by Fred Pearce
But increasingly, the conservancies have caught the eyes of the country’s political elite. Leading military and Zanu-PF figures have decided to complete the transfer of the country’s land from white to black hands by grabbing for themselves a stake in what are, potentially at least, highly profitable “joint ventures.” And they don’t pay; they just turn up and insist on a slice of the action. Mafia style, say the rhino ranchers.
In 2009, Masvingo’s governor, Titus Maluleke, reportedly compelled safari operators within the Save Valley Conservancy to give 50 percent shares to local bigwigs as “indigenous partners.” Some of the press reports are contradictory, but it appears that Major General Engelbert Rugeje, the chief of staff of the Zimbabwe National Army, and the local MP Ailess Baloyi have a share in the Humani Safari Ranch. The country’s attorney general and Mugabe loyalist Johannes Tomana was alleged to have taken the Malingani ranch from its white owner, Kenned Hood. Hood said he had been “chased off” his property, which was also home to ten giraffes, sixty antelopes, thirty buffaloes, five lions, and two cheetahs. Paul Mangwana, former minister of empowerment, was said to have taken the Wanezi block ranch, while local senator and former governor Josiah Hungwe took Mwenezi ranch. WikiLeaks later published U.S. diplomatic cables repeating many of the assertions.
Early in 2011, the German government lodged a complaint alleging that one of its citizens had his land stolen. Willy Pabst was the owner of the Sango ranch on the Save Valley Conservancy. Berlin claimed that Maluleke had “made it quite clear that he wanted a partnership without paying for it.” The complaint said Pabst’s property was protected under the 1995 Bilateral Investment Promotion and Protection Agreement between the two countries. But Zanu-PF said it had recently revoked the agreement on the grounds that “no foreigner should be allowed to own rural agricultural land in Zimbabwe.”
Zimbabwe’s parks director, Vitalis Chadenga, called these conservancy grabs the “unfinished business of the land reform program.” But there was little sign that the ranches were being given to smallholders. Conservationists said that the new bosses were keen to sell hunting licenses to safari companies from South Africa and Botswana.
In the light of all this, it may be no surprise that some white Zimbabwean farmers have been in search of new pastures. They remain less popular than the Boer trekkers, but their unquestioned farming skills are in demand. In 2005, a group of them were welcomed in Nigeria. There, near the town of Shonga on the banks of the River Niger, they lead what Michael Mortimore, a British geographer who has visited them, calls “a somewhat reclusive existence in the bush.” It is more than an hour to the nearest hairdresser’s, one of their wives complained when a BBC film crew found them.
The group of thirteen farmers were each given twenty-five-year leases on 2,500 acres by the governor of Kwara state. The land was not empty. The governor confiscated it from the inhabitants of fifteen surrounding villages. He said it had not been permanently cultivated. True. But in what is a familiar African story, the villagers said it was vital for their herding and shifting cultivation. They seem to have been assuaged, however, by compensation payments, electricity lines, and asphalt on their roads. Meanwhile the Zimbabwean settlers have received assistance in the form of a chicken abattoir, and milk- and cassava-processing facilities.
Mortimore says the results have been “spectacular.” But he wonders whether this white Zimbabwean enclave in the middle of Nigeria will, as the state governor hopes, catalyze a new form of farming across the state. The farmers told the BBC they have not yet made a profit, and cannot find banks willing to invest in their farms. One rice farmer, John Sawyer, said that despite the state subsidies, he faced bankruptcy. The scheme did not look like a model for feeding Africa.
Part 6: The Last Enclosure
Chapter 24. Central Africa: Laws of the Jungle
Vincent Bollore is a friend of France’s President Sarkozy, and a longtime neighbor of Sarkozy’s wife Carla Bruni in the private Parisian mansion of Villa Montmorency. He has a personal fortune estimated at $2 billion. His Bollore Group is as well connected in the former French colonies of central Africa as it is in the salons of Paris. For that is where its wealth comes from. In the region’s capitals, Vincent Bollore is nicknamed the “last emperor.”
