Congo
Basin: International funding to support oligarchic logging
African logging concessions are usually
seen as units of forest management. However they are better seen
as a kind of currency in a larger system of power politics and
exploitation.
The international community has played
a key role in establishing and perpetuating the politics of ‘logging-patrimony’.
Probably the most important way in which northern countries promote
oligarchic logging is by providing political, military, economic
and diplomatic support for the oligarchic regimes it is designed
to serve. Often, such support is unofficial, private or covert.
International financial institutions (IFI) provide additional
support by providing lending devoid of forestry-reform conditionality,
by providing ineffective or misguided forestry-reform and project
lending, and by providing private-sector forestry-related investments.
Despite the known problems with the
forest sector in Cameroon, international funding has continued
to pour into the country: during the 1990s, at least $75 million
in foreign assistance was given for forestry and conservation
projects.
During the mid 1990s, Britain’s Overseas
Development Administration (and then DFID) attempted to implement
a programme to ‘operationalise’ the provisions of Cameroon’s 1994
Forest Law relating to the establishment of community forests.
This required, firstly, establishing a clear set of rules for
the allocation of community forests – which had never been undertaken
by the Cameroonian government – and secondly to establish a unit
within the Forest Department to administer the community forests.
Community forests, as defined in Cameroon’s law, are of extremely
limited size (maximum 5,000 hectares) and duration (15 years renewable
for a further 15). Further, they can only be established in the
limited areas of ‘non-permanent’ forest, thus excluding them from
areas designated as forestry concessions (UFAs). However, subsequent
to the passing of the 1994 Forest Law, these non-permanent forest
areas were becoming increasingly important to the political machinery
as a means of allocating short-term, ‘cut-and-run’ logging rights,
or ‘ventes de coupes’. The forest administration thus worked actively
to oppose the implementation of community forests.
This illustrates that the institutions
that now administer the ‘forest sector’ in parts of Africa are
not only primarily articulated around industrial logging but also,
because this logging is linked to the vested interests of senior
political figures, directly opposed to any use of forest resources
– such as community forests – that might hold developmental benefits
but that would potentially jeopardise the absolute discretion
that those political figures have had in using forests as a means
of political patronage.
Given the importance of logging concessions
as the ‘grease in the cogs’ of political patronage, graft and
corruption in all Congo Basin countries --and elsewhere: in Ivory
Coast, Togo, Guinea, etc.--, it is hardly surprising that internationally
funded projects to provide ‘technical assistance’ to improve the
‘performance’ of African forestry concessions have proved to be
such spectacular failures.
Excerpted from: “The political ecology
of the African logging concession system and the complicity of
international donors”, Simon Counsell and Arnaud Labrousse, sent
by Simon Counsell, Rainforest Foundation, email: simonc@rainforestuk.com
