DOSSIER Deforestation with just 40 cubic metres, equal to just ten large trees, confiscated in the first four months of 2019 (25,000 cubic metre of illegal timber was seized in 2018). The Chico Mendes Institute, responsible for such seizures, must now announce in advance the time and location of its raids on illegal loggers. The picture appears just as grim in central Africa. Rainforest in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) covers 93.2m ha, but 8.5m ha was lost between 2001 and 2017. Palmed Off, a report this summer by the Rainforest Foundation UK, concluded that palm oil and rubber plantations destroy large swathes of rainforests and disrespect human rights in the Congo basin. Plantations in the region are rarely subject to environmental impact assessments and undeclared and illegal logging is common. Indigenous communities have been displaced from lands they depend upon for hunting, fishing and farming. Within the Congo basin, the pressures differ geographically. On its periphery, in Cameroon, Gabon, the Republic of Congo and Equatorial Guinea, the forest is undergoing rapid change. Rates of forest loss also shot up dramatically in 2018 in Ghana (60 per cent) and Cote D’Ivoire (26 per cent), according to the WRI, primarily as a result of small-scale cocoa farming that was responding to a global surge in cocoa demand. ‘We’re increasingly seeing roads, pipelines, dams and railways – infrastructure that typically gets put into developing countries,’ says Counsell. ‘When you get these corridors of infrastructure, they bring secondary impacts, such as logging, palm oil and subsistence farming.’ Rubber plantations and mining activity are also increasingly intrusive in these areas. ‘Without extremely strict controls – which are beyond the capability of the governments there – it’s pretty much impossible to stop the cascade of deforestation that follows,’ he says.

Meanwhile, in the DRC, which accounts for two-thirds of the basin, the impact of large-scale logging concessions has been monitored closely with satellite imaging since 2004. At the last count the country had 10m ha of legal logging concessions. The logging is notionally sustainable and involves the harvesting of trees such as the sapele, sipo, azobe, wenge, afrormosia and iroko, which are popularly used in the west for decking, boardwalks and quays. A good deal of this is issued with the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) seal of approval.

‘Concessions involve selective harvesting of prime commercial timber,’ says Counsell. ‘The problem is, once the trees are gone, they’re gone. The companies that log the timber either move on or go bust. They leave behind them labourers and associated infrastructure such as roads. Small-scale subsistence farming and oil palm moves in and the already degraded forest gets completely degraded.’

Greenpeace is equally critical. ‘In the Congo Basin, we are witnessing widespread environmental and human rights violations,’ says Victorine CheThoener, head of the Congo Basin forests campaign at Greenpeace Africa. ‘It’s all a kleptocracy where governments and companies collude to loot our natural resources and ordinary people pay the price.’

Other pressures also apply to the region, says Hansen. ‘Congo has 100m people, they have to feed themselves. There’s really no state to offer them any

20 • Geographical

Increasing Primary Forest Loss in South American Countries

300k

(hec t are s)

los s fore st

Primar y

250k

200k

150k

100k

50k

Bolivia

Peru

Colombia

0

2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018

Fighting back in the DRC

n There is room for optimism in the DRC, says Simon Counsell of the Rainforest Foundation UK, thanks to a recent shift in attitudes towards ownership. ‘Unlike Latin America,’ he says, ‘there has historically been no possibility for local communities to gain security of tenure. Farmers are effectively squatters. That does not create conditions to look after the land sustainably.’

However, two laws have changed the ground rules and give Counsell hope. In 2016 the DRC government approved a law allowing communities to claim ownership of areas of land up to 50,000ha. ‘This is important, it allows them to protect the land against logging companies. It’s a positive opportunity that hasn’t emerged elsewhere in the region.’ So far, 450ha of land has been designated in this way to 40 community groups.

A separate presidential decree, passed in 2003, bans the expansion of any new logging concession. ‘It was widely breached during the first few years but it is now more or less holding steady,’ says Counsell. ‘Without this, the 10mha of logging concessions could have expanded to 70mha.’ Community groups are increasingly feeling confident about reporting breaches and illegal activity.