The forests of Africa cover 520 million hectares and constitute more than 17 per cent of the world’s forests. They are largely concentrated in the tropical zones of Western and Central, Eastern and Southern Africa. With more than 109 million hectares of forests, Congo Kinshasa alone has more than 20 per cent of the region’s forest cover, while Northern Africa has little more than 9 per cent, principally along the coast of the western Mediterranean countries, according to FAO. This still, however, makes Africa one of the continents with the lowest forest cover rate.
African forests include dry tropical forests in the Sahel, Eastern and Southern Africa, humid tropical forests in Western and Central Africa montane forests, diverse sub-tropical forest and woodland formations in Northern Africa and the southern tip of the continent, as well as mangroves in the coastal zones.
Over the last 20 years, about 300 million hectares (six times the size of France) of mainly tropical forest have been converted into other land uses on a world-wide basis, such as farms and pasture or large-scale plantations of oil palm, rubber and other cash crops. Increasingly fragmented forests have become much more susceptible to fire than was ever thought possible: tens of millions of hectares of normally fire-resistant forest have been destroyed by catastrophic infernos in the Amazon, Central America, Indonesia, West Africa and Madagascar.
To the east, very little remains of Madagascar’s once magnificent tropical forests. Long isolated from mainland ecosystems, these forests are home to an exceptional number of plants and animals found nowhere else. Unfortunately, none of Madagascar’s forest fragments is large or natural enough to qualify as a frontier forest today.
Large blocks of intact natural forest do remain in Central Africa, particularly in Congo Kinshasa, Gabon, and Congo Brazzaville. In Congo Kinshasa, which contains more than half this region’s forest cover many forests remain intact, in part because the nation’s poor transportation system can’t easily handle timber and mineral exploitation. Some areas have fewer passable roads today than in 1960, the year the country became independent, and some frontiers have lost population during this period.
Tropical forest ecology
Tropical forests are the world’s ecosystems and reservoirs of biodiversity. In unspoiled tropical forests, the forest floor is fairly open with a layer of decomposing leaves and rotting branches covering mineral soils. Anywhere a large tree has fallen, lianas, vines and young trees crowd together in dense tangles. In rain forests, the intense precipitation washes away minerals and nutrients quickly, making anything about the cover of decomposing leaves and branches poor on nutrition. Plants, thus, must act quickly to recycle these nutrients bound in dying plants.
This is exactly what makes rainforests fragile ecosystems. If the vegetation cover is removed, the area is exposed to erosion and the washing out of minerals and nutrients, leaving a poor soil. Agriculturalists might burn the vegetation to bind the nutrition into the ground for some seasons, obtaining good yields, but after few years, nutrients have been washed out and the soil has become poor.
This degradation also makes it a timely process for a rich tropical forest to re-establish itself. Forest re-growth might be relatively quick, but biological production and biodiversity might take hundreds of years to re-establish.
The history of the African rainforests underlines this even more. Under the last ice age (until 10.000 years ago), climate in Africa was colder and dryer. Forests were fewer and smaller, and most forests were of a tropical montane type (with a significantly lesser biodiversity).
At the height of glaciations, rain forests were probably restricted to three main refuge areas, one in the north-eastern Congo basin, a second in Gabon, southern Cameroon and Bioko and a third in Liberia and Sierra Leone. From these core areas, the rainforests were allowed to spread as climate became more like today’s some 10, 000 years ago.
There is, however, still a notable difference in biodiversity between these core areas and those colonized by the rain forest during the next thousands of years. Rainforests of eastern Congo and the area of Gabon-Cameroon-Equatorial Guinea are by far the biologically rich areas of Africa.
The forest resource
Forests play an important economic role in many African countries. Forest products provide 6 per cent of GDP in Africa at large, the highest in the world. But the share of forest products in trade is only 2 per cent. This picture is, however, different on a country level. In Cameroon, for example, timber generates more than a quarter of the country’s non-petroleum export revenues, along with some US$ 60 million in taxes.
In 1996, logging enterprises directly employed more than 34,000 people in Cameroon. According to one government estimate, 55,000 people currently work in the logging sector, when indirect employment is factored in.
Forests provide a range of ecological, economic and social services to humans, including protection of water and soil resources. Forests also act as store-houses of carbon, much of which is released into
It is difficult to quantify the economic importance of these commodities, but a study by the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) estimates that they are an important source of cash revenue for local communities. Meat, bush mango, the bark and fruits of Garcinia cola, palm nuts, cola nuts, and the African pear were among the major cash suppliers.
The trade in these commodities especially is an important source of income for women. In Cameroon, over half of the log exports in 1998 came from five tree species that also generate non-timber commodities.
Forests also represent immense cultural values. African tropical forests are home to a large variety of peoples and ethnicities, which originate much of their cultural value set from their physical surroundings. Among the oldest peoples in Central Africa are forest hunter-gatherers, pejoratively known as “pygmies,” who immigrated to the region several thousand years ago.
These groups rely primarily on the tropical forests for their livelihood, medicine, and shelter. Their cultural identity is rooted not only in language, kinship, oral history, traditional practices but also in their identification with a particular area of the forest.
Eco-tourism is also providing a growing income for the people. Before the Rwandan genocide and the conflict in Congo Kinshasa, the national parks in that zone containing mountain gorillas became a major tourist attraction. In Rwanda, traffic was that high, that visits had to be reserved. In Guinea, before the conflict in neighbouring Liberia, the border mountain Mount Nimba, with its rich montane forests, was a tourist attraction. Several countries outside Africa now are attracting tourists to their famous forests. Rainforest tourism is probably one of the least exploited resources in Africa, with great potentials.
Financial investment in the tourist industry should not exceed investment in logging, but might require investing in political change in some countries. Tourists won’t come to war-ridden countries like the Congo, nor will they go to insecure dictatorships like Equatorial Guinea.
Deforestation
Now, rainforests are being depleted rapidly as the tall trees and the soils can be exploited profitably on a short term. Montane forests have suffered from cultivators clearing the hillsides and transforming them to open woodland pastures or coffee plantations. The soils of the deciduous forests have been particularly attractive to cultivators, who have cleared very wide areas. Logging of large areas is still depriving Africa of some of its last unspoiled forests.
Chr. Hennig is the News Editor of afrol news (African Online News).
