Congo,
DR: Doing away with forests, people
and climate through logging
DRC’s rainforest --the world’s
second largest-- is disappearing through logging. According to a
report from The Guardian (1), “today a dozen large, mostly European,
companies dominate the industry and have vast concessions: Trans-M
has Lebanese owners; another group, which controls around 15m acres,
is owned by the Portuguese Trinidade brothers; the American Blattner
family has more than 2m acres; the German Danzer Group has 5m. To
make worthwhile the tricky task of exporting wood over the rapids
near the capital city of Kinshasa, the demand is for the highest
quality wood for European kitchens, floors and furniture. Peace
has exacerbated the problem, opening up the forest to smaller companies.”
Most logging concessions
were granted in spite of a national moratorium on logging titles
since 2002 and in violation of the new forest laws. The companies
know they will be able to appeal, and log, for many years.
The forest provides food,
medicines and building materials to two-thirds of the people in
Congo --40 million people. DRC’s rainforest is also one of the biggest
stores of carbon in the world. However, the companies are being
encouraged to take what they can. A flawed World Bank-financed review
of the legality of 156 logging contracts has otherwise increased
the peril as some 46 of the total contracts were converted into
legal concessions --33 of which were granted after the 2002 moratorium
was already in place. (2) With no social and environmental criteria,
the review process ignored the impact on local people's livelihoods.
Most concessions were granted in areas inhabited by people dependent
on the forest, many have Pygmies living in them, and a third is
in areas identified as vital for conservation. Also the global significance
of tropical forests in stabilizing climate change and protecting
biodiversity was ignored. (3)
In 2003,
Safbois, a part-American, part Belgian-owned conglomerate, was awarded
a more than 100,000 square miles concession to log the forest for
the precious African teak. Local communities condemn the company
which they say will profit from their trees while providing little
or nothing for them: their hunting grounds are being destroyed,
their access to wild food denied, there are few jobs, they pay is
meager.
The Guardian’s report explains
that: “The system of concessionaries offering gifts to communities
in return for permission to log is now the basis of the whole forestry
operation in Congo. Isolated communities, which have seldom had
contact with outsiders, are being persuaded to sign away, for just
a few machetes and bags of salt, the rights to the forests on which
they have depended for millions of years. One company gave a community
18 bars of soap, four packets of soup, 24 bottles of beer and two
bags of sugar. Another signed a deal for 20 sacks of sugar, 200
bags of salt, 200 machetes and 200 spades. In Orientale province,
another company promised a school, a clinic and enough wood to provide
for their coffins.”
"Concessions are being
given out, and the villagers are not being told what the chiefs
are signing up to. Communities are in chaos and there is more and
more social conflict. It is a cruel system that continues the injustices
and atrocities of the colonial system but it is even worse because
it deprives communities of their resources and consigns them to
perpetual poverty."
A World Bank official spoke
anonymously: "Clearly the companies are the root of the problem.
They are taking advantage of the chaos. They exploit the poor. It's
normal. They are businessmen. It's a very small group of people
who get rich and the very large group stay poor. Because the government
is weak, it cannot take them on. Nothing much has changed since
King Leopold's day. All this started in colonial times. The government
continued the same old ways after independence. It's still a system
of colonialism."
Companies say they want
to take just a few trees, but “to take out just one valuable tree
requires roads to be built deep into the forest, which means hundreds
of other trees are cut or smashed down - often the very ones that
the communities use and need for medicines and foods. The companies
do not replant - the trees they cut down may be 100 years old -
and they leave the forest vulnerable to floods of hunters and other
farmers moving in to pull down more.”
The forest is gone forever,
and the companies take everything, “including the chance to develop",
as a local regrets.
Additionally, industrial
logging is also a major contributor to climate change. By churning
and compacting the soil logging releases stored gases, and quickens
its breakdown when it's exposed to oxygen. When logs are removed
from a forest, a high percentage of the carbon remains in the “waste”
--dead plants, unwanted trees, branches, stumps, roots-- that decomposes
and sometimes is set alight, releasing large quantities of CO2 to
the atmosphere. Logs are transported in trucks that drive thousands
of kilometres daily producing millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases.
Logs exported as roundwood or converted into planks or woodchips
are then shipped to markets abroad in huge tankers that add more
tonnes of carbon emissions.
In spite of all the above,
the same old colonial concessionary system “is now accepted by the
World Bank and western governments. It deprives millions of people
of their resources, encourages corruption, prevents development,
divides communities and contributes to climate change. The real
scandal today is that, for a few square metres of flooring, or a
kitchen door, or a bedpost, the second greatest forest in the world
is being destroyed, probably for ever”.(1)
Sources:
(1)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/sep/22/congo.environment
(2)
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/press-center/releases2/greenpeace-exposes-impacts-of
(3)
http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/carry-on-up-the-congo-2
