the previous quarter.

New skills

Putting former fighters into skills-training programmes and relocating them from the plantation has begun, the spokesman of the National Commission on Disarmament, Demobilisation, Reintegration and Rehabilitation told IRIN.

"The first thing we are doing right now is carrying out an intensive verification exercise to identify those rightful ex-fighters who needed to be placed in various skills-training programs like masonry, agriculture, shoemaking, soap making among others," said Molley Paasewe.

He said with the support of the UN Mission in Liberia, legitimate former combatants would be transported from the plantation elsewhere, such as their home communities.