Forest City Relations

The Problem

Why focus on the urban factor? The future of tropical forest areas in Central Africa depends largely on how they are exploited by urban masses and how they are managed by city-based elites. Urban-related problems and their influences on tropical forests is a very important but widely neglected topic. Integrating the urban factor in tropical forest conservation and development projects is crucial because:

there are more people living in urban areas than in rural ones, (e.g. Gabon, 73%);


the number of very large cities is growing rapidly: more than 70 Sub-Saharan cities with one million inhabitants are forecast for 2020 (compared with 18 in 1990);


use of wood, game and other forest products by city dwellers appears to be unsustainable;


urban behaviour patterns which result in deforestation (especially peri-urban deforestation) provoke serious ecological and social problems;


in times of economic hardship, urban populations exert increasing pressure on forest resources: the situation is exacerbated when state systems no longer provide basic services.

Consequently, as human activity relating to urban expansion disturbs the delicate balance between populations and nature, many elements of Central Africa's rich biodiversity are likely to disappear before locally appropriate solutions are found. Meanwhile, living conditions will continue to decline. It will be a major challenge to reverse these trends.

Combined with these quantifiable factors is a somewhat more ambiguous consideration: when official socio-economic data is analysed, conclusions tend to indicate that urban populations are unable to sustain themselves: earnings are not sufficient to buy food or fuel or pay for lodgings and transportation and service costs exceed cash availability. Nonetheless, not only do urban populations survive and maintain spending habits, but their numbers continue to increase considerably. This implies that there are real or perceived economic opportunities in cities. It is likely that some economic opportunities do in fact exist through the somewhat mysterious mechanisms of "informal" or "parallel" economy and that forest products play a major role here.

Objectives

Initial Phase:

Improve knowledge on how urban populations interact with their different types of forest environments, especially in expanding peri-urban areas, by taking into account:

urban demographics,


urban economic activities and their rural support systems,


social organisation,


national development levels and the role of the state in providing basic services,


international and bilateral development and conservation schemes,


relations which city dwellers have with their forest-based counterparts;


Continue to explore dynamic approaches to sharing information on the Consortium, partner and Network levels.

Subsequent Phase:

Formulate action-oriented recommendations as to how African city dwellers themselves, in the framework of regional, national and international development programmes, can help improve living conditions in urban areas while diminishing unsustainable use of tropical forest resources. These recommendation must be pragmatic and should build on existing or potential opportunities for sustainable development.

Topic Originality

While numerous studies and programmes have devoted considerable research attention to the international priorities of development, maintenance of biodiversity and Third World urbanisation - and some have analysed combinations of two of these issues - no work to date has attempted to look at all three problems in a single theoretical paradigm. The forest-city interface component of APFT takes these three factors into account and thus has the potential to make viable action-oriented recommendations based on holistic analysis.

Background

The APFT Terms of Reference raise the following questions with respect to urban populations living in tropical forest areas:

Component A (Improving knowledge and increasing R&D capacities on the EU and ACP levels in the area of ethnoecology) (annex I, p. 4):

what impact does economic crisis and urban growth have on forest ecosystems?


how important are forest products to the urban economy and the urban diet?


what influence does the urban mental representation of the forest, its products and its inhabitants have on development and conservation projects?

investigate how urban demands influence forest-based activities;


investigate representation and use of forest products by city dwellers, the commercialisation and exchange of these products which links the two zones, as well as the social relations between city and forest dwellers.

analyse socio-economic and psychological impact of cities.

On the basis of the above, the following guidelines were elaborated and circulated to potential institutional partners in Central Africa in the first few months of APFT:

Concerning the socio-economic aspects of forest products in the urban context, research-actions to be taken include:

inventorying volume at formal market areas and along informal commercial networks;


establishing their real costs compared with alternative products;


identifying and making contact with the social actors participating in the chain of exchange;


establishing the ethnicity of these social actors;


establishing the ethnicity and socio-economic level of consumers of forest products;


investigating gender roles.

On the level of mental representation, investigations should be made into how city dwellers perceive:

the forest space;


forest products;


conservation rhetoric and actions;


the ecology;


the environment;


wildlife;


hinterland land tenure systems;


forest peoples (hunters-gatherers, shifting cultivators, river people);


professionals or semi-professionals whose livelihoods are linked to forest exploitation (hunters, poachers, bush meat traders, those working in the timber sector, etc.).

Other dimensions where understanding perceptions is important are:

human relationships between city dwellers and their forest-based family;


how city dwellers identify themselves vis-a-vis their forest origins;


how they perceive the question of land use in surrounding forest areas.

An EU DG XI feasibility study had already addressed a number of these issues: Theodore Trefon, City Dwellers and the Central African Tropical Forest: Resources Use and Perceptions, Brussels, June 1994.

