Derisory Resources

The other challenge in these remote areas relates to corruption and the lack of state efficiency. In its tiny office in Lomié (Département of Haut Nyong) covered with posters about the fight against poaching and corruption, the chief officer Léon Mtapié Djouedjeu lets out a deep sigh. His dream as a water and forest engineer is recorded in the service manual which he slips, somewhat timidly, under his visitors’ eyes. In it are listed in black and white the new security duties recently assigned to his office. It is up to him and his team to carry out the tasks of an administrative nature and in the field in all the surrounding forests. But what team exactly? The man is alone, desperately alone, monitoring a territory of 13 000 square kilometres, that is almost half the size of Belgium! He can just about count on the group of  'interns', permanent unpaid team-members. His work vehicle? A motorcycle that regularly breaks down. He has no other choice than to ask the operators - the very ones he is supposed to inspect - to provide him with a vehicle...

Although corruption is condemned in all official discourse (as soon as you get off the aeroplane in the arrivals lounge of Yaoundé airport), it is still not combatted enough. Many official bodies and international observers see it as the number one scourge of Cameroon. 'Transparency International  (Ed: the most vigilant NGO in this area) has awarded Cameroon the title of the world corruption champion three times in the last ten years', recalls Jean Nke Ndih, researcher at the Centre d’Etudes Environnementales et Sociales of the Université de Yaoundé 1 (1). 'A very good indicator of forest-related issues...’ This phenomenon is closely linked to poverty which is particularly striking in remote forest areas. Today half of all Cameroonians live with less than two dollars a day and the country comes 144th out of 177 in the United Nations Human Development Index. An unenviable fate.

From the beginning of the 1990s, pushed by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the country undertook a major reform of its forestry legislation: thirty year felling rotation, an end to the forced movement of forest ethnic populations - particularly the Pygmies -, replacing private sale by calls to tender for the award of concessions, the creation of a 'community forest' status (managed by villagers) and so on. So many good resolutions, the aim of which was to ensure a fairer distribution of the fruits of the forest to the population as a whole, and hence to tackle poverty more effectively.

Alas! Ten to fifteen years later and, despite the introduction of several waves of reforms, the results remain mixed. Already in 2006, European researchers made the harsh observation that each year 540,000 cubic metres of timber leave the Cameroonian forest without being monitored or tracked by the State:  a quarter of national production. In the following four years, the conclusions of a mission to oversee governance, co-funded by the European Commission were no more positive. Although lawlessness has declined markedly within forest concessions awarded to foreign companies and although forest management plans are becoming the norm, the rest of the activities carried out in the forest seem to take place in the greatest anarchy: laundering of timber in community forests, lack of inspections at the key transport points, corruption and interventionism of the administrative and political authorities, ineffectiveness of the Brigade Nationale de Contrôle (National Monitoring Brigade), failings in the chain of custody, widespread tax fraud, fines rarely paid... A real litany which is condemned in the reports of the Observatoire Indépendant des Forêts (Independent Forest Observatory).

(1) « Déforestation : causes, acteurs et enjeux» (Deforestation, Causes, Stakeholders and Issues), Centre Tricontinental, septembre 2008