Bollore is especially big in Cameroon, where his group runs the main port at Douala and the country’s railway links to its neighbors, has trucking companies and pipelines, grows oil palm, sells cigarettes, and taps rubber. And there are the timber concessions. In Cameroon, Bollore owns a third of the logging rights.
His main rival in the convoluted forest politics of Cameroon is Hazim Hazim Chehade, Lebanon’s long-standing consul to the country. Since the 1990s, Hazim has controlled some 370,000 acres of Cameroon forest. His company, Société Forestière Hazim, has been accused repeatedly by government agencies and Greenpeace of illegal logging, both within his own concessions and in those of others. The colorful but slightly sinister presence of Bollore and Hazim in the country seems straight out of a Graham Greene novel. But they are far from alone.
In the steamy forests of central Africa, foreign loggers control forty times more land than local forest communities. Another French forester, Francis Rougier, oversees his family’s two and a half million acres in Cameroon and Gabon. That’s an area the size of Northern Ireland. Much of Rougier’s land in Gabon is accessed by the Trans-Gabon railway. Built in the 1980s, it runs through 435 miles of jungle from the coastal capital of Libreville deep into the interior to Franceville, Rougier’s company town. Like the Bollores, the Rougiers are close to Sarkozy. Before him, they were intimates of former presidents François Mitterrand and Jacques Chirac. In early 2010, Sarkozy visited Franceville with Rougier and Gabon’s president Ali Bongo. You have to pinch yourself to realize that the colonial era is over.
Hans Joachim Danzer heads the Swiss-German Danzer family. They have specialized for half a century in producing veneers from hardwoods logged in Congo-Brazzaville and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Their combined concessions in the two Congos cover 8 million acres, an area approaching the size of Switzerland.
DRC, the former Zaire, is Africa’s second-largest country and the golden prize for loggers. Its huge swathes of jungle are the heart of the last great rain forest on Earth. Those forests have been largely spared from foreign loggers through recent decades of war and chaos. The roads have returned to bush and the chainsaws have fallen silent. Only Zimbabwe’s military entered. A decade ago, its soldiers did a deal with Kinshasa and set up armed logging camps in what was for a while one of the world’s largest and most militarized logging concessions. The generals reportedly harvested from 80 million acres of forests around the mining region of Katanga in the south of the country.
As the country opens up, the Zimbabweans are gone, but the Danzers are still there. So is an American dynasty from Philadelphia. Daniel Blattner’s family has for fifty years logged a concession of more than 2 million acres around Kisangani, the trading town above Stanley Falls that was the model for Kurtz’s “inner station” in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
The Danzers and Rougiers, Bollores and Blattners, are the old guard in central Africa, family firms whose logging concessions have persisted barely noticed by the outside world for half a century. But today many concessions are changing hands, and the pace of logging is increasing. In 2007, another French family company, Thanry, sold its 1.5 million-acre concession in Gabon to the Swiss group Precious Woods, a neighbor of the Danzers in the tiny Swiss canton of Zug. The same year, Precious Woods also bought a minority interest in Liechtenstein-based Nordsudtimber, which controls four forestry companies in DRC. Precious said it was “laying the foundation” for a greater presence there.
Mostly, however, the concession buyers are from the east now. Thanry was the largest logging company in Cameroon, with more than 1.7 million acres of logging rights until selling out a decade ago to the Ho
ng-Kong-based Vicwood Group, which specializes in plywoods. Vicwood also operates in Congo-Brazzaville and the Central African Republic. It has a total of 17 million acres of forest awaiting its chainsaws.
Keeping up with who owns the Congolaise Industrielle des Bois (CIB) concession in Congo-Brazzaville is hard. CIB is the country’s biggest employer; its holdings comprise 3.5 million acres in the country’s north highlands. Its tenants include many pygmy hunters who in the past have been forced to become its laborers. Originally CIB was French owned. It was taken over by the German Stoll family in 1968. The Stolls sold it in 2006 to the Danish Dalhoff Larsen Horneman Group (DLH), a low-profile company that had become briefly notorious for receiving timber shipped by the arms traders who ran Liberia’s forests during its long civil war. After timber prices collapsed during the global financial crisis of 2008, DLH sold to the fast-growing palm-oil-to-timber conglomerate Olam International in January 2011.
