Untitled - Greenpeace

42
CARVING UP THE CONGO
©Greenpeace/Reynaers
INDUSTRIAL LOGGING-LED POVERTY ALLEVIATION IS A CHARADE
The stated aim of the World Bank’s strategy
for reform of the logging sector is to help
alleviate poverty. The Forestry Code which it
persuaded the DRC Government to adopt
makes provisions for taxes collected from
logging operations to be redistributed back
from national to local level, to provide money
for regional development. It also formalises a
system whereby logging companies negotiate
direct compensation with local communities
for access to their forest, and requires
companies to develop forest management
plans, one aspect of which is to ensure that
communities retain rights to forest resources
and services.
However, given the context of corruption that
typifies the DRC, there is little realistic hope
that the industrial logging model of
development will improve people’s quality of
life. In fact, as Greenpeace research and
investigations show, money from taxation
rarely materialises, the direct development
offered to local communities by logging
companies is a cruel deception, and industrial
logging degrades the essential forest resources
on which the vast majority of the DRC’s people
depend – while communities who challenge
logging companies over these issues may well
face a violent response. In this way, the people
of the DRC are left poorer as logging
companies plunder their forests.
‘Any discussion of forests and
forestry in the DRC should
have as its primary focus the
fact that the vast majority of
people in the DRC depend on
wild plants and animals for
their health, for their energy,
for their medicines, for their
food and in many cases for
their cash income.’ 238
David Kaimowitz, Chairman,
CIFOR, 2004