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Africa: New Technology to Sever Timber's Link to Conflict?
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Inter Press Service (Johannesburg)
8 August 2008
Posted to the web 8 August 2008
Michael Deibert
New York
While conflict diamonds or blood diamonds, as they are known, have gained attention the world over in terms of the role illicit gems play in fuelling warfare, the role that the timber trade has played in abetting conflict has received considerably less consideration. That may be beginning to change.
The world over, though particularly in West Africa, both legal and illegal commerce in timber has played a substantial role in the enabling of conflicts in countries such as Côte d'Ivoire, Liberia and Sierra Leone. The ruin globally wreaked on forests is having wide-ranging consequences.
According to the 2007 World Bank report "At Loggerheads: Agricultural Expansion, Poverty Reduction, and Environment in the Tropical Forests", nearly 70 million people-many from an indigenous background -live in remote areas of closed tropical forests, while an additional 735 million live in or near trop¬ical forests and savannas. Both groups rely heavily on forested areas for fuel, food and income.
The World Bank report went on to warn that tropical forests were shrinking at a rate of five percent a decade and that "by the middle of the 21st century only shreds of this once-vast forest may be left". This trend, the report noted, will have a dramatic effect on climate change, adding three billion tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year, something that would affect people far beyond forest-dwelling communities.
Stepping into this contentious landscape, Helveta, a firm based in the United Kingdom, is marketing software that it says will help regularise the fragmented supply chain for timber. It should also lessen the risk for companies of purchasing wood that has been illegally procured.
"The best way to improve transparency is to make sure that everyone has the same view of the same data at the same time," says Patrick Newton, Helveta's CEO. "Our focus has been very much to engage with nation states on governance issues, but also with local communities to make sure that transparency is embedded in our process."
Helveta works in tandem with such bodies as the Liberian Forestry Development Agency and the International Tropical Timber Organisation in Côte d'Ivoire. Using its control intelligence system (CIS), trees are catalogued and tagged with numbers entered into a computer system hosted in the UK.
"It gives (local residents) a tool to prove their occupation of the forest," says Jerome Lewis, a professor of social anthropology at University College London and a consultant working with Helveta to develop the software. Lewis has worked with Mbendjele Pygmies in the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville) since 1994.
"They can prove to outsiders that they live and use and depend on the forest," Lewis explains.
Over the last decade, the West African nation of Liberia has been particularly hard-hit by the illegal timber trade. Former president Charles Taylor controlled the industry with militias of child combatants before being driven from power in 2003 and eventually finding his way to the defendant's chair in a war-crimes tribunal in The Hague.
United Nations Security Council sanctions against the Liberian timber industry were finally lifted in 2006. Under the government of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf - Africa's first elected female head of state - the nation has begun to emerge from more than a decade of civil war.
"Timber has played an important role in fuelling the conflict here and the government is keen to implement a system where timber can help aid the reconstruction of the country," according to Thomas Pichet, Liberia country manager with SGS, a verification, testing and certification company that is overseeing the implementation of the CIS.
Despite the progress, though, some observers contend that much remains to be done.
In June 2005, Global Witness, a London-based grouping that seeks to demonstrate how natural resources are used to fund conflict, published a report outlining the role that the timber trade had played in fuelling Liberia's civil wars. The report also details how it continued to provide succour for various internal armed actors, even after the official cessation of hostilities.
"Much of the mining and logging is being organised by former warring party commanders and generals who, given the limited success of Liberia's (demobilisation, disarmament, rehabilitation and reintegration) process and weak internal controls, maintain their access to weapons and have the capacity to export their goods abroad," the report asserted.
Some observers see a need for technological and political improvements to be addressed in a tandem fashion.
"The potential for these kinds of IT-based timber tracking systems is good, but the humans that push the buttons are the same humans that fill in the paper-based forms or stand at the roadblocks now," says David Young, who oversees the independent forest monitoring project at Global Witness.
"There is a risk that they might be very good on the technical side but don't put the same effort towards political problems, which won't necessarily produce the right results."
Nevertheless, Helveta says that it hopes its work in countries such as Liberia, where timber once accounted for six percent of gross domestic product before civil war engulfed the nation in 1990, will help forge a more lucrative and environmentally responsible logging policy to benefit both the forests and the people who live there.
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"The forest is not an empty place," argues Helveta's Patrick Newton. "There are plenty of people out there and they have a vested interest in protecting it."
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