Kamalo is a small urban settlement on the road connecting Makeni, capital of the Bombali region, to Kamakwie, capital of the Karene district, in the far north of Sierra Leone, a few kilometres from the border with Guinea. The town consists of a handful of clay houses and corrugated iron shacks that fade from the roadside into the mangrove forest, giving way to savannah dotted with small traders astride old motorbikes struggling under the weight of large baskets of fruit, very young sun-scorched herdsmen, beggars, war veterans, migrants.

Around 2 in the morning, a thunderous roar of approaching engines breaks the nocturnal quiet and, shortly afterwards, a convoy of articulated lorries and large flatbed trucks emerges from the darkness to pass through Kamalo and continue towards the major cities — first Makeni, then the capital Freetown. On the beds of the moving vehicles, slender figures with covered faces can be glimpsed, huddled in the shadows, alert as nocturnal animals. Beneath them, stretching the full length of the trailers and concealed under large PVC sheets, lies the true wealth of the Sierra Leonean people: timber from the forest. None of the inhabitants seems to notice the racket of the convoy passing through; no one takes the trouble to check who or what has disturbed the small town's sleep. In five minutes, it is all over.

A dying forest

Sierra Leone has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world, according to the Environmental Performance Index 2024, compiled by Yale University and Columbia University in collaboration with the World Economic Forum and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission. And Global Forest Watch, the platform that monitors the world's forests in real time, reports that since the turn of the century the country has lost more than 35 per cent of its total forest cover and 14 per cent of its rainforests — invaluable reservoirs of biodiversity and key components in climate regulation processes.

Deforestation is a scourge that appears incurable — an extractive practice that has already translated, for small rural communities, into the effective inaccessibility of water, a resource closely tied to the forest, and of seeds, which in many parts of the country represent a genuine medium of exchange and an irreplaceable source of sustenance. Although the young Sierra Leonean population has recently begun to develop a profound awareness of the importance of managing their own natural resources — historically the source of brutal disputes and civil wars — institutions still struggle to implement an action plan that includes a comprehensive monitoring system, something that has until now proved impossible to put into practice due to phenomena such as the lack of infrastructure and government personnel, corruption, and the increasingly worrying unavailability of fuel. For these reasons, in recent years government officials have been unable to fulfil their duty to monitor and oversee production and trade dynamics, leaving inland agricultural villages at the mercy of speculators and landlords, the large landowners, and facilitating deforestation companies which, as a result, have been able to operate undisturbed, circumventing the laws that require adequate and proportional replanting in return for timber extraction.

"Over these years, our work has been severely tested by the conditions of poverty and socio-political instability we have had to contend with since 2002, at the end of the civil war," recounts Dauda Larry Koroma, an officer at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry with the specific mandate of maintaining relations with small and large farmers in the Karene district. "As Ministry officials we have the responsibility of overseeing agricultural activities and protecting forests — tasks in the face of which we often feel powerless and are almost forced to neglect due to a lack of resources. In a context like this, it is easy for legal and governmental vacuums to emerge in which illegality can flourish unchecked. Walking through the chiefdoms of the interior regions — areas governed according to a tribal system that make up the districts — it is easy to see how deforestation is a widespread practice that is completely out of control. The large farmers, meaning those who control large-scale agricultural systems, have felled primary and secondary forest without waiting for the usual regrowth periods, convinced they could reap large profits in a short time and unaware that they are causing irreversible damage that can only be seen over the long term. The Ministry's forestry division is very busy managing this phenomenon and protecting community forests, which are vital to the survival of rural villages, while the government is trying to strengthen the legislative framework with the help of community leaders."

Unfortunately, however, techniques such as slash-and-burn are deeply rooted in local agricultural tradition — a practice that involves burning large swathes of forest to convert them into farmland. This phenomenon, combined with rotational farming systems, means that large forest areas are burned in alternating months, irreparably compromising soil fertility and the well-being of the entire region.

Dauda Larry Koroma

"Obviously, due to the continuous population growth, the periods of land rest needed for soil regeneration are shrinking ever further, breaking the regenerative balance that the forest needs to remain intact. Over the past two years we have been trying to set up a community reforestation programme, going into individual counties and acquiring parcels of land to then return them to communities in good health, but the results of these projects are difficult to measure in the short term. On top of these problems there is also the issue of massive deforestation, in which the main actors are foreign timber merchants — predominantly Chinese, Taiwanese and Vietnamese — who are willing to destroy entire areas of mangrove forest, essential for the survival of the ecosystem, in order to harvest the species that command the highest prices abroad. In short, the challenges we face are many and all of vital importance."

Sierra Leone: "Beautiful country, hard life"

Among the houses lining the only dirt road that cuts through the savanna towards the country's northern border, stacked haphazardly so as to keep them out of sight of inspectors and government officials, logs of every size lie waiting to be transported to Freetown. Small farming communities store the timber until Liberian, Ghanaian or Ivorian traffickers arrive in the evening, load it onto their vehicles and haul it to the capital, driving through the night to avoid police checkpoints or to bribe officials away from prying eyes.

As villagers in the area recount, until a few years ago Chinese timber merchants were happy to venture deep into the most remote forest areas of Sierra Leone, negotiating timber purchases directly with local communities. Today, however, they prefer to delegate extraction and transport activities to African traffickers, cutting down on fuel and labour costs. Countries such as Ghana, which is rising rapidly in economic terms, provide teams of workers equipped enough to complete the work quickly and at costs that Chinese companies consider negligible. Naturally, the farming villages that have animated Sierra Leone's forest life for centuries are willing to sell off large portions of it at rock-bottom prices in order to cope with food insecurity and the dire living conditions brought about by isolation and the climate changes that are slowly causing a substantial reduction in rainfall in favour of the dry season. By operating in this way, foreign traders secure control of the entire supply chain — from extraction to supply through to the transport of raw materials — extracting the maximum possible profit.

Also not to be underestimated are the advantages linked to climatic conditions and the strategic position of the Gulf of Guinea countries, from which it is easy to export large quantities of natural resources extracted from the West African hinterland. An emblematic case is provided by Russia which, in the 1980s, recognised the potential of crops in tropical contexts and began planting locally seeds already widely established in Europe, such as tobacco, profoundly altering the agro-forestry system along the coast. This approach was also applied to many other plant species from the very beginning of colonialism, contributing to the worsening of forest integrity, as forests were widely sacrificed to make way for European cultivation. With the outbreak of the civil war in 1991, Western powers gradually abandoned Sierra Leone, leaving indigenous populations with the difficult task of managing non-native crops using the few resources that had survived the conflict.

"On top of all this, there is the major problem of fuel, which is now almost impossible to obtain in large quantities at affordable prices," explains Fatmata G. Sillah, District Agricultural Chief Officer for the Karene district. "To power their numerous mines, Guinea buys enormous quantities of fuel from us here in the border areas, significantly disrupting the market. Consider that by the end of 2024, petrol in Sierra Leone had reached three times the price it costs in Nigeria. This has a knock-on effect on our Government's activities, which cannot provide the necessary means to carry out thorough inspections across the entire country, and on the lives of farming communities, who are forced to burn ever more firewood to keep villages running. As a result, deforestation is further than ever from being halted. According to a recent report provided to us by the UN, between 1975 and 2018 Sierra Leone lost around 40 per cent of its forests. The current Government, elected in June 2023, immediately placed on its agenda the strengthening of the Ministry of the Environment and the hiring of a substantial number of new ministerial officers, but a problem persists that, like many others, has its roots in the aftermath of the civil war: following the conflict, with the aim of reintegrating fighters into soc