Kong Chiong Lok, known as “King Kong”, is the face of the global logging industry; a middle-aged, cheerful Malaysian working right on the equator deep in the Gabonese forests, cutting African wood with American machinery to make flooring and plywood for the Chinese and European markets.
His company, Bordamur, the biggest logging firm in the world, has already stripped much of Malaysia and the Solomon Islands, worked its way through large parts of Cameroon and Papua New Guinea, and is now deep in Russia, Guyana and the Congo basin — the largest and most biodiverse forest left intact in the world, excluding the Amazon.
As one of two Bordamur concession managers in Gabon, Kong’s job is to extract legally the most valuable timber from a vast 1 000km2 rectangle of the Minkebe forest, a 32 280km2 area populated by elephants, gorillas, buffalo and antelope.
In seven years, Bordamur has constructed more than 400km of logging roads, taken out approximately 500 000 of the big-gest and best trees, and next year will move on to its slightly smaller neighbouring concession on the edge of the Minkebe National Park, which covers 23% of the forest.
According to Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth International and the Environmental Investigations Agency, Bordamur has a poor record in its global logging empire. In Indonesia it is accused of using the army to threaten local communities; in Russia it has been fined repeatedly for violations of regulations and environmental laws; and in Papua New Guinea it has been accused of human rights abuses on many occasions. In Gabon, however, it is widely considered to be the most responsible of all the companies.
The process is called selective logging, but it’s hardly sustainable. Research suggests that about 15% to 20% of the forest is completely destroyed just getting out the three or four trees that are felled on average in each hectare. No replanting is done and the foresters work only to the market, taking out whatever trees they have orders for.
Five years ago there was huge demand for Gabon’s redwoods; now Bordamur is returning to previously logged areas to harvest the paler species that only a few years ago was considered unsaleable. As world demand rises, and especially as China develops, other, cheaper woods are becoming saleable and the forest is being logged out.
Over the course of the next 30 to 50 years, 83% of Gabon’s pristine forest will be selectively logged, mainly by European-based companies — some of which have been fined substantially for running logging operations in protected areas and taking illegal wood.
Pauwel de Wachter, Minkebe project leader for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Gabon, says that the scale of the logging is going to be shocking. Gabon, he says, has anything up to 17 000 elephants living in its forests, more even than in Kenya. “The whole forest will change immensely and inevitably,” he says.
The good news is that two years ago, in a move that surprised many people, President Omar Bongo decided to create 13 large national parks, covering 11% of the country. Some overlap existing logging concessions, but conservationists welcomed the initiative, which is backed by at least $5-million as part of the Congo Basin Initiative, announced at the Johannesburg World Summit in 2002.
According to both the WWF and Shell Gabon, the country’s forests have remained intact largely because of oil, discovered more than 25 years ago off the coast. Most of the government’s energies went into developing the oil sector and timber exploitation was not seen as a priority; from more than 80% of Gabon’s national income, it accounts for only 13% now. Three million tonnes of wood are exported a year, but this is likely to increase as the oil dries up.
The park authorities, the WWF and the government have drawn up a legal document, signed by Bordamur and local villages, to try to prevent hunting in the forest.
“It is good for us,” says Kong. “It is good to conserve forests, too. No more wood in Malaysia; all national parks now. So we come here.”