A. Historical overview of human occupation of the Congo Basin
During the last glacial period, rainfall in the Congo Basin was insufficient to support dense forest in all but a few remnant patches and river galleries, and the landscape was dominated by scrub savanna (Elenga et al. 1994; Jolly et al. 1998). It was not until 10,000–8,000 years ago, after the glaciers had receded and rainfall increased, that the savannas were fully recolonized by trees. By 3,000 years ago, the forest had reached somewhat beyond its present extent (Hamilton 1981; Hart et al. 1996). During this period the Congo Basin appears to have been primarily inhabited by small bands of hunter-gatherers that moved camp as resources were locally depleted (Mercader et al. 2000; Vansina 1986 and 1990).
Archaeological evidence shows that what are now the forest zones of Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Gabon were occupied by farmers as long as 10,000 years ago. It was not until the Bantu expansion from what is now the Nigeria/Cameroon border, around 5,000 years ago, that agriculturalism spread thinly throughout Central Africa, however, (Vansina 1990), reaching what is now Uganda by A.D. 400. The ubiquitous presence of scorched oil palm kernels suggests that almost all of the forest has been cleared by subsistence farmers at least once, and thus should best be described as old regrowth forest (Oslisly 1995 and 1998; White and Oslisly 1999).
Although the forests have been used by humans as a source of food, medicine, construction materials, and agricultural production since the last glacial period, it was not until the last 100 years, when roads and railroads were constructed, that forest resources began to be exploited at an industrial scale for export to global markets. Between the 1940s and 1970s, export agriculture was an important component of the economies of Cameroon and the Democratic Republic of Congo, producing a pulse of deforestation. Low commodity prices and insufficient maintenance of the transportation infrastructure have since substantially reduced the economic viability of export agriculture, particularly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, lowering the incentives for forest conversion. To national treasuries, timber constitutes the most important economic value of the forest, but to the household economy and to a few pharmaceutical companies, it is commercial trade in bushmeat and non-timber forest products (NTFPs) that has risen in importance.
Today, the countries of Central Africa can be divided roughly into two categories, based on their population density and level of urbanization. Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and Burundi are relatively densely populated and primarily rural; Gabon, the Central African Republic, the Republic of Congo, and Equatorial Guinea are more sparsely populated and more urbanized.
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Box 4. Traditional territories span national borders While families, kin-groups, lineages, and tribes have been moving around Central Africa for millennia in search of resources, all lay claim to traditional territories. These seldom reflect present political or land-use zoning boundaries; as a result, locally meaningful landscapes often conflict with those mandated by international agreements or national land-use zoning policies. For example, people from the Oveng–Djoum–Mintom–Lélé–Alati in southern Cameroon frequently cross the Ayina river that marks the boundary between Cameroon and Gabon to carry out their traditional subsistence activities in the Minkébé forest in Gabon. Their ancestors originated in Minkébé, and most still have close relatives living in Minvoul and Makokou in Gabon. For them, the boundary between Cameroon and Gabon bisects their traditional lands. Source: Ndongo Allogho and Mouncharou, pers. comm., 2000. |
B. Who are the present managers of natural resources?
In Central Africa, natural resources are managed by households, clans, communities, the private sector, and government. Central African governments are the de jure owners of “unoccupied” lands. Governments—or more correctly, leaders in countries—typically allocate “unoccupied or unimproved” lands, in the absence of public debate, to timber exploitation, mineral extraction, agricultural plantations, or to parks and reserves, with the latter covering less than 6 percent of the landscape. Industrial-scale agricultural plantations cover only a small fraction of the landscape, with the notable exception of the Cameroon Development Corporation, which has huge land holdings in southwestern Cameroon. Once-extensive plantations of oil palm and coffee in the Democratic Republic of Congo have since the late-1980s largely been abandoned. Logging companies dominate the forest estate, accounting for 76 percent of Cameroon forests, 40 percent in Gabon, and almost 90 percent of northern Republic of Congo.
More than 12 million households, within communities of varying sizes, decide how to use the natural resources within their immediate vicinity. Rural people value and manage the forests and savannas as a source of agriculture soils and soil nutrients, construction materials, wildlife, and other NTFPs. In the past, extended families, clans, and tribes managed natural resources by restricting access to certain areas and to specific resources. Production of cash crops and an increase in literacy, labor mobility, and individual wealth have together with the superimposition of European laws and governance institutions altered these earlier systems of resource management, but have not totally destroyed them.
By customary law, households can extend their agricultural holdings through the process of mise en valeur, by cutting trees down and converting the forest to farmland. Household agriculture nonetheless today accounts for less than 10 percent of the forest zone, and seldom extends for more than 3–5 kilometers from the nearest road. The impact of hunting on wildlife populations, by comparison, can extend as far as 30 kilometers from human settlements.
Concentration of the responsibility for natural resource management in the hands of a few government officials and a few logging companies, neither of which are accountable to the citizenry, has resulted in considerable inequity in benefit sharing from natural resource exploitation, low compliance with resource management laws, and unsustainable resource use. Rural families have little, if any, formal authority over how natural resources located more than 3–5 kilometers from their settlements are used. They have no say in whether forests are allocated to logging companies or set aside as protected areas, and they receive little or no compensation for resources over which they have traditional claims but which they are prohibited from using. Unsurprisingly, local communities have typically responded by disregarding the law and participating in illegal “self-compensation” activities such as land encroachment and poaching.
