Sourcing timber in Uganda: King of the jungle

Less than a hundred years ago, the ruling classes ventured into the African jungle to shoot wild animals at point blank range. On one famous expedition in 1909, ex-US President Theodore Roosevelt and his son Kermit shot a grand total of 1100 animals, including 11 elephants, 20 rhinos, 17 lions, 20 zebra, seven hippos, seven giraffes and six buffalo. A big hunt indeed.
We are now living in a more enlightened age. Today's equivalent of a big game hunter is a quantity surveyor from Oxford called Guy Austin. Last month he trekked deep into the East African jungle, not to bag an elephant, but to source sustainable hardwood timber for the new High Commission building in Kampala, Uganda, due to be completed in February 2005. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office stipulates that all timber specified for its buildings be legal and sustainably sourced. The criteria proved problematic for Austin, a partner at construction consultant Ridge, as international conservation organisations claim that no sustainable timber exists in Uganda. This had cost implications for Austin as the local builder Cementers' quote for the contract had priced the timber on the assumption that it would be sourced locally.
The problem was further exacerbated because the British architect Cullum and Nightingale had specified iroko timber for the interior of the building – including the doors, architranes, skirtings, side screens, louvres, ceilings and fixed furniture and fittings. Like mahogany, iroko is fashionable and expensive, making it a prime target for illegal logging. There is iroko available in East Africa, but although legally available under Ugandan law, Ridge found that it was not being harvested under the FCO's criteria (see "What you shouldn't use", page 44).
The most straightforward way of meeting the FCO's demand for sustainable timber would have been for project manager Ridge to specify wood that had been independently certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. The internationally recognised FSC mark guarantees that timber comes from a well-managed, sustainable forest. It takes up to seven years for a forest to gain FSC certification. Unfortunately no forest harvesting timber in Uganda had the FSC stamp of approval.
There was one other, unsatisfactory, option. Ridge could have imported FSC timber from outside Africa. Austin was keen to avoid this course of action. "It's not sustainable. We didn't want to ship it to Mombasa in Kenya and then hire 25 diesel trucks to transport it to Kampala," he says.
Austin met the Ugandan Forestry Department to explain his dilemma. It put him in touch with Paul Jacovelli, a British consultant working with UK firm Agrisystems. Jacovelli is working on an EU-funded forest conservation programme for the Ugandan Forestry Department. One of the programme's goals is to gain FSC certification for a tropical moist forest in the western part of Uganda called Kalinzu Forest Reserve.
Austin was hopeful that Kalinzu would be the answer. But there were two problems: there is no iroko being harvested in the forest, and Kalinzu is not yet FSC-registered.
One hardwood alternative to iroko is strombosia scheffleri. It is regarded as a secondary hardwood because it is smaller, more difficult to harvest and therefore less popular than mahogany or iroko. As a result, it is in more plentiful supply and is available in Kalinzu. Austin showed the architect a sample of the pink coloured hardwood and to his relief the architect agreed to change the specification to strombosia.
This was good news but Austin was not quite home and dry. "We wanted something that was legitimate in everybody's eye," he says. "Ridge had to be careful. We couldn't turn a blind eye to corner-cutting as we wanted to avoid bad publicity for us and we didn't want the UK government to be accused of raping Africa." To find out how legitimate the Kalinzu timber might be, Austin and an FCO official visited Rachel Hembery, the WWF's timber campaigner. He did not get the response he was after. "The WWF do want to help but she depressed us," he recalls glumly. The message was stark – if the timber hasn't got FSC registration you can't call it sustainable.
Austin was not to be deterred, however. He remembers coming out of the meeting and deciding there and then that he would have to go to Kalinzu to see for himself how sustainably the timber was being harvested.
In the first week of February, Austin trekked into the jungle. After a four-hour journey and a brush with a snake ("I heard a hiss and legged it") Austin arrived at the Kalinzu reserve. Initial impressions were favourable. The characteristics of every tree to be harvested had been recorded by the local team under Jacovelli's instruction. Each tree is numbered and the data recorded includes diameter, quality, and GPS location.
To verify that the mapping had been done correctly, Austin asked to be taken to three strombosia trees chosen at random. Once these had been located, Austin visited an area of forest that had been planted in 1999 with mahogany in a process known as enrichment planting. Austin noted that there was no evidence of illegal foresting, in particular pit sawing, charcoal burning, logging trails or piles of cut timber.
Although satisfied with the management of the forest, Austin wanted to make sure that no timber felled in Kalinzu was spirited away for use elsewhere during delivery. He agreed a system with the Forestry Department for marking and cataloguing the felled wood. Each plank of timber would be marked as coming from Kalinzu and have a compartment, block, and tree number. A spreadsheet would be kept during the felling to keep a record of the planks specifically sawn for the High Commission. This would then be compared to another spreadsheet recording the details of the planks delivered to Cementers. If the spreadsheets match, then Ridge would know that none of the timber had been lost in transit and that the builder was using timber sourced from Kalinzu.
Austin was also keen to meet the criteria for sustainability as laid down by Friends of the Earth. FOE calls for the ecological integrity of the forest to be maintained and for the local community to benefit from foresting.
To minimise the impact on the forest, Ridge insisted that the planks be cut in situ and carried out by hand. It also put an enrichment planting programme in place. As well as replanting strombosia, it has brought 1500 mahogany saplings and will pay locals to keep undergrowth from inhibiting the young trees' growth for four years.
There is also a strategy to utilise the whole tree, as Austin explains. "Only 30% of the tree is actually recovered. The loppings and toppings are usually junked. We are insisting that 70% of the waste wood is turned into charcoal in situ by local burners, so the local community feels the benefit of timber harvesting as well as the outside world." At the end of March the timber destined for the High Commission will begin to be felled. Austin is pleased with the efforts Ridge and the FSC has made to source locally produced sustainable timber. "It's not FSC-registered but it's as legal as we're going to get. It's better than anything else you can get in Africa and it's cheaper than shipping it to Mombasa," he says.
The project team is so confident of the timber's environmental credentials that the FCO has offered to pay for the WWF's Hembery to visit Kalinzu.
Austin is hopeful that the lead taken by the FCO and Ridge will help change the habits of timber procurement in East Africa. "If the FCO is seen to be buying into what they are doing it should help," he says.
It's all a far cry from Roosevelt's day.
While his shooting party would have been racking up a cricket score shooting lions and elephants, the Ridge team is making a concerted effort to ensure their intervention in Kalinzu benefits the local ecology.
Their effort has not gone unnoticed. "The Ugandans are thrilled to bits," says Austin.