Raided forests leave villages empty as the wood trucks roll
Almost half of Cameroon is covered by tropical forests, but it is disappearing fast. According to Global Forest Watch, the country lost close to one million hectares of humid primary forest between 2002 and 2023, representing about half of its total tree cover loss in the same period. The devastation is a key focus of several international partnerships with Cameroon, including a European Commission support programme for “development through sustainable and resilient territorial development in the face of climate change” and the EU Voluntary Partnership Agreement on legal timber trade and forest governance.
So far, however, despite being paired with internal laws and regulations, these initiatives have not been effective, as a forest extraction mafia continues to operate with complicity from within Cameroon’s state apparatus.
“They are taking away our lives”
Manyu and Akak villages, 300 and 250 kilometres respectively inland from the southwestern port city of Douala, once hosted self-sufficient populations who lived off hunting, fishing, and farming in the forest. Now, “as they are taking away our timber, they are taking away our lives”, says an elderly woman who still resides in Manyu in one of the few remaining communities where people haven’t all fled to the cities. “It is like the cut trees reflect wounds that bleed away the blood from our veins”. She recounts how her community once “got our protein from the animals we killed, some of which we also sold to raise money for the education of our children. The forest climate helped the healthy growth of our crops on the farms. We used the tree bark and leaves to cure ourselves when we were sick since we could not always afford the money to go to the white man’s hospitals. Now that the forests are disappearing, we too are disappearing quicker and quicker”.
Cameroon deforestation rate
Nobody left
A local community head in Akak recounts how many people have actually disappeared from the area. “Our clan once had fourteen villages. Right now there are only ten villages left because all the people in four of the villages died one by one until there was nobody left. In the case of Ekpantang village, the two villagers who remained were forced to move out, while in the case of Ndebokem, the one man who was left had to move to Akak.”
Retired teacher Arrey Godwin, from nearby Bakogo, explained that young men, who once made their livelihoods through hunting, farming, and fishing, have long since migrated to the cities. “With the animals disappearing along with the forests, the hunters had nothing left to hunt so they left. The farmers later followed and now it is the fishermen who are leaving because catches have dropped and for the little they catch there are no people to buy.”
The new arrivals are very skinny
In the larger coastal districts further south, around Limbe to the west of Douala, residents are deeply unsettled by the arrival of ‘hungry skeleton’ people emerging from the forest, one inhabitant of Limbe says. “They are often relatives, so we host them, it’s just that people here are also poor. But it’s clear that they are in a bad state. You hear neighbours talking between them about the new arrivals, who are invariably very skinny. You can see that these are the ones from the forest.”
Loss to the state
According to the NGO Data Cameroon, the country’s ports ship out timber at a rate of 2 million tonnes per year. Data Cameroon did not specify how much of this could have been illegal, but in 2021, a report by the National Agency for Financial Investigation, ANIF in its French acronym, stated that illegal logging and wildlife exploitation results in a loss of revenue of about 33 billion CFA francs, close to 54 million dollars, each year to the state of Cameroon. This amounts to almost a third of the total annual forest sector turnover in Cameroon, estimated by Data Cameroon at over 160 million US$.
The cases don’t go to court
Officially, timber extraction is regulated in Cameroon, both in external trade agreements such as with the EU, and internally. Also officially, the government takes its job of preventing and punishing illegal logging seriously. In its quarterly ‘infractions summaries’ the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife has denounced the existence of “illegal traffic rings” comprising front “companies, lawyers’ offices and trucking businesses” and the National Anti-Corruption Commission (CONAC) has reported on dozens of senior officials in the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife, including heads of forestry posts, engineers, former controllers of the national or regional brigades of the ministry involved in bribery, falsifying logs and other crimes. CONAC’s 2023 report, the most recent it made public, lists 13 public officials as having been fined or suspended by the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife for such infractions.
However, ZAM could find no record of any such cases going to court. “No court cases have been held in recent years, you can’t even get details of the fines or whether the disciplined officials are back again,” says a source close to environmental NGOs in the southwestern region. According to a recent investigation by InfoCongo and Le Monde, who analysed six editions of the “infractions summaries” published by the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife between 2015 and 2021, four formal logging companies had been sanctioned ranging from fines to formal notices and even temporary suspension of their forestry license but continued to be allocated plots of land for logging by the ministry. “No one talks about it,” the aforementioned source said. “There is an omerta in the forestry sector in Cameroon.”
Phone calls and envelopes
One timber truck driver ZAM spoke to explained that he frequently passes through checkpoints carrying illegal timber without being stopped. “My boss, who is a big businessman, ensures that. Before I arrive at such a checkpoint, he has already phoned the officials who are there and given them instructions not to bother me. Of course, they receive periodic envelopes from my boss. These envelopes range from 1,000,000 FCFA to 10,000,000 FCFA (US$ 1,600 to US$ 16,000) depending on the length of time they cover.”
Corrupt officials were weeded out in the past
It wasn’t always like this. Up to the mid-nineties, a veteran forestry officer recalls, that ministerial departments and civil society stakeholders involved in the forestry sector had control brigades stationed at such checkpoints, which checked that no wood was taken out without the explicit license to do so. “At the end of certain periods, reports from all checkpoints were compared, and if the number of controls undertaken by the brigade of a certain ministry fell short of the number presented by another brigade, the brigade with the lesser number of controls was held accountable. In this way, corrupt operatives were easily detected and weeded out.”
But as Cameroon’s one-party-system with one supreme ruler, Paul Biya, consolidated an elite political class with almost automatic access to state resources (the NGO Good Governance Africa explained Biya’s “centralised personal leadership”, with “widespread corruption and weak institutions”, these checks and balances were done away with. “Today, those who are supposed to enforce the law against deforestation are the ones who are involved in the most blatant acts of degradation”, the retired forestry officer said. “Ministers, directors, parliamentarians, tax inspectors, mayors, colonels and police commissioners are connected to control posts to coordinate the massive illegal logging that goes on now. They oil the paths of the trucks across regions. Once drivers transporting illegal timber are stopped at checkpoints, they only need to make a phone call to their bosses, who in turn call the controllers at the checkpoints and order them to let the truck go. Our presence in most checkpoints is just window dressing.”
The funds are a mystery
Asking around among environmental NGOs and forestry department officials, none could say what had happened or was happening with international funds allocated to Cameroon to combat deforestation and climate change. Some were aware that, between 2010 and 2014, Cameroon had been earmarked to receive US$10,66 million as part of a United Nations REDD+ ('Reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries”) partnership but had no knowledge of what had happened with the money. A recent study by the platform Forest News indicates that the REDD+ “leadership” of Cameroons’ Environment Ministry MINEPDED could not “pass orders” to other departments and that that had “defeated the integration of REDD+” in state structures. ZAM was unable to trace the funds involved in the different current EU partnership agreements, or the use made of these.
See all stories in this investigation:
Africa’s political elites’ deforestation scam | Main story
Nigeria and Uganda | Western “green” funds used for “merrymaking with ministers” while forests are cut down
Mozambique | The destruction of Quirimbas Park
Ghana | Despite much ‘green’ planning and funding, the political elite still mines the forests
Malawi | How “thieves” in government are ravaging Mulanje mountain
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