Forestry company under fire for illegal timber harvest in DR Congo

Some $5 million worth of timber exported from the Democratic Republic of Congo to China in the second half of 2022 was felled illegally, according to a watchdog report.

The timber was exported by Congo King Baisheng Forestry Development, known variously as Cokibafode or CKBFD in short, which in April 2022 was found by DRC authorities to have been awarded concessions in violation of local law. U.K.-based advocacy group Global Witness traced some of the wood to these disputed concessions. It also gathered evidence that the company has been logging without regard to forest management plans, echoing complaints that local NGOs have been raising against CKBFD for several years.

According to Global Witness, the company, then owned by a DRC army general and operating under the name Maniema Union 2, obtained extensive concessions in the provinces of Équateur and Mongala in 2018 — a time when a moratorium on allocation of industrial forestry concessions was in place. Within weeks, Maniema Union 2 was sold to a Chinese businessman, Lei Hua Zhang, owner of the timber conglomerate Wan Peng International.

For its report, Global Witness tracked the timber from where it was cut down to its delivery at the Chinese port of Zhangjiagang. The NGO alerted Chinese authorities to the illegal origins of the timber, but says the latter refused to intervene, arguing it wasn’t within their jurisdiction as the timber wasn’t from China.

“There is a large legal loophole regarding imported timber,” said Charlie Hammans, who led the investigation for Global Witness. “China has made these statements about forests on an international level, but they haven’t enacted the necessary legislation to support their claims. China said that they would take action if asked by the DRC’s government, but that otherwise, it’s not their problem, which I find sad.”

CKBFD’s representative in the DRC didn’t respond to a request for an interview.

Intensive logging

Forests cover more than two-thirds of Mongala province. The Indigenous peoples and local communities there live off the forest as well as farming; residents earn income supplying the major cities of Kisangani and Kinshasa with rice, yams, fish, as well as wild game and other forest products.

But activists from APEM, a local NGO that works to protect endangered peoples and species, have expressed concern about that they say is a decline in forest resources in recent years in the areas where CKBFD operates.

“There is an obvious decrease in biodiversity,” said Blaise Mudodosi, APEM’s coordinator. “In that area, game is scarcer, so people have a harder time finding food to feed themselves. What’s more, when the Chinese cut down trees, they frequently don’t practice selective logging, so they cut everything, including the trees that host caterpillars. Those caterpillars are very important here.”

Stany Malezi is a farmer and father of 11 children. He lives close to a CKBFD concession in the north-central part of Mongala, near the provincial capital.

“Before Cokibafode came, we lived quietly and peacefully. But they’ve looted nearly everything,” Malezi said. “I live off gathering caterpillars and picking mushrooms. Now, we can’t find them as easily as we used to. Yet we need them to survive, and we used to be able to sell them so our children could go to school. So how are we going to live?”

In this part of the country, Gonimbrasia petiveri caterpillars, called mbinzo in Lingala, a language widely spoken in northwestern DRC, are a nutritious staple, rich in lipids and proteins that sometimes replaces meat. In Mongala province, where more than 80% of households live below the poverty line, these caterpillars’ disappearance could have a devastating impact on inhabitants’ food security.

“The wood goes by; no one can stop them to ask questions or request papers, and so on. There are no controls,” Mudodosi said. “They don’t respect the cutting quotas [which regulate sustainable timber harvesting in a concession]. They come to the concessions and do whatever they want. They even cut trees that aren’t big enough to be cut yet, but they don’t care about what happens next.”

Mudodosi said he regularly alerts local government authorities about these problems. “We campaigned for the concessions to be suspended, but in reality, nothing’s changed,” he said.

The abuses he and other civil society groups have observed have been corroborated by the Forest Governance Observatory (OGF by its French acronym), an independent NGO that monitors forest resource management and exploitation in the DRC.

In 2021, OGF visited one of CKBFD’s sites in Mongala along with representatives from the environment ministry for an official inspection of the company’s logging activities. During this mission, they found that Cokibafode routinely conducts logging activities in violation of the sector’s prescribed rules and standards, namely with the absence of all operational documentation, the absence of a traceability system for felled wood and no definition of concession boundaries.”

