Rainforest by Tony Juniper

Author:Tony Juniper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile
Published: 2018-03-29T04:00:00+00:00

Logging and war

In 1990 I visited the dockside at Abidjan, Ivory Coast’s main commercial city and port, where I spoke to the workers loading logs for export to Europe. They told me that the country had no means to add value to the wood, for example by processing the logs into planks, furniture or window frames. This was why so little economic value was attached to the forests as a sustainable resource and why it was being cut, cleared and replaced with crops. The size of the logs on the quayside said a lot about how far the depletion of the forest had gone, with trees as as small as 30 centimetres in diameter piled up on the quays. The bigger and more valuable specimens were long gone.

Not only has the timber industry been a weak contributor to economic development in the region, but it has also been a factor in conflict. From the early 1990s to early 2000s timber revenues helped to fuel the conflict that raged in Sierra Leone. Charles Taylor, president of neighbouring Liberia, promoted unrest in order to gain control of Sierra Leone’s diamond mines. The long civil war that resulted was marked by appalling atrocities, including slavery, amputations and executions. As the world became increasingly aware of what was going on, there was eventually a ban on the trafficking of so-called ‘blood diamonds’.

While that didn’t completely stop the trade, it did significantly curtail it and it led Taylor to seek cash from other sources, including timber. Some of the money raised from the expansion of highly destructive logging operations was used to pay for the weapons that perpetuated the conflict in Sierra Leone and funded militias in Liberia. Mature logs appeared again on the Abidjan docks, having been illegally shipped out of Liberia. Internal conflict also caused major damage to the rainforests in Ivory Coast, where during the political crisis of 2010–11 two large protected areas were cleared. Illegal logging, conversion of forests to farming and mining were the causes, while intensive poaching added to the pressures on surviving wildlife.

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