“If you look at the logs, you can see each one of them is tagged, which is why – after years of sanctions – the country is finally allowed to export timber again,” explains Jessica Donovan, Technical Director for CI-Liberia. “Logging concessions in Liberia are only granted now if there is a completely clear chain of custody, which means that by looking at the tags, buyers of this timber can trace it literally to the stump.”
Rivercess Road in Liberia is not the most comfortable road to travel down. After spending six hours in a Land Cruiser bumping and bouncing along this wide dirt track, past overgrown rubber and palm oil plantations and destitute roadside villages, it’s a relief to slow down and pull over to let the big truck heading in the opposite direction get past.
As Conservation International’s (CI) Media Director, I’m here with a French journalist looking at CI’s plans to help Liberia build a “green economy” with which the nation can achieve economic development without compromising its environment.
The truck heading towards us down the pothole-ridden red clay road is one of many identical juggernauts that have rumbled past us, and its cargo is really quite something to behold: five gigantic tropical trees, felled not long ago and now on their way to Europe. After another 20 minutes of swerving and bumping along the road we reach what both we and the loggers have come here for – Liberia’s rainforest.
READ MORE: Liberia, A Future in the Forests
It’s easy to look at these trucks and feel depressed – felling trees in a pristine forest like this seems like defiling a wonderland. But strangely, they tell a tale of hope – albeit one which needs urgent action to keep from turning to (another) Liberian tale of woe.
Decades of Conflict
To many people these days, Liberia is a byword for the problems faced by too many African nations. Despite holding two thirds of West Africa’s remaining tropical forest, significant natural resources – ranging from diamonds and gold to large deposits of iron and fertile agricultural land – and supporting a comparatively small population of just three million, Liberia exists in a state of grinding poverty and has been through two decades of civil conflict.
In 1990 a coup d’etat and the very public murder of the president (who had himself seized power in a murderous coup a decade earlier) started a chain of events and a brutal civil war. Throughout this time the nation’s forests were considered by the warring factions to be three things: a useful hiding place from your enemies, a source of food from bushmeat and a source of income from the valuable timber that could help buy more weapons. It was during this period that CI recognized that despite the dangers, the threats to this profoundly important area of forest were so great that we had to open a CI-Liberia office to work to protect it, and the communities and biodiversity that it supports.
IN DEPTH: The role of forests
Alex Peal, who set up CI’s operations in Liberia, recognized that when the war was over, the country would need its natural resources and biological diversity to rebuild itself. He refused to accept that the war should compromise Liberia’s long-term future.
Fear + Forests
The fact that Liberia still has such large swaths of standing forest is a testament less to conservation than to the chaos that engulfed the country during the civil war period. The difficulties in cutting down the nation’s forests at that time ranged from understanding who actually owned the forests – the logging rights to every available chunk of forest had been sold nearly three times over, meaning that the “owners” of the concessions were extremely unclear – to the sheer danger of trying to undertake logging in areas that were filled with heavily armed and volatile groups, to finding any workers who had not fled to the cities to escape the conflict.
In 2005 this dark period in the nation’s history finally came to a close with free and democratic elections that led to the nation choosing Africa’s first ever female president – Ellen Johnson Sirleaf.
But after 15 years of war, Liberia faced huge challenges in rebuilding and development. International trade sanctions had been introduced to prevent the nation’s timber and minerals from being exported to buy arms to fuel the conflict, profoundly limiting the nation’s opportunities for economic development. There was nearly 90 percent unemployment, no real infrastructure or bureaucracy and practically no viable law enforcement because there was no money to pay the police. The nation’s future looked almost as bleak as its past.
Rebuilding a Nation
But after five years of work, efforts to ensure viable long-term development in Liberia are starting to pay off, and the timber trucks are, surprisingly, evidence of this.
“If you look at the logs, you can see each one of them is tagged, which is why – after years of sanctions – the country is finally allowed to export timber again,” explains Jessica Donovan, Technical Director for CI-Liberia. “Logging concessions in Liberia are only granted now if there is a completely clear chain of custody, which means that by looking at the tags, buyers of this timber can trace it literally to the stump.”
And ensuring that logging, mining and the other extractive industries in Liberia are being undertaken legally is an important first step in rebuilding the nation. In the short-term, Liberia needs revenue to establish the structures and governance that will help to prevent over-exploitation of its forests and other resources, and to help it prevent a return to the terrible conflict that has blighted its recent history. For this reason, logging and the important revenue it generates is not going away soon. But CI is working hard to help Liberia protect its forests and generate revenue from standing trees rather than felled ones – in particular by working to deliver funding from efforts to tackle climate change by keeping forests standing, a mechanism known as REDD+ (Reduction of Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation.)
The big question now is: Can the country succeed in lifting its people out of poverty before its forests are lost?
Read the second part of this story at Building a Green Economy.