Ongoing Actions

Before being able to formulate concrete and meaningful policy recommendations concerning the challenge of development with conservation, more knowledge is needed about how and why city dwellers use and perceive the forest. Investigations have consequently started in Kinshasa, Libreville and Yaoundé. From a scientific angle, choice of these cities was based on a series of comparative and contrasting variables: origin, demographics, nature and intensity of urbanisation process, level of development and state of infrastructure, proximity to forest, social and political situation. From an organisational angle the choice of these cities was based on the existence of institutional partners and the presence of other APFT or APFT-related activities.

Studies focus on fuelwood (Kinshasa and Yaoundé), perceptions (Kinshasa and Yaoundé), rattan (Yaoundé) and an analysis of economic relations between Libreville and the Estuary Province.

While many other studies have been undertaken on forest products, those undertaken by APFT contribute to understanding specific local problems by emphasising socio-economic needs on the one hand and socio-environmental impacts on the other and by placing this within a comparative context. They also address the need for still greater monitoring of information required for appropriate decision-making. The perception studies are original and vital for policy development if urban attitudes and behaviour patterns in relation to the forest environment are to be modified. Very little is known about how city dwellers perceive the forest which is prerequisite to being able to suggest awareness solutions which are very different in an African context than in a Western one. All of these studies contribute to local capacity-building.

These studies, combined with an analysis of work in the areas of urbanisation, urban social and economic organisation, development issues, environmental protection, extraction and commercialisation of NTPFs, etc., tend to indicate that while there is a strong cultural attachment to forest products, recourse to their use is best explained by economic determinism.

The problem of resource depletion and peri-urban deforestation is also considered within the much broader context of regional economic development which is increasingly hampered as the African continent continues to be marginalised in the new world order. Transnational corporations and international trade and financial institutions increasingly influence development policy without manifesting sufficient moral and political will to constructively help African institutions and NGOs.

As data is being gathered, a specific forest-city data base is being constituted. Documents on forest products (game, fuelwood, other NTFPs), African urban issues (urbanisation, "crisis", sustainability, origins, demographic shifts) and perceptions are accumulated at the Coordination Unit and entered into the general APFT bibliography with the label "ville-forêt". References of works not available in our documentation centre are also listed.

Actions for 1997

Research

In addition to continued support for ongoing SAC/JAC projects which is justifiable from a scientific as well as a capacity-building point of view, two new dimensions will be analysed in a first phase and eventually explored by local researchers.

The first is to develop forest-city interface activities in intermediary cities. This is important because it will help clarify the long and complex flow of exchange between "productive" forest areas and "predatory" megapoles. It is also a means of analysing on a manageable scale the threshold between sustainable resource use and excessive extraction in the context of land carrying capacity issues, i.e., what are the conditions whereby human settlements begin to exert unsustainable pressures on different types of forest lands and resources. Intermediary cities, moreover, can be considered as alternatives to the more wasteful, less manageable larger cities. They can contribute to feeding these latter and are probably less detrimental to the environmental resource base as they are closer to traditional land and resource use practices.

Research proposals have been elaborated in these contexts for:

Ouesso, Congo (M. Thuret): spatial organisation, land carrying capacities and resource use;


Ebolowa, Cameroon (S. Bouly): food supply and commercial exchanges between the Ntem Province and Ebolowa as well as Ebolowa's role as transit point between the Ntem and Yaoundé;


Bukavu, Zaire (M. Romainville): financing strategies (tontines and mutuelles) which influence how informal urban economies can transform forest ecosystems;


Kikwit, Zaire (R. Mangala): economic crisis pushes city dwellers to rely increasingly on forest resources. But what happens when the erstwhile forest hinterland comes to resemble savannah?

A JUE researcher (H. Solly) intends to develop a dimension relating to forest-city relations. In the context of social mobility it has been observed that there is a large "floating population" which is apparently neither city-based nor village-based. The question to be addressed pertains to how these individuals perceive both environments and what their specific activities are when in town or village.

Workshop

A regional brainstorming session is scheduled for the spring of 1997 at the APFT base in Yaoundé. Participants will include those SAC/JAC already undertaking forest-city interface studies. Researchers from other Yaoundé-based organisations such as IITA, CIFOR or ASB could also be invited.

Website

A Forest-City section on the APFT website is being planned. It could include:

Revised Concept Paper,


Forest-City label of APFT Bibliography,


Profiles and research activities of forest-city SAC/JAC and SUE/JUE,


Information on email discussion possibilities,


Bulletin board,


Mission Reports,


DG XI report City Dwellers and the Central African Tropical Forest: Resources Use and Perceptions.

Comments can be sent to Mike Fischer Updated 20th August 1997 by Jane Bex