Imperialism is the Arsonist of Our Forests

In the same year, the exuberance of carbon markets reached its pinnacle with several African countries striking deals to concede vast sections of their forests to UAE, Europe, and US-based corporations to extract and trade carbon credits. These deals cover land masses of 20 per cent of Zimbabwe, 10 per cent of Liberia, 10 per cent of Zambia, and 10 per cent of Tanzania and more contracts are expected to come from other countries. In Kenya, the government signed a controversial deal conceding millions of hectares of the Mau forest leading to the forced evictions of the Ogiek community. In Senegal, large-scale reforestation projects covering 25 per cent of the mangrove forests of the Saloum Delta, one of the largest wetlands in West Africa, are slated to turn into carbon deals financed by oil giant, Shell. These are just a few cases in one long string of deals to meet the growing demand for conservation-area-based carbon markets and nature-based solutions to address climate change.

Numerous reports emerged in the last year documenting the devastating impacts of carbon and biodiversity offset projects on local communities. The Oakland Institute report presents several case studies of offset deals by investment firms in East Africa, including Sydney-based New Forest with a portfolio of 1.27 million hectares of land. The reports mark the massive expansion of carbon offsetting activities on the continent causing violent evictions, disseminating livelihoods and increasing carbon emissions as very alarming. In short, the report asserts that carbon and biodiversity offset is nothing more than the ‘latest frontier of green colonialism’ that sustain the exploitative economic structures fuelling the environmental catastrophe globally.

These condemnations are essential in highlighting the urgency to reposition the trajectory of the international climate agenda to usher in more just and equitable transitions in Africa. African activists have done well bringing these issues to the forefront of international negotiations like the Conference of the Parties on Climate (COP28) and Biological Diversity (COP15). However, pan-African feminist writer and activist, Rosebell Kagumire, reminds us that climate negotiations remain a space where established power is reasserted, noting:

The commitments made by rich and power-hoarding nations so far have not been nearly deep enough to make the radical shift needed to slow the warming of the globe. The long-term needs of marginalized populations in the Majority World are too often subject to intense debate and little outcome.

Kagumire’s powerful argument points to a critical issue that many African scholars and grassroots activists have long spoken about. That is, the international climate agenda serves to maintain, what Marxist economist giants, Walter Rodney and Samir Amin, skilfully described as the underdevelopment of African countries that is foundational to the economic growth of the imperialist core. After all, if climate actions have so far led to the violent dispossession of Africans to integrate vast swaths of lands into global markets, while no sacrifice of such scale is imposed on countries of the Global North, what should that tell us about where the loyalty of the climate agenda lies? The late Zimbabwean land reform activist, Sam Moyo, captured this well, noting that ‘ecological imperialism and the effects of “North” driven climate-change agenda are marshalled against agrarian development from below’ which seeks to reserve more African land and biodiversity for external forces.

At a moment of emerging political and economic interests as well as geopolitical realignment against the backdrop of a rapidly changing natural environment, it is crucial to fully grasp how the international climate agenda functions within these shifting global structures. Equally important is to draw from anti-imperialist and grassroots thoughts and practice to advance a discursive terrain for an authentic African climate agenda first and foremost predicated on our right to meaningful development.

Essentially, carbon and biodiversity offset schemes are premised on the idea that rangelands, forests, mangroves and other important ecosystems of the Global South can serve as carbon sinks and neutralize the ecological effects of the unsustainable economic growth in the Global North. The 2022 Land Gap Report estimates that the total area of land needed to meet climate pledges is almost 1.2 billion hectares globally. Consequently, conservation areas in Africa, from which states evict local communities and set aside for protection, are increasingly enrolled in carbon and biodiversity offsets in exchange for economic benefits. However, for agrarian communities, the foregone social, cultural and economic values of conservation areas including food security, water for irrigation and hydroelectricity cannot be overstated and defy any calculation.

Despite the damning evidence of their impacts, African governments and environmental organizations present offset deals as a mechanism to generate revenues for communities but so far, the benefits remain elusive. For example, in Senegal, some communities in the Saloum Delta have been able to generate income by supplying propagules for the mangrove reforestation campaign organized by Wetlands International, the French Development Agency and carbon credit broker, We Forest. However, local officials shared with me concerns that this income is used to obtain the buy-in of impoverished communities. There is also great uncertainty about their capacity to generate revenues or access resources after the deal is signed between the government and the carbon buyer. It may be too early to know for sure if, in the long run, offset deals will deliver on their economic promises for local communities. But the record from over three decades of conservation and development schemes can help us gauge their possible trajectories.

Carbon and biodiversity offsets have existed in different forms since the 1990s as part of a host of integrated conservation and development programs (ICDP), advanced by international environmental agencies and implemented mostly in the Global South. They are market-based approaches designed to channel economic benefits for community development while preserving the natural environment. Such programmes include tourism-based conservation projects, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD+) and Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES). In reality, except for PES which works directly with farmers and landowners, most ICDP schemes demand that local communities cede control of their land and resources in exchange for employment and vital public services for communities already living under the weight of state-sanctioned deprivation. Nigerian environmental researcher, Adeniyi Asiyanbi, has demonstrated how REDD+ facilitate a regime of forest militarization that curtails local resource access while driving elite accumulation in timber forestry. Similarly, my research among many other studies, shows that in most of Africa, tourism-driven conservation programmes, give greater advantage to private tour operators, while undermining local resource use practices and entrepreneurial activities, thereby exacerbating structural inequities.