Olam is Singapore-based, but has its origins twenty years ago as a cotton-growing offshoot of the Kewalram Chanrai Group set up by Indians in Nigeria. In January 2011, Olam bought another DLH concession in Gabon, giving it a total of 4 million acres of hardwood forests in the two countries. Rimbunan Hijau, the giant Malaysian conglomerate owned by Tiong Hiew King, also has 1.2 million acres in Gabon.
Meanwhile, the French-German Isoroy group sold a 1.4-million-acre concession in Gabon to China’s Honest Timber in 2009. Honest Timber is one of fifteen Chinese private logging companies operating in Gabon, with concessions covering 6.7 million acres, a tenth of the country. Annually, they ship around a million tons of the highly prized Gabonese okoume timber to Chinese plywood manufacturers. For the past decade, Gabon has been by far the largest African supplier of logs to China. Collectively, the Chinese concession holders are probably the country’s largest employer.
China’s unusual success in wooing the country is due to one man, Jean Ping, the son of a Chinese trader and a Gabonese clan chief’s daughter. As the country’s minister of foreign affairs in 1987, Ping stopped off during an official trip to China to invite a long-lost nephew and timber trader named Xu Gongde to set up a logging company in Gabon. He came and brought many after him.
As the logging concessions go east, a new generation of Western forest entrepreneurs is moving in. They want to make money from conserving carbon, either by planting new forests or by “protecting” natural forests. Under international climate treaties, such initiatives can earn them carbon credits worth between ten and twenty dollars per ton.
This is good news for the atmosphere, of course. But the danger is that, unless properly done, it could be bad news for the people whose land is taken. And the companies, whether their motives are altruistic or strictly commercial, can get caught in the middle. Take the case of the New Forests Company, a London-based company with leases on 67,000 acres for planting forests in Uganda, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Rwanda. In Uganda, it found itself taking over land cleared of people by the national government’s Forestry Authority. The people and their farms were to be replaced with pine and eucalyptus trees. The company hoped to earn up to $2 million a year by selling the carbon credits under the Kyoto Protocol.
Oxfam, the aid charity, calculated that some twenty thousand people were evicted to make way for the company in Uganda, mostly in 2010. Nobody much disagrees with that, but the government and New Forests insist the people were squatters who had no right to be there. That might legally be true, but some of the people interviewed by Oxfam said their grandfathers had been given the land in return for fighting for the British Army in Burma and Egypt during the Second World War. And the manner of their departures was hardly fitting. The company said it had been assured that all the evictions were “legal, voluntary and peaceful.” But, confronted with evidence that villagers were forcibly moved and their homes were torched, government officials told the New York Times this may have happened. Surely, whatever the law may say, they deserved better?
The Kyoto Protocol gives carbon credits for planting trees. Its successor will give credits simply for protecting natural forests threatened with destruction. The UN’s international climate talks on cutting industrial carbon emissions may have stalled since the 2009 debacle in Copenhagen, but progress has been faster on a global deal known as Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, or REDD. It aims to pay the forests’ owners to keep that carbon out of the atmosphere by protecting their trees. The cash will come from rich-world power companies and industrialists whose emissions are limited by law at home. Even without a UN deal, that includes most large companies in Europe, some U.S. states, Australia, and elsewhere.
Conservationists see REDD as a way to unlock billions of dollars for both fighting climate change and saving the rain forests. No wonder they are excited. But it raises tricky questions. Who exactly owns the forests? And where will the money end up? Will the beneficiaries be the forest dwellers, or governments, or a new generation of corporate carbon concession holders?
In Brazil, there are signs that forest dwellers can use their hard-won land rights to harvest international cash. In part of the Juma forest reserve in Amazonia, the state government has given every household a credit card account into which it deposits fifty dollars each month as a payment in return for keeping the forest intact. The Surui tribe in Rondonia believes it can sell the carbon content of the trees in its own reserve, without the government acting as an intermediary.
