Who says an oil spill isn't a perfect opportunity to promote your corporate brand?

That was the brilliant PR strategy executed by officials from Esso after an oil spill that occurred near the Chad-Cameroon oil pipeline in October.

The small spill threatened to destroy a village's growing fields, so company flunkies sprang into action, offering villagers three Esso backpacks as compensation for alerting them to the discovery.

The World Bank-financed pipeline project is being carried out near the Kemo area of Chad, and until October, was costing the Exxon-Petronas-Chevron group a whopping $4, 300,000,000.00 ($4.3 billion). That figure has since been revised up to $4,300,000,014.99 (we hear it was because someone in accounting ordered a snuggie -- the backpacks came out of a forgotten warehouse corner somewhere.)


Brendan Schwartz, a researcher collaborating with local NGOs, has been following the developments closely. "The truth is, scientifically, no one knows the extent of the damage Exxon's activities are causing because we don't have enough resources to measure these impacts comprehensively."

He tells the story of a man named Namarde Keiro, a villager whose case was the subject of a hard-hitting expose called "A Humanitarian Disaster in the Making" by AlterNet.

Keiro's fallow land was ruined by the spill and he was one of the villagers offered a company knapsack in compensation. Because of the damage to his property and having given much of his land to the project, this already dirt-poor farmer says he can no longer produce enough food to feed himself, let alone his family, nor can he afford to send his kids to school.

"I am not an agricultural engineer and cannot put a dollar value on the loss of his land," says Schwartz, "But I know that it's worth more than an Esso backpack."

This isn't even the first oil spill related to the project -- depending on who one asks, it's between the third and the fifth documented incident. "Unfortunately, there is a laundry list of cases where the oil companies running the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline Project have committed questionable acts," claims Schwartz. "There are hundreds of cases in which the oil consortium did not properly compensate individuals or communities for their loss of land, crops, et cetera."

Esso representatives did not respond to multiple requests for comments on this story. Word is they might have been too busy digging through some promotional foam beer coolers to hand out to oil-covered seagulls somewhere in Alaska.