DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO: Illegal logging destroys Congo Rainforest

Greenpeace said on Wednesday (April 11) that international logging firms working in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) have destroyed the forest and are causing social misery. According to Greenpeace, Congo's forest covers an area of about 700.000 square kilometres, with parts in Cameroon, Republic Democratic of Congo and Congo Brazzaville, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea and Gabon. In a report released on Wednesday, Greenpeace said that the World Bank "maintains the illusion that logging companies will be largely beneficial to local communities." "With regard to the work of the World Bank, we are very much focused on poverty reduction, which is also linked to our commitment to the sustainable development, and our interest in developing the responsible economic growth. We see all three of them tied together," said Stephen Lintner, Senior Technical Advisor, The World Bank. The Congo Basin rainforest is the world's second largest tropical forest after the Amazon, and one of the planet's essential defences against global climate change. Greenpeace says some local communities including pygmies depend on the forest's natural resources for subsistence and its various animal species must be protected. The gorilla, the chimpanzee and the bonobo monkey all depend on the rainforest for their survival. In May 2002, the World Bank imposed a moratorium on the allocation of new logging titles and the renewal or extension of existing ones. And while new forest areas have been protected since then, Greenpeace says the transitional DRC government had signed 107 new contracts with logging companies covering more than 15 million hectares of forest by April 2006. Villagers of Lua Ipeke in the Bandundu region say they have seen virtually none of the benefits promised in the contracts. Local communities have received gifts such as bags of sugar or crates of beer in exchange for logging in their particular area. "It was half a crate of beer and a bag of sugar, 5 kilograms of sugar and it had to be divided by two. Six bags of soap and what's more, a bag of salt, also to be divided by two. That was it," said a landowner. Under the World Bank reforms, the forest law of 2002 stipulates that 40 percent of Forest Area Taxes from logging operations are reinvested locally. But critics say that in practice, all the taxes collected since 2003 have simply disappeared. Pierre Methot, who leads the international team observing this legal review, says many titles are illegal and have been granted in breach of the moratorium. "For the past years, many titles have been given in contradiction to the moratorium on forest titles, and on the other hand, there were forest titles which didn't respect the regulations that were in effect at that time," said Pierre Methot, Team Leader, Forest Landscapes Initiative, World Resource Institute. Local authorities say their investigations on logging companies are often marred by the companies themselves, as well as the lack of transportation to monitor them. "The reason I'd like to do statistics (of logging companies) is to compare what is written on the registered books and what's really taken away. This is why they don't allow me to do it," said a local environment officer. Greenpeace says the World Bank reforms will do little to improve the plight of communities dependent on the forest and its biodiversity. Elsewhere in Brussels, activists reenacted what Greenpeace said was happening in the Congo's forest, with loggers pushing locals to cut the tree down. ''What we are doing here is trying to represent what's happening in Congo, where contracts are being signed in Kinshasa but where locals are not concerned, are not being consulted. And when companies arrive on site, what happens is that they compensate local communities by offering them presents that are worthless compare to the value of the trees being exploited,'' Greenpeace Forest campaigner Philippe Cornelis described. The environmentalists say the DRC government lacks even the basic infrastructure to regulate and control the logging industry. Without urgent support from international donors, the forests of the DRC will be cut down, floated down river and exported for sale.

ITN Source | April 12, 2007

Tags:. .republic. .regulations. .regulate. .pierre. .observing