Source: Do You Know Where Your Charcoal Comes From? | The New Republic
Nigeria’s forests are being decimated to make charcoal for cookouts in Europe and the United States.
ROBIN HAMMOND/PANOS PICTURES/REDUXCharcoal production in Lagos, Nigeria
Two men dropped their tools and fled on foot from an approaching motorbike. They abandoned their own motorcycle, yellow jugs of water, two hoes, and several charred lumps of wood. Nearby, wisps of smoke leaked from soil mounds. Further afield lay bare roots of freshly felled trees. They had been making charcoal, the same way people have done for years, stretching back into prehistory: Cut down trees; gather the logs and branches into piles; cover them with earth; light a fire underneath; and let it slowly burn for about a week to produce a fuel that burns hotter and discharges less smoke than wood does.
This charcoal produced from the receding forest at Agyana, an agrarian community on the edge of Nigeria’s capital territory Abuja, is then packaged in bags and sold to consumers all over the world for their barbecue grills, many of them unaware of the origin. It’s also in high demand locally, where urban households buy it from kiosks to cook their meals. The producers, mostly young men, invade the forests in droves in search of income. In Agyana, the charcoal producers have formed an association. The two men who fled, association chairman Gimba Abubakar explained, ran from him because they did not pay the association’s levies.
Nigeria lost nearly half of its forest area between 2007 and 2017, according to the World Bank’s Little Green Data Book. In 2017, the staggering deforestation forced environmental policymakers to recommend a de facto ban on charcoal export by ceasing to issue the permits required to produce charcoal for export legally. But the following year, with this policy still in place, other countries’ import of Nigerian charcoal grew by 34 percent, according to Comtrade, the United Nations export and import database. Charcoal use for pleasure, rather than subsistence, seems to be increasing: In 2020, the United States alone imported over 158 million kilograms of charcoal from various countries, 42 percent more than in 2019 and more than twice the amount a decade ago, in 2010.
Africa accounted for about two-thirds of global wood charcoal production in 2018, with dire consequences for the continent’s carbon-absorbing forests. Deforestation is frequently blamed on local dependence on wood fuels, in addition to land cleared for farming, timber, and construction. But there is also another factor: illicit charcoal export to countries in Europe and North America with abundant modern energy sources, consuming charcoal for leisure and novelty. And because illicit charcoal export is hard to track, very little is known about the extent of the issue.
In 2014, Nigeria started requiring charcoal exporters to obtain a permit from the Federal Department of Forestry by submitting, among other things, a reforestation plan for their area of production. But rampant deforestation continued, hence the 2017 decision to stop issuing permits entirely. The 2017 policy shift doesn’t seem to have had the desired effect either. Nigerian official charcoal export figures don’t match international charcoal import figures: According to U.N. Comtrade, countries around the world reported importing more than $91 million worth of Nigerian charcoal in 2018 alone and more than $80 million in 2019, while the country reported just $4.5 million of charcoal export in 2018 and about half that amount in 2019.
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