Every day, in the late afternoon, women carrying sacks of branches on their backs leave the bush and take a road south of the Equator. Men pass by on motorbikes, one after the other, carrying sacks of coal. Boys walk with a log slung over their shoulders, as if carrying a baguette.
In the midst of the trees, Debay Ipalensenda drops the ax and joins this parade, which is slowly destroying one of the most important landscapes in the world, all to cook a meal.
The scene plays out not just on this stretch of road in Congo, but across the entire 3.36 million square kilometers of rainforest in the Congo Basin, the second largest in the world.
It is a ritual that, by its ubiquity, is a tragedy. And not only for generations of people who have had no other means of preparing food than cooking it with wood, but also for the entire planet, as forests, by absorbing carbon, are essential to slowing global warming, but here tree by tree and, in some cases, branch by branch.
Congo’s logging industry uproots precious old trees for use in furniture and in building houses, contributing to the destruction of forests — especially when they are not properly regulated. In addition, entire swaths of forests are burned to make way for agriculture.
But the encroachment of the forest by ordinary people in search of cooking supplies is also surprisingly destructive. This is in part because felling and burning trees releases stores of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, where it acts as a blanket, trapping the sun’s heat and warming the planet.
But in addition, cooking with firewood and charcoal — wood that is burned until it is reduced to almost pure carbon, which burns longer and at higher temperatures — affects air quality with the particles emitted in the smoke.
Nearly 90% of Congo’s 89.5 million people rely on firewood and charcoal for cooking, according to World Bank estimates. Congo lost more than 480,000 hectares of primary forest in 2021, mostly with residents clearing land for agriculture and gathering wood for fire and charcoal, according to Global Forest Watch.
Ipalensenda is part of the expanding trade that supplies a growing population. As he cut down a tree trunk, the thud of his homemade ax echoed through the forest. He didn’t want to be working there, in the woods, where he spins the ax for hours on end. He already had bigger plans.
“My dream? Well…”, he sighed and paused, leaning on the axe, while a yellow butterfly flew close to his face. “My dream was to be a doctor.”
Ipalensenda, 33, graduated from high school and planned to attend university. Then his father got sick and died. Suddenly, it was up to him to support the family.
“Now I’m a coal worker,” he said.
The job was one of the few jobs available to him in the small communities of mud-brick houses that line the edge of the forest. After all, everyone needs to cook their meals somehow.
Most of the destruction of Congo’s forests is a matter of survival. Despite its vast wooded landscape, rushing rivers and abundance of precious stones, minerals and metals, the country is one of the poorest in the world. It is also one of the least electrified.
The power grid barely exists in this nation of stark inequalities. That’s true even hundreds of kilometers from Ipalensenda, in the capital, Kinshasa, where the gleaming hotels and nightclubs hide the reality: even here, in one of Africa’s largest cities, relatively few people use gas or electric stoves.
“I have electricity, and it changed my life,” said Israel Monga, one of the lucky ones, who was out on the street one sultry afternoon. But Monga has connections: he is an electrician who works for the Société Nationale d’Électricité, the national electric company.
The story is different for almost everything else.
Less than 17% of the country has access to electricity, according to the World Bank, and those who do are used to problems. Small flames regularly erupt from the few electrical wires covering Kinshasa, and blackouts are common. Earlier this year, more than two dozen people died when a power line broke and fell in a crowded market.
Bakeries where baguettes and a doughy cassava bread called fufu are made often rely on charcoal or wood for baking. As are the stalls selling the popular dish, chicken mayonnaise with a spicy mix of onions and peppers. And the same is true of countless people who cook at home.
Most Kinshasa residents rely on twigs and briquettes that are hauled into the city in trucks every day, the product of countless charcoal burners and wood gatherers raiding forests in rural areas.
Congo has huge clean energy potential. Some researchers believe that the Congo River, which winds through the country, could be used to supply the entire continent. The government has been trying to put more hydroelectric facilities on the grid for decades.
However, a plan to create more dams, which could double the capacity of China’s Three Gorges, has stalled, in part because the project is mired in disputes between international companies bidding for the work. The current hydroelectric system is in ruins and is poorly managed.
Meanwhile, politicians, academics, activists, global financial institutions and businessmen are trying to find solutions to rid families of coal. Some projects provide clean energy to several communities across the country. Some are designed to teach residents how to build ovens in which charcoal is made with less wood, or how to make eco-friendly charcoal from organic waste.
But none of this reached Ipalensenda. He enters the forest daily, snaking barefoot for hours, between trees in swampy terrain. Halfway through the course with thigh-high water, in an irregular forest where groups of trees have already been cut down.
“We were taught that by cutting down the forest the oxygen will disappear,” he said. “It worries me, of course, but what can you do when you see that the only way to feed your family is to cut down trees? There’s no other option.”
Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves
