Rosewood plunder in Guinea Bussau

During the March-May cashew nut harvesting
season, it is normal to see heavy trucks line Amílcar Cabral
Avenue in Bissau, Guinea-Bissau's capital, waiting to
offload their cargo onto ships. But when they line up all
year long, suspicion is raised, especially when demand for
the country's cashews has plummeted.
From interior regions of Guinea-Bissau, the trucks openly
haul tree trunks, said Constantino Correia, an agro-
engineer and former director of the country's forest
management agency. The cargo, mainly African rosewood,
is destined for China, according to Abílio Rachid Said of the
government Institute of Biodiversity and Protected Areas
(IBAP).
Environmental activists have been denouncing illegal
logging in Guinea-Bissau for some years, but now it may be
too late "as we risk not having [the African rosewood] in the
coming years," warned Said.
"It is a type of wood in extremely high demand in the
Chinese market," he said. Worth hundreds of thousands of
dollars, Bissau-Guinean rosewood is used, among other
things, to make Hongmu furniture, red-coloured luxury
Chinese furniture replicating the styles of the Qing period.
Various reports by the Environmental Investigation Agency
(EIA) indicate that China's craze for rosewood has already
driven dramatic increases in illegal logging elsewhere in the
world.
Following the April 2012 military coup, rule of law almost
completely broke down in Guinea-Bissau, heightening
corruption and fanning illegal and wanton deforestation.
"There has always been illegal cutting of trees," Fodé Mané,
president of Human Rights Network in Guinea-Bissau, told
IRIN. "The difference is that it wasn't as abusive as it is
now."
He pointed out that protests by affected local communities
worried about the loss of the forests and source of their
livelihood have resulted in intimidation and abuse by the
National Guard (in charge of internal security) and the
military.
Poverty and plunder
Guinea-Bissau's latest crisis also drove up misery for its
mainly rural population, as donors froze funds, while the
prices of its main export commodity, cashew nuts, plunged
due to falling demand. Eighty percent of the country's 1.6
million people are involved in cashew nut production.