C. What is the likely outcome of increased community-based management?
Granting local communities greater responsibility and authority in the management of natural resources has two primary desirable outcomes. The first is a more equitable share of the benefits that accrue from resource exploitation. The second is the more sustainable use of resources. In northern nations (i.e., nations in Europe and North America), high-profile lobbying by special interest groups, large-scale civil action, and most importantly the use of civil suits against government and the private sector have encouraged more open public debate, increased transparency, and greater accountability in the management of natural resources. More democratic decision making certainly reduces the risk that the resource practices of the minority will adversely impact the resource use concerns of the majority, and militates against rent capture by the few to the detriment of the many.
Natural resource conservation nonetheless tends to happen only when it either addresses the self-interest2 of resource managers—i.e., those with the power and authority to regulate access to and use of resources—such as household heads, village elites, police, fishermen’s groups, or pitsawer teams, or when civil society deems that individual self-interest is undermining the interests of society as a whole.
In a global view of the drivers of deforestation, Kaimowitz and Angelsen (1998) reported that the effects of well-defined and secure property rights are ambiguous. In some cases where forest clearing is a means to obtaining property rights, the latter becomes merely an incentive for extensive clearing, and inadequate or inappropriate land management follows. This type of speculative land grabbing is common in Brazil and Central America but less so in Central Africa, despite the fact that mise en valeur remains the customary mechanism by which farmers privatize common-pool forests. Furthermore, holding formal rights to forest lands is no guarantee that communities or individuals can retain those lands. When the advent of Brazil nut production in Bolivia lowered the market price in Brazil, Brazilian community-forest owners cleared the forest instead for manioc (Assies 1997), the production of which had become 12 times more profitable than collecting Brazil nuts (Periera dos Santos and Lescure 1993).
The increased democratization of forest management can ameliorate inequities in benefit sharing from such resource exploitation. It should be noted, however, that it is less certain to result in increased conservation of natural landscapes.
D. Why are rural communities not already in control?
Centralized, paternalistic, and patronage-based political systems, inherited from colonial powers, characterize government–citizen relationships throughout Central Africa. When combined with the realities of limited access to education, the absence of legal and fiscal mechanisms to force public- and private-sector accountability, and government control of media and communications, this means that civil society efforts to make government more democratic, transparent, and honest are, at best, weak. This is particularly true for rural communities that have also experienced the erosion of traditional authority structures, and that are politically and economically marginalized.
E. Does the size of a community matter?
People share affinity with others based on kinship, proximity, social class, religious, ethnic and national identity, and special interests, such as profession, sports, or tastes. The greater the affinity within a group, the greater the social cohesion and social capital and the greater the likelihood that the group will act uniformly in any particular context. The less the affinity, the greater the disparity in interests and the more contentious will be attempts to come to group consensus. In broad terms, group affinity and social cohesion are likely to be strongest within communities of interest and weakest in communities of place, with communities of practice being somewhere in between. Unfortunately, in the past most community-based natural resource conservation efforts have focused on communities of place (such as villages), rather than on communities of practice (hunters) or communities of interest (banning whaling).
As group affinity and social cohesion decline, the more need there will be for a negotiation and conflict resolution mechanism that has checks and balances to ensure that powerful or vocal individuals or subgroups do not dominate group decisions on natural resource management. Put more simply, small, socially cohesive groups will be much more easily mobilized to work together for a common cause than will larger groups with less affinity. Larger groups will, however, have strength in numbers and thus may be more effective agents of change of government policies and private sector practices. The most effective way to retain the advantages of social cohesion and to achieve the necessary political stature in practice may be through coalitions of small groups.
F. Human land use and biodiversity conservation
When the access to and use of natural resources is not regulated, humans tend to transform wild lands to other land uses that provide greater tenure security and higher rates of return. Where trade increases the value of wild resources, there is a trend toward over-harvesting, on-farm production, and exclusion of resource users by resource managers. Agriculture almost always simplifies natural landscapes by removing the large variety of wild plants and animals that would compete for sunlight, water, and soil nutrients with the very few domesticated plants and animal that are valuable to humans.
Not all species of plants and animals are equally threatened by, or tolerant of, human use. Some species, like pigweed (Amaranthus spp.), thrive in human-disturbed landscapes, whereas others, like chimpanzee (Pan spp.), quickly disappear as human occupation and use of a landscape increases. Thus, although the genetic, species, and ecosystem diversity of human-occupied landscapes tends to be much lower per unit area than that typically found in even inadequately management-protected areas, not all species are equally at risk within anthropogenic landscapes.
Efforts to ensure the sustainable use of natural resources would be unnecessary if human use of these resources had no impact on their composition and abundance. Given increasing human populations and rising demand for resources, sustainable use and conservation typically means reducing the number of people who have access to natural resources and/or reducing the quantity of resource exploitation per unit area and time. Both of these solutions to unsustainable resource use will result in winners and losers. When New Zealand restricted access to its tuna fishery, many poor fishermen who were making a living from the unsustainable harvest of bluefin tuna lost their, admittedly short-term, source of living. Others who obtained individual transferable quotas saw their long-term access to tuna secured, the harvest of tuna decline, the quality and value of fish increase, and their livelihoods soar.
The challenge in sustainable resource management is to agree upon how much and what kind of change, if any, in the resource base is acceptable as a result of consumptive or nonconsumptive resource use. As all resource uses change the resource base in some way, the key is to legislate and to enforce observation of the threshold beyond which the change is considered unacceptable.
2. Self-interest in this context refers not only to the economic value of a resource, but also to its spiritual and cultural values. Preserving a patch of forest may be more important to an individual for its value as a family cemetery than as a source of timber, for example.