But the danger is that, with governments and corporations dominating negotiations on the rules for REDD, most of the compensation will end up in national treasuries, or with corporate concession holders and the consultants who will advise them on how to meet REDD’s complex rules. One recent analysis found that consultancy services and other external expertise for a single REDD pilot project typically cost around $30 million, almost ten times that originally envisaged. In Indonesia, which has become a REDD pioneer and expects to reap billions of dollars a year from carbon conservation, the first eleven forest carbon projects set up by the government gave forest communities only a fifth of the revenue.
As in the early days of the biofuels boom, carbon cowboys are on the lookout for opportunities to make a quick killing out of REDD.
In 2009, something went badly wrong in Papua New Guinea, a country already well known for its duplicitous and sometimes corrupt treatment of forest dwellers. An agent for the Australian carbon trading company Carbon Planet named Kirk Roberts had been traveling to forest communities with genuine-looking carbon-offset certificates, purporting to be from REDD. Their authenticity seemed real since they were signed by the head of PNG’s Office of Climate Change, Theo Yasause. Roberts had done deals with forty communities, exchanging the certificates for the rights to sell carbon offsets from their forests.
But Adelaide-based Carbon Planet director Dave Sag has since admitted the certificates were worthless “props.” They have no value to the villagers. But if REDD becomes a reality, then the carbon rights that the company bought with the “certificates” could one day become extremely valuable. Both Yasause and Roberts, a disqualified Australian horse trainer who once ran a cock-fighting business in the Philippines, left their posts under a cloud shortly afterwards. In 2011, Yasause was charged with the murder of a former national rugby league star named Aquila Emil after a shooting incident outside a Port Moresby nightclub.
REDD’s requirement to protect threatened forests could become a new reason to throw forest dwellers out of their forests. The argument will be that natives are destroying their forests, and that outsiders must be brought in to protect them—and harvest the carbon credits from doing so. Shifting cultivators are an obvious target. Conventional forest surveys blame them for destroying large areas. But usually their small forest clearings swiftly regenerate. Recent research suggests that, far from being jungle villains and deforesters, most forest communities are admirable custodians of their land. It is outsiders who cause the problem
s.
In a detailed study across the tropics, Ashwini Chhatre of the University of Illinois and Arun Agarwal of the University of Michigan found that forests under the control of local inhabitants usually stored more carbon than government-owned forests. For all their green talk, most governments licensed destructive logging, or simply fail to protect the forests from invaders. But locals had a long-term interest in ensuring their forests’ survival, and most did just that. “We can increase carbon sequestration simply by transferring ownership of forests from governments to communities,” they concluded.
But out in the rain forests, what is happening is mostly the opposite. “There is a real fear that REDD will lead to dispossession of local communities [as] governments stake their claim on emissions reduction credits,” said Chhatre and Agarwal. “Existing REDD action plans from the UN and World Bank do not identify communities as relevant agents for managing forests to sequester carbon. Instead they focus on national governments, replicating long histories of centralized control over forests.”
Frances Seymour, director of the Center for International Forestry Research in Bogor, Indonesia, says this research reflects the findings of her own researchers. “Poor people are usually too poor to do much damage.” Machetes rarely chop as much timber as chainsaws. Rather than snatching the forests from their inhabitants in a bogus effort to “save” them, the world needs to tackle the real forest destroyers, she says. That means mothballing pulp mills in Sumatra, and rejecting proposals to convert forests into oil palm plantations.
Will governments do that? She doubts it. They want to harvest carbon credits while continuing to harvest the timber and clear the land for commercial agriculture. To achieve that, they will perpetuate the mythology of forest-destroying peasants. They will continue to throw forest dwellers off their land, and will soon be cashing in REDD checks for “protecting” the forests. The losers will be the forests’ traditional inhabitants—and the forests themselves. It is the most pernicious form of green grab yet.