They also noted that the company’s representatives spoke neither French nor Lingala, the province’s two official languages, which “has a highly negative impact on the company’s compliance with logging standards” as well as its communication with local workers, the administration and communities.

Complicity within the system

Mudodosi said he hasn’t seen any changes since Global Witness published its report into CKBFD’s illegal operations in Mongala and Équateur in October 2023, either administratively or on the ground.

“Whether you’re an inspector or an NGO, when you come to ask them questions about their operations, they say, ‘We’ve already settled everything with the Garagara.’ By Garagara, they mean the ‘Grandgrand’ — poorly pronounced because they don’t understand the language — and Grandgrand means the governor or another state representative,” he told Mongabay.

“There’s a lot of complicity in the system, so they [CKBFD representatives] consider themselves to be above the law. But we want our forests to remain standing and intact. Our forests play a crucial role in the climate.”

Type Wombi Biyela Dilingi, an adviser to the environment minister, overseeing the protection of forests and peat bogs, said he has also encountered this problem.

“Those engaging in illegal logging know it. They’re helped by compatriots who know the law very well; they know that somewhere, there are things unsaid and loopholes, and they exploit the weakness of the law,” he said. “You’ll see the same investor and legal entity will get caught several times for the same offense because they know that the maximum fine for illegal trafficking, for example, is $1,000. They can take back as many logs as they want; the fine remains the same. So, they’d rather get caught and pay.”

In a country where annual GDP per capita is $710, $1,000 may seem like sufficiently severe punishment. But for a Chinese multinational, which, according to Global Witness, exports millions of dollars’ worth of wood in just a few months, this is a paltry sum.

In its 2022 review of forest concessions, the Inspectorate General of Finance (IGF), the government’s audit agency, noted that CKBFD was one of many forestry companies that had failed to pay royalties due to the government . It also stated that the company had obtained concessions larger than the maximum permitted under the 2002 Forest Code.

“Awarding concessions of more than 500,000 ha [1.2 million acres] to a single company is not allowed,” said Global Witness’s Hammans, adding that CKBFD “have a lot more.”

“Since 2002, it has been forbidden to allocate forest areas not previously belonging to concessions, but [the DRC government] still allocated them,” he said. “There are so many laws that show the company is operating illegally, but its compliance with the law is not necessarily the most important thing to the government. What is defined by law and what happens in reality are two different worlds.”

The IGF also identified several governance issues, including the allocation of forest concessions by successive ministers outside the officially organized market and without a call for tenders. The auditing service also described “laxity” on the part of the forest administration in collecting royalties and a similar failure on the part of the country’s revenue service.

The IGF recommended the suspension of all concessions deemed illegal, including those belonging to CKBFD. The recommendation was implemented by the environment minister in April 2022 . A few days later, the minister set up a committee tasked with reviewing all the logging concessions in the country. After a first audit, the ministry decided to suspend the contracts in Équateur but approved those in Mongala, specifying that it would work with the concession holder to achieve compliance. CKBFD was given eight months to pay tax arrears and settlement fines for its Mongala concessions. At the end of this period, a further audit took place, and CKBFD obtained official authorization to keep its concessions in that province.

AJBS, a youth NGO that advocates for social well-being and has been a longtime critic of CKBFD, expressed outrage at the decision. “There need to be sanctions!” said AJBS president Roger Nzumbu. “We spoke out about the minister of environment suspending the problematic concessions before returning their logging permits. And now this …”

Nzumbu and his organization are currently writing a public report and preparing a complaint in hopes of compelling CKBFD to respect the law as it logs these concessions. Like APEM, they say they’ve seen no changes in the company’s behavior in response to the series of audits: CKBFD continues to deforest swaths of Mongala with excessive logging, and export the timber to China.

However, according to Wombi, the adviser to the environment minister, this situation should soon change. At a national “State of the Forests” meeting held in January 2024, the issue of stiffer penalties for illegal logging was raised. Wombi said he hopes that new, more binding laws will soon be passed to dissuade companies from violating the law.

DRC logging contracts suspended as audit uncovers serious violations

Banner image: A truck drags a tree trunk along a forest access road in the DRC. Image courtesy of Global Witness.

A version of this story was first published here on our French site on Apr. 12, 2024.

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