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Regional overview: Africa

Except for the Congo Basin, Africa’s frontier forests have largely been destroyed, primarily by loggers and by farmers clearing land for agriculture. In West Africa, nearly 90 percent of the original moist forest is gone, and what remains is heavily fragmented and degraded. Today, West African frontiers are restricted to one patch in Cote d’Ivoire and another along the border between Nigeria and Cameroon.

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 today.

Large blocks of intact natural forest do remain in Central Africa, particularly in Zaire, Gabon, and the Congo. In Zaire 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. [55] 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.

Today, most of Africa’s remaining frontier forests are at risk. The two major threats are logging and commercial hunting to meet growing urban demand for bushmeat. (Overhunting removes populations of key species that help maintain natural forest ecosystems.) In Central Africa, over 90 percent of all logging occurs in primary forest one of the highest ratios of any region in the world. [56] In some areas, logging itself causes relatively little damage because only a few high-value tree species are removed. Still, logging roads open up a forest to hunters, would-be farmers and other profit-seekers. One region warranting special concern is eastern Zaire: Civil unrest in Rwanda, Burundi, Sudan, and Zaire has driven hundreds of thousands of people into this area, where they escalate demands on the forest.

Threatened frontiers include:

Frontier:
1. Tai National Park and surrounding forests
Forest type: Tropical
Geographic location: Cote d’Ivoire
Threats: Logging, agricultural clearing, hunting, potential invasion by war refugees
At Risk: The only remaining large and relatively intact piece of a forest block that once covered more than 830,000 square kilometers in eight countries west of the Dahomey Gap (a natural savanna that divides West Africa’s forests into two distinct sections).

Frontier:
2. Cross River and Korup National Parks and surrounding forests
Forest type: Tropical
Geographic location: Border between Nigeria and Cameroon
Threats: Logging by Asian and European timber companies in unprotected forests, new settlements, agricultural clearing, hunting
At risk: Rich in plant species, this forest may provide a wealth of potential new drugs and industrial products. Extracts from the newly discovered Ancistrocladus korupensis vine, for example, offer hope for a new AIDS treatment.

Frontier:
3. Eastern Zaire forests
Forest type: Tropical
Geographic location: Zaire
Threats: Agricultural clearing, invasion by throngs of war refugees
At risk: The greatest biological diversity of any forests on the continent. Also, the Ituri forest (found within this frontier) is home to many of Africa’s remaining pygmy peoples.

References and notes

55. Estimate of the proportion of the Congo Basin’s forest cover located in Zaire is based on figures in: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Forest Resources Assessment 1990: Global Synthesis, FAO Forestry Paper 124 (Rome: FAO, 1995), Annex 1, p. 28.

56. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Forest Resources Assessment 1990: Tropical Countries, FAO Forestry Paper 112, (Rome: FAO, 1993), Annex 1, Table 5a.