China Saps Mozambique of Timber Resources

By: Richard BeharJune 1, 2008

China in Africa | photo illustration by Plamen Petkov

In a 4x4 vehicle arranged by a local group that monitors Mozambique's forests, I travel to Maganja da Costa in the once-heavily-wooded Zambezia province, the country's poorest. Maganja is a tiny district, a five-hour drive along tortuous, dusty roads -- traveled by villagers on bicycles with huge bags of firewood on their heads -- from Quelimane, one of the country's main port cities. Quelimane was journey's end for Livingstone on his trek from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean in 1856. But it is the start of my trans-African journey. My destination is a field office of Madeiras Alman, a unit of a Taiwanese conglomerate and one of the largest exporters of timber from Mozambique back to mainland China.

The office turns out to be nothing more than an unmarked trailer in the middle of a forest. A hand-painted sign nailed to a nearby stick reads Alman. The trailer is vacant, but within minutes of arriving, I am surrounded by dozens of angry locals demanding to be paid. "They think you're the Chinese owner," explains Gil, a forest technician acting as my guide. After explaining through my translator that I'm not the owner, or even Chinese, I manage to calm the men down. They say they'd been stiffed for work performed -- a common complaint in the forestry trade here. They'd each been promised $120 for three months of backbreaking labor -- lifting logs the size of girders by hand onto trucks, in a forest littered with land mines left over from a civil war -- but were paid only $25. They've been showing up every day for months in a futile search for managers who never appear.

They are short men, under 5 feet tall, and wear ripped clothes that are likely Chinese knockoffs. A man named Pedro sports a Sean John shirt, another an orange David Beckham tee, while a third reads Vogue Paris. One man's cap informs me that This is the closest thing to a handyman this family's got. Many are barefoot, with bloodshot eyes and missing teeth, flies moving in and out of their mouths.

One man identifies himself as Pinto, the chief, and says they are from the Alukadi tribe, which has been in the region for centuries. They never signed any paperwork with their Asian bosses, he tells me, but they yell and scream, promising to "go to war" unless they are paid. "We have the power to remove this office," one man shouts. In fact, they have no power at all.

"Let China sleep," Napoleon famously remarked, "for when she awakes, she will shake the world." Today, China is not only roused, she is devouring the world for breakfast. In just a few years, it has become the world's top consumer of timber -- as well as zinc (with 30% of global demand), iron and steel (27%), lead (25%), aluminum (23%), and copper (22%), along with nickel, tin, coal, cotton, and rubber. The entire sub-Sahara currently uses one-twentieth the amount of steel China does. And although China is the planet's second-biggest consumer of oil, behind the United States, it's gaining fast.

One-fifth of humankind lives in China, and an increasing number of those people are seeking a consumerist version of xiaokang, or "well-being." If their per capita GDP (now about $6,500) approaches South Korean levels in the next 20 years, as it is on track to do, Chinese consumption of aluminum and iron ore will increase fivefold; oil, eightfold; and copper, ninefold. As Sunter, the author and futurologist, puts it, "China is putting 1.3 billion people through an industrial revolution with neither colonies nor substantial indigenous resources besides coal. The only way it can do this is by establishing long-term supply contracts with resource-rich countries."

In sub-Saharan Africa, the Chinese seem to be everywhere: clearing trees in Mozambique, drilling for oil in Sudan, digging in copper mines in Zambia, opening textile factories in Kenya, prospecting for uranium in Zimbabwe, buying cobalt in the Congo, laying expressways in Angola. They have launched a satellite from Nigeria and built phone networks in rural Ghana and a dozen other countries. Hospitals, water pipelines, dams, railways, airports, hotels, soccer stadiums, parliament buildings -- nearly all of them linked, in some way, to China's gaining access to raw materials. A $5 billion, 50-year government fund to encourage Chinese companies to invest in Africa. A $9 billion loan package for Congo. A $5.6 billion stake (20%) in Standard Bank, the biggest on the continent. And in April, $40 billion -- plus in export-credit guarantees to help fund investment in Nigeria, Africa's biggest oil producer.

From Issue 126 | June 2008

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