Congo DR

The Itombwe Massif lies northwest of Lake Tanganyika (28º02′ - 29º04′ E, 2º41’ - 3º52′ S), stretching over a vast area of 1,600 km2 that encompasses the territories of Mwenga, Fizi and Uvira. It forms part of the Mitumba mountain range, with altitudes ranging from 60 metres above sea level in the western portion to 3,475 metres (Mount Mohi) in the north, with numerous peaks of 2,000 metres or higher, then abruptly dropping to 770 metres in the east, where it borders on Lake Tanganyika.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has the second largest tropical rainforest in the world, second only to the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. The country’s forests have recently drawn international attention, not only due to the challenges posed by climate change, but also because of the struggle being waged by Congolese civil society in general, and the environmental movement in particular, to stop the government from lifting its current moratorium on new logging concessions.

Born to independence in 1960, the Democratic Republic of Congo has lived since then amid fighting. Its former colonial ruler Belgium, as well as the US, the EU and international financial institutions such as the World Bank have been key hidden actors and interested parties in a scenario where ethnic rivalry has caught the world attention, while hiding economic struggles over the riches of a country which was the world’s largest cobalt exporter, the fourth biggest diamond exporter and ranked among the top ten world producers of uranium, copper, manganese and tin.

Front-page articles in mainstream newspapers and magazines have pictured Congo’s crisis along the “preconceived notion of the ‘savage,’ ‘depraved’ African”, said Maurice Carney and Carrie Crawford, from Friends of the Congo (FOTC), in their article “Casualties in the Scramble for Congo’s Resources” (at http://friendsofthecongo.org/commentaries/congo_casualties.php).

In April 2003, in WRM Bulletin Nº 69, we wrote an article on the Democratic Republic of Congo focused on the exploitation of columbium-tantalite (coltan, for short), widely used in cellular phones, laptop computers and video games, and how the mining of this ore has devastated forests like the Ituri forest, changing forever sites which used to sustain the Mbuti livelihoods and were the habitat of several animals like gorillas, okapis --a relative of the giraffe--, elephants and monkeys. It was a sad picture that coltan left in the forests of DRC, a scenario for war and depredation.

Between 1991 and 2001, Shell Renewables -a division of Shell Oil International- implemented a forestry operation based on the planting and harvesting of fast-growing cloned eucalyptus trees (see WRM Bulletin 46), with the aim of establishing a high-yield source of biomass for future energy generation.

Indigenous peoples living in the tropical rainforests of Central Africa are widely dispersed and identify their groups by a variety of names. Numbering a total of 300,000 to 500,000 people, those members of communities from several ethnic groups characterized by their small stature are identified under the generic name of “pygmies” (see WRM Bulletin Nº 119).

More and more the rush to use biomass as an alternative source of energy allegedly to reduce CO2 emissions is concealing the unsustainable consumption pattern that underlies global warming and climate change. Reduccionist approaches focus on solutions which create even greater harm. That is the case of a major European project which has enthusiastically identified industrial-scale eucalyptus plantations as an answer for so said less polluting steel manufacturing processes.

The Indigenous hunter-gatherers of the central African forests, so-called Pygmy peoples, consist of at least 15 distinct ethnolinguistic groups including the Gyéli, Kola, Baka, Aka, Bongo, Efe, Mbuti, western Twa, and eastern Twa living in ten central African countries: Angola, Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Central African Republic, Gabon, Republic of the Congo (Congo), Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Rwanda, and Burundi. Their estimated total number is from 300 000 to 500 000 people.

Everyone seems to agree on the need to protect the world’s remaining forests … while forests continue to disappear at the same alarming rate as usual. It is therefore important to distinguish between those who are truly committed to forest protection and those whose deeds and words go in opposite directions. For this purpose, most of the articles included in this issue of the WRM bulletin serve as good examples.

In the northeast of the Democratic Republic of the Congo lies the large, dense, mountainous Ituri rainforest, which spans approximately 70,000 square kilometers. It is an area rich in natural resources. Tropical timber is harvested (legally and illegally) on a large scale. Minerals such as gold and coltan (used in mobile phones) are exploited intensively after the trees have been cut down.

The Congo rainforests of central Africa are, after the Amazon, the second largest rainforest on Earth and a major biodiversity hotspot: Two-thirds of the forest lies in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) -- still divided by a vicious civil war fuelled by competition for control over natural resources, and that claimed 3.5 million lives. About 40 million people of DRC depend on the rainforests for their very survival.