Is Africa back from FOCAC with new focus? (2)

THE FLAMBOYANT JAMBOREE of visits to China by all African countries except one has ended and all the visiting presidents and heads of governments on such visits are presumably back in their home countries where they hold sway. What types of bargains those attendees made with China will be of great interest for their anticipated tremendous impacts back home. Whether or not they went with their thinking caps on or simply left them behind will be of interest as the outcomes of the deals they struck in China become obvious. The glamorous and elitist Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), it is hoped, was not another platform for trading away Africa to China on its home run.

Three intertwining issues the leaders of some African countries were expected to have brought to the attention of China, with resolute decision and firm position are regional insecurity, illegal activities of Chinese actors and the negative environmental impacts of loggers who ship tonnes and tonnes of non-food forest resources away to China from Africa. It is obvious that many of the visiting heads of governments and their entourages may have sat, slept or dined on beautifully crafted furniture in Beijing without thinking or caring about their origin. It was a likelihood that President Felix Tshisekedi, while meeting China’s President Xi Jinping in the morning of September 2, 2024, may have sat on chairs made of woods from his native DR Congo pristine forest. Two days later, President Filipe Jacinto Nyusi, while meeting with the Chinese strongman on September 4, 2024, may have sat on a sofa made of rosewood from Cabo Delgado region of Mozambique.

But these are the issues that should not have escaped their attention while in China. The supply chain integrity of timber logs leaving Africa and heading towards China remains questionable for a number of reasons. The same China that claims to be leading in environmental action within its own territories is actively – though surreptitiously – degrading the environment of some countries in Africa in the course of the transactions involving the extraction of the latter’s natural resources. More worrisome is the fact that these transactions defy global best practices and are deemed exploitative, considering the manner in which they are carried out. They hurt the environment, sustain insecurity and are characterised by corruption. This write-up will draw insights extensively and make quotes copiously and verbatim from two recently published reports in Africa Defense Forum magazine, for its relevance to the China-Africa timber product exports.

The forest covers of countries where China has its footprints are significantly diminishing. The challenge of flash floods and soil degradation in the affected countries is real. In its own patriotic zeal, China banned the harvesting of its own native rosewood in 1998 in the aftermath of overwhelming local supplies arising from uncontrolled logging, which negatively impacted its environment. Thereafter, Africa became Chinese logging companies’ next focus, beginning with The Gambia in 2001. The tiny country lost almost all its rosewood within a decade, turning to its neighbouring Senegal from where The Gambia continued to export the mostly illegally harvested rosewood. To underscore China’s skewed interest in Africa, it did not waste time on the declining resource base of The Gambia or Senegal when the DR Congo and Mozambique were there to exploit.

It is doubtful if China is bothered at all by any international rules, treaties or conventions guiding logging activities and the export of timber products, particularly from Africa. And it seems like the governments of the countries affected are lacking in the political will to call China to order in these activities that tend to endanger their lives now and in the future. According to a new study, a Chinese logging company is illegally demolishing rainforests in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DR Congo), stripping the country of millions of dollars’ worth of irreplaceable natural resources and fuelling corruption. A particular Chinese company, Congo King Baisheng Forestry Development (CKBFD), though reportedly controlled nine logging concessions in the DR Congo, was still accused of often logging illegally outside its boundaries, circumventing the suspension from the DR Congo’s Ministry of the Environment in April 2022. In the second half of 2022, an investigation by Global Witness, a nongovernmental organisation, revealed that the company shipped more than $5 million worth of illegal timber from its bases in the DR Congo to a port near Shanghai.

Such a continued transaction, according to the report, highlights the governance flaws that allow illicit logging activities in the logging industry in the country, particularly involving corruption and conflict with forest communities. In that report, it was observed that, “as one of [the] biggest consumers of timber globally, China can be a key part of the solution to global deforestation, and the Chinese authorities must crack down on companies exploiting the DRC’s precious forests for profit.”

Something must have emboldened the Chinese-owned CKBFD to continue to embark on destructive activities in the DR Congo, by cutting down old-growth rainforest and exporting millions of dollars’ worth of illegal timber to China.” What matters to the environmental conservationists does not seem to matter at all to the Chinese loggers despite the harmful effects of their operations on the environment. The environmental services derivable from the Congo rainforest include the dense tree canopy and abundance of plant life capturing carbon dioxide and pumping oxygen into the atmosphere. Another place where similarly dense forest is found is the Amazon rainforest in South America.

