IN AFRICA, THERE IS AN AREA AS LARGE as Western Europe that remains terra incognita on most maps. Depicted as a uniform mass of green, the rainforests of equatorial Africa cover Southern Cameroon, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Congo and much of Zaire. They spill north into the Central African Republic and south into Angola. There is a powerful myth that these rainforests and their inhabitants, in sharp contrast to those in other areas of the world, remain isolated and secure. As a result, the destruction of Africa's equivalent of the Amazon continues to escape the attention of the Western world.
Africa's forests are presently home to about 150,000 so-called "Pygmy" people: the Baka of Cameroon, the Aka of the Central African Republic and the Mbuti and Twa of Zaire, as well as hundreds of thousands of forest-dwelling Bantu farming villagers. The hunting and gathering Pygmy groups have long lived in a relationship of exchange with these farmers, trading forest products such as meat and honey, and some labor service, in return for produce.
Zaire contains half of Africa's and 13 percent of the world's rainforest - an acreage surpassed only by Brazil. Of Zaire's 11,000 different plants, one third are unique to the region. The country has more mammal, bird, primate, amphibian and fish species than any other African nation.
Yet, as elsewhere in Africa, the forests of Zaire are under siege. Siforzal, a subsidiary of the Germany company Danzer, in which Zaire's President Mobutu has a large interest, controls a vast logging concession that stretches for 250 kilometers along the banks of the Zaire river at Lokoko, an area in the Northern region which contains over two million acres of some of the most isolated rainforest in the continent. Lokoko is one of the world's major logging concessions and the largest in Africa.
Danzer began logging in Lokoko seven years ago. The company built a road to the forest, and expands it by 120 kilometers each year. In order to ensure that washed-out roads do not hinder logging, these roads are the best-maintained in Zaire.
Danzer fells four hardwood species in Lokoko. The occurrence of these valuable woods is extremely low, only one tree to eight acres. But, because each trunk brings in $5,000 to $10,000 in Europe or the United States, the company's logging operations are still highly profitable.
Once the trees are felled, huge "skidders," or tractors, drag each tree through the forest to loading areas the size of six football fields. From there, Danzer's Mercedes trucks haul about 60 trees daily over the 90 kilometer journey to the banks of the Zaire river, and an awaiting fleet of 40 tug boats, each of which can pull a massive 1,500 meter raft of logs. So begins the 2,000 kilometer journey downstream to the ports on the Atlantic coast.
Under Zairean law, Danzer is required to manage the Lokoko concession on a 25- year cycle, returning to re-cut when the forest has regenerated. However, given that even the fastest growing hardwoods take 100 years to grow, the devastation caused by the initial logging is so great that there is no incentive to return. Up-river, an area the size of Lokoko has been abandoned now that all its valuable timber has been cut. "The company always says it will come back and make a second cut, but in fact it never does," says a young French worker for Siforzal.
Grab mentality
"It's a grab mentality. Right now, there's plenty of stuff to mine. The logging companies haven't been confronted by the reality that they have to go back over and retake," says Jim Pearce, an ecologist who has lived for many years in Zaire. "The concessions are still moving out; a lot are not being worked but are on the books, waiting until the right moment to mine or to sell. There is nothing in the foreseeable future to prevent them from mining these forests, and then they'll be confronted with the second cut. At that point we'll see much greater degradation."
Sometimes there is no forest to which to return. In the wake of the company's departure, colonists flood into the newly accessible forest areas, pouring in through the route by which the logs were extracted. Even as a concession is being logged, shanty- towns spring up among the huge tree-stumps. These house Danzer's own employees - 200 at Lokoko - or farmers who come to grow food for the workers.
The farmers do not stay long in any one spot. Because rainforests' nutrients are held in the living mass of vegetation, not in the soil, they yield one bumper harvest but quickly deteriorate. After two or three harvests, the farmers clear a new patch of forest for farmland.
Danzer officials are eager to point out the advantages that logging brings to the region, arguing that the company not only employs local people to work the logging operations, but builds schools and medical centers. Yet such benefits are short-lived, lasting only as long as a concession's timber, and the wages are derisory: $6 per week for a Zairean at Lokoko. The "reforestation tax" that Danzer pays is negligible: less than one dollar per acre. Robert Grantham of the African Environment Network has calculated that for annual exports worth more than $16 million in profits, Danzer pays a mere $10,000 in taxes to Zaire.
Lokoko is but one of 10 concessions owned by Danzer in Zaire. At over 2 million acres, it is currently the company's largest operation, but forests of even greater size await future exploitation. By 1988, Danzer held sway over a staggering 22 million acres of forest, or almost 10 percent of Zaire's forest area.
A rash of European companies
Danzer is only one of 55 companies now logging in Zaire. Across the river to the south of Lokoko, a Belgian company is logging an area of similar size at Monbongo. The Italian company La Forestiere, the German company Stabach and Danzer all have operations to the east of Lokoko. From the Atlantic coast to the equator, few areas remain untouched. Yet these operations represent only the beginning of the scramble for timber.
Ninety percent of Zaire's forest has been parceled out, mostly to the powerful elite - President Mobutu and his political and military allies. Although only about 25 percent has actually been worked so far, loggers and developers envision great increases in logging. Jacques Pierre, a senior French Canadian forester in Zaire, says the annual rate of logging should increase 20-fold by the year 2000. By then, Zaire's annual production would be running at 10 million cubic meters. Pierre claims, "This is the sustainable level for Zaire."
