Top: A team of FDA staff in a town hall meeting with affected forest leaders in Tima Town. The DayLight/Esau J. Farr
By Esau J. Farr
TIMA TOWN, Gbarpolu County – The Forestry Development Authority (FDA) has initiated the process of establishing a new logging concession. The FDA has engaged with the communities that would be affected in Kongba District, Gbarpolu County, near the Gola Park forest management contract area, specifically “D” or FMC-D.
The FDA is conducting social and economic surveys in the area in line with the Forestry Reform Law. The law requires the regulator to seek local people’s consent for possible commercial logging activities. It also mandates the FDA to conduct an inventory of all species of the forest that qualify for a concession agreement.
“Government needs resources and if it must continue infrastructural development, we need to get those resources from the communities for the benefits of all of us,” says Rudolph Merab, the FDA Managing Director. “We want to see our communities developed. Our people in the rural area have been there for years in abject poverty. So, our intervention has to be real.”
FMCs are large-scale concessions signed between the government and logging companies. It covers at least 50,000 hectares of forestland and not more than 400,000 hectares for 25 years.
After the First and Second Liberian Civil Wars, Liberia’s forest cover area was divided into 26 large-scale contracts. They were labelled as FMC “A” to “Z”. This one in Gbarpolu and others were, however, not granted to companies due to technical reasons.
Currently, two of them are active—Geeblo Logging Company and Euro-Liberia Logging Company—according to the FDA’s records, with the rest inactive.
When completed, the Kongba-based concession would be the first since the initial ones over 15 years ago.
“The team that is here will talk with community people. They will go into the bush to check and find the different kinds of trees there,” Ekema Witherspoon, an FDA consultant, tells a town hall meeting in Tima Town, one of the landowning communities.
“They will take some people from here and work with the team that is coming from Monrovia because your children know the forest.”
Forest leaders of Kongba welcome the idea of commercial logging in their area.
“We don’t want any more parks in our district. The only thing we want is a company that will come and improve our living conditions,” says Blama Kanneh, Paramount Chief of Kongba District.
Other chiefs agree with Kanneh.
“For us to hear you today that you want to work with us for companies to come here, we are very happy,” says Aaron Momo, Zuie Clan Chief. “If you compare other counties in Liberia with Gbarpolu County, especially Kongba District, you will feel at for us here. Development is very slow here!”
Following the FDA’s field report, companies will have to bid for the forest through the Public Procurement Concession Commission (PPCC). The winner of the bid, after legislative approval, will sign a social agreement with the would-be affected communities.
But forestry campaigners dissent from the process. Jonathan Yiah, the head of forest governance of the Sustainable Development Institute (SDI), believes it is counterproductive. Yiah references the troubled history of large-scale logging concessions.
A 2013 Liberian government-commissioned report by the London-based Moore Stephens found all seven concessions, covering 1,007,239 hectares, had been illegally awarded.
Likewise, a 2024 review by the US-based Forest Trends found that all FMCs were noncompliant.
“The FDA should refrain from pursuing another forest management contract when nearly all existing contracts are either dormant or underperforming,” says Yiah.
“Instead, the FDA should focus on implementing the recommendations from the Liberia Forest Concession Review (Phase II) of 2024.” The review determined several large-scale logging contracts did not meet essential prequalification criteria, among others.
“Resolving these critical issues should take precedence over initiating another [large-scale logging concession],” Yiah adds.
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