Although Mozambique has less expanse of forest coverage, it has obscured other African countries as China’s primary supplier of rosewood – a material highly desirable for its use in expensive furniture. Mozambique reportedly shipped 20,000 metric tonnes of the internationally protected timber to China in 2023 alone, despite a long-standing ban on exporting logs. In doing so, Mozambique dwarfed Madagascar, Nigeria and Senegal as China’s major rosewood source, leading to near depletion of rosewood. More worrisome was the involvement of Mozambique’s loggers, both legal and illicit, harvest in Cabo Delgado province, where Islamic State terrorist group benefits financially from illicit logging, according to a recent report by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA).

The loss of rosewood forest lands has stretched to more than four million hectares of forest cover in Mozambique over the last 20 years, according to Global Forest Watch. The log export ban promulgated since 2017 did not seem effective as more than 90 percent of Mozambique’s wood has continued to go to China which massively imports logs. The tracking and tracing done by the EIA investigators traced nearly 300 containers of a type of rosewood known as pau preto from the port of Beira to China between October 2023 and March 2024. Transactions involving rosewood worth more than $18 million have been done, with shipments amounting to 10,000 metric tonnes.

Rosewood smuggling between Mozambique and China, according to the EIA’s investigation, was driven by three factors: poor management of forest concessions, illegal logging and corruption among port officials, which have been allowing illicit logging to grow unchecked in insurgent-controlled areas. The rosewood trees are protected under the United Nations’ Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species (CITES), which limits the amount of logs a country can harvest and export while guaranteeing the survival of the species. Detection of CITES violation is a task with the burden placed on receiving countries.

The losses to illegal logging activities are enormous. Mozambique’s Environment Minister Celso Correia, in 2017, reportedly said illegal logging cost his country half a billion dollars a year in lost revenue. Efforts of Mozambique to end unsustainable and illicit logging by imposing multiple bans on cutting and exporting logs have taken more than 20 years, still going on.Yet the forest plunder continues, as timber traders traffic the wood by exploiting the chronic instability and corruption in Cabo Delgado,” according to the EIA investigators, in their report titled “Shipping the Forest.”

China’s smart moves enable Chinese traders to get around export bans in part by mixing rosewood bought in Cabo Delgado with other legal logs in shipping containers, according to the EIA. They also mislabel the contents of shipping containers to hide rosewood shipments. One of the ways of forest preservation is the proper enforcement. It will also contribute to sustainable livelihoods. The advice now is that “Mozambique must strengthen its forest protections by enforcing its own regulations, and China and the global shipping lines must respect Mozambican laws and investigate the bad actors systematically violating them.”

Over the past two decades, the DR Congo has reportedly lost more than 18.4 million hectares of tree cover, partly due to deforestation driven by companies such as CKBFD. It has also been reported that CKBFD is not alone in its illegal logging. A visit by DR Congo ministers to 52 logging concessions this year recently revealed that fewer than a quarter of them were operating legally, according to Global Witness. Another finding from the Chatham House found, in a 2014 study, that nearly 90 percent of the logging done in the DR Congo was illegal.

An audit released in 2022 revealed that corruption is a major driver of the destruction of the DRC’s rainforest. It revealed that a succession of government ministers awarded logging concessions despite a 2002 moratorium on new logging contracts. In some cases, concessions were reclaimed by the government then turned over to other companies, also in violation of the moratorium. In essence, “the forest administration did not respect the moratorium that it itself established,” the auditors reported, adding that “this is nothing less than the outright sale of forest concessions.”

Notwithstanding the DRC programmes to reforest areas of deforestation, according to Chinese companies some entities such as CKBFD are logging at a rate that is five times the volume of timber their permits allow. Concerns are increasingly being expressed. For instance, one commentator intoned that “the Chinese government must take measures to stop this flow of illegal timber from the DR Congo and other Congo Basin countries and must also provide financial and technical assistance to the DR Cong to help it effectively curb this flow and sustainably manage its forests … as the future of the Congo Basin rainforest depends on it.” It is hoped that the leaders of those countries concerned directly and indirectly will step up actions in the right direction and will engage the Chinese authorities in bold efforts to correct the undesirable situations in Africa’s ecosystem. This should be on the front burner in any China-Africa diplomatic discussions.