Push to build port, mines and roads to cut poverty and unemployment threatens the country's shrinking forest reserves
KRIBI, Cameroon (AlertNet) - Cameroon’s dream of building, digging and mining its way out of widespread poverty by 2035 has sparked a war of words between government officials and environmentalists, who say the plan encroaches on millions of hectares of forest and threatens local livelihoods.
“We regret that these rural forest community people have to suffer and that the vast deforestation triggered by these development projects will have a serious impact on climate change,” said Jean Jacques Zam, president of the Cameroon Parliamentary Network for Sustainable Forest Management, at a recent meeting on climate change in Bertoua, in eastern Cameroon.
Tropical forests cover about 15 percent of the world’s land surface and contain about a quarter of the carbon stored worldwide in plants, soil and trees, according to statistics from the Cameroon environmental ministry.
As a result, their loss or degradation is a major source of emissions of carbon dioxide, which contributes to climate change.
PORT, MINES IN FOREST REGIONS
But nearly three quarters of the projects planned as part of “Vision 2035” – a government investment effort announced in late 2009, featuring major construction projects in the south and east of Cameroon as well as expanded mining – are concentrated in areas home to 4.7 million hectares of rich forest reserves, figures from Cameroon’s forestry and wildlife ministry show.
The tension between the need to improve the lot of Cameroonians, 40 percent of whom live on the equivalent of less than a dollar a day, according to a 2008 economic review, and the desire to protect against climate change in a country that lost more than an eighth of its forest between 1990 and 2005, could hardly be demonstrated more aptly.
The 2010-2035 investment plan aims to slash underemployment from 75 percent to less than 50 percent by 2020 and reduce poverty from 40 percent in 2007 to less than 20 percent by 2035. The plan comes after two and a half decades of economic stagnation, Paul Tasong, secretary general in the economy, planning and regional development ministry, told reporters last month.
Tasong, a chief architect of the programme, hopes to drag the country’s poor into the middle class and help Cameroon attain its Millennium Development Goals by building road infrastructure projects, a deep seaport and gas plant at Kribi, a hydroelectric dam at Memve’le, new hydroelectric thermal plants , a hydro-electricity project at Lom Pangar and a 4,200-km fibre-optic cable.
Meanwhile mine deposits of cobalt, nickel and manganese near Lomie, iron ore at Mbalam, rutile (titanium) at Akonolinga and diamonds at Mobilong will be exploited.
Tasong said he was the Cameroon-driven Vision 2035 project would achieve results where previous international efforts had failed.
ONE MAN’S HOPE, ANOTHER’S NIGHTMARE
Tasong’s dream, however, is his forestry and wildlife counterpart’s nightmare.
Denis Koulagna Koutou, a director at the Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife, said at a tree-planting ceremony in the capital Yaounde recently that his ministry was especially worried about the impact of the new project on Cameroon’s South and East because these regions harbour a network of protected forests that collectively are home to many species.
They include Dja Wildlife Reserve - a UNESCO World Heritage site - and national parks at Lobeke, Campo Ma’an, Boumba Bek, and other sites that “constitute very important forest ecological reserves in the Congo Basin forest area.”
Nearly half of Cameroon’s 46.5 million hectares consist of forest, which cuts a swathe through six of its 10 regions, providing an income for its people and generating wealth for legal loggers.
“The disappearance of our forest means losing out on an important part of revenue from logging for our council budget, especially in the short run, and this is quite disturbing,” said Sabikanda Guy Emmanuel, one of Kribi’s two mayors, during a recent visit by government officials to the ports project site.
No less concerned is Charlie Ntonifor of the Center for the Environment and Rural Transformation (CERUT). Ntonifor, also a member of the African Forest Action Network, said at a recent seminar that he had shared his fears directly with the government.
“The Kribi deep sea port alone, according to the plan, will occupy some 27,000 hectares of forestland, and by the time the other major projects are realised, over a million hectares of protected forest must have been lost, making the already high rate of the disappearance of Cameroons forest even worse,” Ntonifor said in an interview.
FOREST LOSSES
He quoted statistics from the World Conservation Monitoring Center showing that Cameroon lost 13.4 percent of its forest between 1990 and 2005 – the equivalent of about one percent a year - due to commercial logging, agriculture and the demand for wood as fuel.
The losses have come despite Cameroon’s support for the Convergence Plan of the Central African Forest Commission, which focuses on sustainable valorization of the forest and its resources, he said.
As part of that effort, the country’s forestry and wildlife ministry has been trying to reverse the trend of tree loss since 2009.
“Our ministry has embarked on large-scale tree planting especially in the North, Far North, Northwest and West regions, areas where the impact of climate change is already very glaring,” said Elvis Ngolle Ngolle, forest and wildlife minister, during a tree-planting event.
FOREST DWELLERS DISPLACED
The ports project has already forced 5,000 people out of their communities, including local forest dwellers like the Baka pygmies, economy ministry figures show. Those displaced have been paid compensation but some fear they will never be able to adapt to a new environment away from the forest.
“I received 2.5 million CFA ($5,495) as indemnity for my land now occupied by the Kribi sea port project. (That) is very insignificant,” said Claude Mandonge, one local farmer, during a visit by government officials to the port site.
“Getting another piece of land within this forest zone is not easy because it is mostly reserved forest owned by the government. We are obliged to relocate to Kribi town and begin a new life where survival will be very difficult,” he added.
Elias Ntungwe Ngalame is an award-winning environmental writer with Cameroon's Eden Group of newspapers.
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