Chinese
Furniture Fashion Ravages West Africa’s Savannas
Pauline Bax
August 2, 2016 —
1:00 AM CEST
No
one paid much attention to the gnarled, yellow-blossomed rosewood
trees dotted around farmsteads in northern Ivory Coast until
Chinese-backed buyers started offering money for the timber.
Fast forward five
years and Ivory Coast is looking back at a tumultuous time in the
logging industry, with confusion over permits, illegal harvesting of
trees, seizures of trucks, and finally, a blanket ban on rosewood
exports in 2014.
“We simply had no
idea; for decades, the trees were just there,” said Jean Yves
Garnault, the government’s principal adviser on rosewood. “We
only realized its value when we discovered that the wood is
fashionable in China.”
Soaring Chinese
demand for rosewood has spurred a largely illicit trade in West
Africa worth at least $1.3 billion since inception, according to
advocacy group Forest Trends. That’s decimating forests and
heightening tension as governments find that export bans simply
prompt dealers to divert truckloads of timber to ports in neighboring
countries.
Seven of China’s
biggest suppliers of rosewood logs by volume are in Africa, with
Nigeria topping the list and Ghana ranking third. Gambia, even if
it’s 86 times smaller than Nigeria, is fourth because it illegally
ships rosewood from neighboring Senegal, according to activists and
the Senegalese government -- part of a cycle in which illicit trade
moves opportunistically from country to country.
Rosewood is coveted
in China, the world’s largest consumer of the wood, because it’s
used to make antique-looking furniture with intricate carvings
fashionable among middle-class consumers. Importers initially turned
to nearby forests, but when southeast Asian stocks were almost
depleted, traders in 2009 began eyeing West Africa, home to a more
affordable variety.
Representatives of
China’s ministry of commerce didn’t reply to a request for
comment.
Medicinal Purposes
“What happened is
a combination of the species being overlogged in southeast Asia to
the point of endangerment, and more Chinese consumers having the
budget and appetite for rosewood,” Naomi Basik Treanor, a
researcher for Washington-based Forest Trends, said by phone.
“African rosewood has that luster but it’s cheaper, so it’s in
high demand.”
Pterocarpus
erinaceus, the scientific name for the tree that’s 15 meters (49
feet) high, can survive protracted droughts and grows in semi-arid
savannas from Senegal to Central African Republic. Its grey bark is
used for medicinal purposes, and the leaves, once dried, are popular
with sheep farmers as fodder.
Most West African
countries have imposed export embargoes on rosewood, an umbrella term
for more than 30 species of the red-hued hardwood, with some bans
going back decades and many revised regularly. Togo issued the most
recent prohibition in June, as the government announced a 10-year
stop to logging. During a summit in Guinea Bissau in March, 11 West
African countries agreed to urge China to restrict imports.
But regulation
hasn’t stopped illegal logging and shipments continue unabated.
Volumes of Chinese imports of West African rosewood logs surged 30
percent between January and May, according to Chinese customs data
compiled by Forest Trends. The value of the imports rose 19 percent,
it said.
Weak rule of law and
opportunistic traders mean that exports from one country often
originate in another. To circumvent bans, logs are smuggled across
borders or cut into blocks and labeled as generic timber. That
accounts for hugely volatile import data, such as a 100 percent
collapse in exports from Guinea Bissau, a 50 percent decline in
shipments from Togo and a 350 percent surge in exports from Ghana
since last year, the Chinese data show.
‘Stopgap Measures’
“One export ban
will invariably lead to leakage to neighboring countries,” Basik
Treanor said. “These measures are a stopgap and a real solution
would be for China to prohibit the import of illegal timber. There
needs to be robust legislation on the consumer side.”
The Gambia is a case
in point. A tiny enclave that cuts a horizontal swathe through larger
Senegal, it shipped 57,900 cubic meters of rosewood logs to China
last year, despite an export ban in place since 2012, according to
customs data. Prior to 2010, the Gambia didn’t export timber.
Almost all of that
rosewood is smuggled from Senegal, whose forest reserves are in the
relatively remote Casamance region close to the Gambian border,
according to activists and the Senegalese government. Illegal
traders, most of them Senegalese, are destroying at least 40,000
square meters (10 acres) of forest area annually, President Macky
Sall said in a speech last year as he announced an immediate halt to
all wood-cutting permits. He also pledged to recruit thousands of
additional forest rangers.
Senegal in 1998
completely banned exports of the Pterocarpus erinaceus variety and
took the lead in requesting the Geneva-based Convention on Trade in
Endangered Species, or Cites, to list the tree as imperiled.
Horse Carts
The government’s
tough stance and soaring demand have spawned vibrant cross-border
traffic, with Senegalese smugglers using horse carts to carry logs to
warehouses in the Gambia, according to aerial images shown to
reporters in May by conservationist and former environment minister
Haidar el Ali, who used drones to film the evidence.
“The Casamance
forests will be damaged irreparably within the next two years if the
illegal trafficking toward Gambia continues at its current pace,”
he said. “There’s a blatant ‘Who cares?’ attitude that is
just mind-boggling.”
The permanent
secretary of the Gambian Forestry Ministry, Ousman Sow, couldn’t
immediately comment on allegations that the nation exports Senegalese
rosewood, he said by phone. The media department of the Chinese
embassy in Dakar, the Senegalese capital, didn’t answer calls.
In the Gambian
village of Busumbala, 25 kilometers (16 miles) from the capital,
Banjul, Tom Chen, a Chinese national, stood at a dust-covered sawmill
where about 80 workers were sawing timber into planks and packing the
wood in containers for export. Chen said he and his brother arrived
in the county four years ago and obtained a license to purchase and
ship timber, including rosewood and mahogany, to China.
Chen, who has a
steady stream of suppliers and middlemen bringing logs to his mill,
pays $1,150 to $1,400 for a truckload of timber. Asked what he would
do if the Gambia decided to end to the trade, he said: “We will
probably move to another country to continue our business.”
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