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Zaire Environmental Trends
In the last decade, Africa's rain forests have been
destroyed
at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world,
including the
well-publicized Amazon region in South America; Nigeria,
for
example, is now 90 percent deforested. Environmental
degradation
has been less of a problem in Zaire than elsewhere in
sub-Saharan
Africa. Nevertheless, although still 86 percent intact in
the early
1990s, Zaire's vast forests will be increasingly at risk.
A major
threat has been the signing of contracts with foreign
logging
corporations. Some 37 percent of the total exploitable
area of
Zaire's rain forest has already been designated as timber
concessions.
The most intense logging to date has been in Bas-Zaïre
Region
in the hinterlands of the capital of Kinshasa. Logging
itself
disrupts the forest ecology; worse, logging roads carved
out of
forest to export felled timer have become avenues for
immigration
into the forest by poor farmers who clear and burn more
forest for
fields. In 1993 one analyst reported that there was
virtually no
primary rain forest left in Bas-Zaïre.
In the east, the appropriation of land for ranching and
plantations in the Kivu highlands has simultaneously
reduced forest
hectarage and increased the intensity of use of the
remaining land
by the existing population. The Ituri Forest of
northeastern Zaire
has also experienced substantial recent immigration by
growing
populations in need of fertile soil for their crops.
Extensive
forest destruction has been reported as a consequence.
Data as of December 1993
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