RED OIL PRODUCTION WORKSHOPS

The forest region is a major producer of palm oil. Much of the production remains very small-scale. Around Macenta, many artisanal workshops are set up along the roadside. You can't miss them with the big black barrels, where the nuts are cooked, surrounded by a thick smoke. To better understand the production process, you can stop at one of the production sites, especially in the village of Yirié. Next to the bridge before the village, the women spend their days boiling the palm nuts (a type of vermilion date). A first cooking extracts the pulp, then the broth is emptied into vats where a woman mixes the liquid and recovers the shells, which will be used to make soap. A second cooking will saturate the oil, whose blood-red liquid will be stored in cans before being sold on a nearby market. If you have the opportunity to visit bush villages, you will surely see small village units. The method of oil production is then a little different with a first phase, where the nuts are crushed in large stone basins with water to extract the fatty liquid. In this phase, there is no cooking. After the crushing phase, the fatty liquid rises to the surface and is recovered to cook it and obtain the red oil, while the seeds are recovered to extract a black oil that will be used for the production of soap.