The situation in Zaire is typical of that in the rest of Central Africa. Ninety percent of the Central African Republic's rainforest has already been allocated to European companies, and European aid agencies are funding new roads to speed up the timber extraction.
It is not easy to isolate a single culprit in the logging of the African forests. Along with giants like Danzer, a bewildering array of large and small logging companies hold concessions. They are German, Dutch, French, Italian and Spanish, often with local subsidiaries. Once cut, the logs find their way to an equally large number of timber importing firms.
Most Central African governments do not enforce timber-cutting regulations designed to protect the forest. A study team sent to Cameroon by the World Wildlife Fund reported, for example: "Companies get around [the regulations] in a variety of ways. Trees actually too small to fit the regulations are declared legal; others are declared smaller than they really are and yield a lower tax. Some are cut and found to be unmarketable because of flaws; these never get recorded in the books. Most egregious of all is the practice of declaring a second cut, and then felling trees in an entirely different area. No one fears getting caught - there are not enough foresters to do the inspection needed. In short, the logging companies do what they have to in order to increase their profit margin."
The forest dwellers' position
In recent years, forest dwellers in many parts of the world have established links with influential environmental organizations, gaining political skills and the attention of the media in industrialized countries. Yet Africa's forest people have only recently begun to actively oppose the logging companies and to take their case to the world at large. The influx of loggers, who bring jobs and trade, seems to have been accepted by the farming villagers, who may not fully appreciate logging's long-term costs.
The Pygmy peoples, who have a long tradition of avoiding confrontation, have not as yet mounted any overt resistance to the assault on their land. In the past they escaped interference by retreating further into the forest, but now the forest itself is rapidly disappearing.
Logging is threatening forest peoples' ways of life. In Zaire, an elderly Baka man says, "We do not kill so much game now as we used to. We wonder what our children will eat in the future." A Baka woman agrees, "In the past we made molongo [family treks of several months into the forest] but we no longer do it. We killed a lot of meat with spears. Today there are not many true Baka who kill a lot of meat. We kill a little, a little." And many of the Aka Pygmies of Zaire who have been drawn out of the forest to work in the logging camps have fallen prey to disease and alcoholism.
In Rwanda, the forests inhabited by the Twa are almost entirely gone. Some of the Rwanda Twa have only recently been deprived of their hunting and gathering existence by the deforestation of the country, while others have for generations lived outside the forest as an oppressed minority forced to eke out an existence by begging and squatting.
Newly forming international links with indigenous rights groups and environmental organizations are beginning to create some countervailing force to the pressure of the logging companies, however. For example, when Survival International recently protested a $15 million road-building project in Zaire that would have cut through Pygmy land, government officials retreated rapidly from the scheme.
Additionally, some Central African groups are beginning to make connections with indigenous movements elsewhere. At the 1991 UN session of the Working Group on Indigenous Peoples in Geneva, Bola Bobonda of the Twa Pygmies of Zaire spoke on behalf of his people. "I have come," he said, "to ask for your help in finding solutions so that the Batwa people can live in dignity." He said that the Twa wanted recognition as a people, the right to education and the demarcation of one or more legally recognized territories of their own, where they can live according to their traditions and by their own decisions.
At the Rio Earth Summit in June, representatives of the Association for the Promotion of Batwa, Francois Munyeshull and Charles Owiragiye, took part in the Indigenous Peoples Conference. "There is a clinic for the mountain gorillas," said Owiragiye wryly, "but none for us." The Association is the first Central Africa forest dwellers' organization which is run by the Pygmy people themselves.
For the Western public, the idea of forest-dwelling "little people" has a strong sentimental attraction, as many books and films illustrate. Yet few outsiders are conscious of the real threat under which these people live. All evidence suggests that the 1990s will be a decade of destruction in equatorial Africa. Without international public intervention to halt the export of Africa's tropical timber to the industrialized countries, industry will continue to exploit Central Africa, and the assault on both the forest and the forest peoples will intensify.
The 600-kilometer highway, which would cross southeast Cameroon, was first proposed in 1987, but the international outcry provoked by public exposure of the scheme led to its collapse. The World Bank refused to fund it, and in 1990 the plan was put on hold. The government subsequently sought new funding from the African Development Bank, but it too refused to support the project.
The financial incentive for the Cameroon government to exploit its huge timber reserve remained, however. Now it appears that Cameroon's president Paul Biya has, in the words of a writer for the Japanese daily newspaper Yomiuri, "decided to do what most of the world's poorer nations do when they need ready cash, and approached [Japan's] Foreign Affairs Ministry."
Korinna Horta of the Environmental Defense Fund says that the road opens up the area to logging and represents "a direct threat to the Baka pygmies of Southeast Cameroon." Pygmies in Cameroon who have already been forced into dangerous, low- wage work at logging sites are suffering from alcoholism and disease in the camps, Horta says, and some Pygmy women in lumber towns have been forced to turn to prostitution as a means of making a living.
Horta says that communication among the Pygmies in Cameroon is strong, and word about the effects of logging on the forest dwellers' way of life has spread. Those Pygmies who have not yet felt the impact of logging are "very scared" of what the new road will bring. "They know what it means," Horta says.
The World Bank, meanwhile, is proposing a $25 million loan to Cameroon under its new Global Environment Facility "to protect areas of tropical forest including [those] in which the Baka live." But, as Horta points out, "No amount of World Bank funding can halt the devastation of the forest and its people if the road goes ahead."n
- V.L. & D. L.