The ascendency of the finance world through carbon deals and other nature-based solutions comes at a crucial juncture of the climate and biodiversity crises marking a turning point in capitalist capture of the environmental agenda. Environmental anthropologist, Sian Sullivan, maintains that the carbon offset market, as with any new frontier, enables the penetration of finance capital into an expanding array of environmental conservation niches. She argues that this involves a discursive framing of nature using financial terms that reorganize conserved nature into concepts that can be productively aligned with finance. Economic concepts, such as assets, natural capital and green growth were often invoked to justify market-oriented climate solutions at the ACS. This discursive framing of nature, as Sullivan explains, rationalizes human and non-human natures to conform to an economic system that privileges market-oriented values over the distributive and sustainable logics of endogenous socioeconomic processes.

Beyond local impacts, how does this discursive framing of the environmental agenda shape global economic configurations? As I have written before in The Republic, imperialists and their African allies invoke environmental discourses to galvanize the dispossession of African lands, opening them to new markets and extractive concessions for US, European and Asian corporations. Furthermore, the body of work of Senegalese agrarian economist and feminist, Rama Salla Dieng, demonstrates how land dispossession deepens class and patriarchal structures in African rural societies while reshaping agrarian labour relations between the world’s capitalist core and its peripheries. In essence, the Global North-driven neoliberal environmental agenda ultimately seeks to transform the African commons and their relationships to the capitalist core, without fundamentally changing the global structures that vastly contribute to the ecological crisis. As such, there is an urgent need to reorient climate discourses to prioritize the sovereignty and development of African nations.

On 5 February 1986, Pan-Africanist and anti-imperialist revolutionary, Captain Thomas Sankara, delivered his famous speech, Imperialism is The Arsonist of Our Forests and Savannas at the International Conference on Trees and Forests in Paris in which he denounced imperialism as the main driver of the environmental crisis, asserting that:

Colonial plunder has decimated our forests without the slightest thought of replenishing them for our tomorrows. The unpunished disruption of the biosphere by savage and murderous forays on the land and in the air continues […] This struggle to defend the trees and Forests is above all a struggle against imperialism. Because imperialism is the arsonist setting fire to our forests and savannas.

For Sankara, the onslaught of capitalist-imperialist forces led to the ecological crisis; therefore, our struggle to protect our environment was first and foremost one against imperialism.

I argue that the discursive and ideological terrain, from which the African climate justice movement draws its position, severely limits its capacity to struggle against economic imperialist forces. The international climate agenda sits firmly within a Eurocentric ideology which, as Agrarian sociologist, Max Ajl, contends in his critical book, A People’s Green New Deal, can prevent people from grasping that, ‘unless the Third World has the right to develop, the ecological problem cannot be solved on a just basis in the First World.’ Therefore, an African climate agenda should first and foremost challenge the global structures that assault our right to meaningful development.

The dominance of carbon offsets at the ACS is a manifestation of what climate justice scholar and activist, Farhana Sultana, describes as climate coloniality, ‘which discursively limits the terms of global debate and hegemonizes knowledge of and about climate change, and what actions are possible.’There is no doubt that our focus on the global asymmetry of carbon emissions and its impacts is well founded. The problem, however, is that they too often obscure the global political and economic architecture that reproduced these global asymmetries culminating in the unprecedented deterioration of our natural world. From international trade deals, financial institutions, currency, debt, multilateral institutions to the military industry, such global political and economic architecture has led to the concentration of wealth, power and capital in the Global North, and the super-exploitation of resources and labour while undermining the development capacity of countries of the Global South. Therefore, I ask, is our hyper focus on carbon emissions hurting our cause? If so, how should Africans reposition their discursive terrain to challenge these global structures?

The production and dissemination of knowledge about climate issues, especially on carbon emissions are monopolized by agencies that are allegedly neutral yet controlled by actors in the highest polluting countries. This monopoly of climate-related knowledge shapes international policies that orient social and economic development in Africa. Global South researchers have already raised serious concerns that climate conventions intended to cut down carbon emissions will ultimately impede development capacity in their countries by limiting energy production in areas with high levels of energy poverty and undermining self-sustaining agrarian systems such as pastoralism. This is well illustrated in Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain’s 2011 piece,Global warming in an unequal world, in which the authors lay bare ‘the politically motivated and mathematical jugglery’ in CO2 emission calculations by the World Resource Institute, a Washington-based private research group.

Ajl further observes that the dominant school of thought from Western left circles justifies ‘carbon exceptionalism’ using emergency logic, reducing the ‘ecological crisis and the broader crisis of social reproduction to global warming.’ Yet, he continues, ‘the so-called necessary conditions for social reproduction on a world scale are implied or asserted rather than argued.’ It is undeniable that carbon exceptionalism and emergency rhetoric permeates the African climate agenda. But our focus on carbon emissions and its undergirding emergency logic leaves out an array of bolder and more transformative demands that move us beyond just managing the crisis to ushering in a more equitable world system.

Take, for example, the staple claim of climate justice circles that Africa has the smallest proportion of carbon emissions and yet is hit hardest by the climate crisis. An accurate claim, indeed, that justifies proposals for financial redress intended to support climate adaptation projects funded by global North institutions. But as the record shows, the dominant climate financing mechanism proposed so far has led to neo-colonial technocratic solutions and meagre climate adaptation funds that further entrench the unequal global patterns of development. Similarly, demand for debt cancelations that would free up government financial resources to build climate-resilient infrastructures while critical can be short sighted. As Senegalese development economist, Ndongo Samba Sylla has shown, debt cancelation without changing processes of accumulation on a world scale does not eliminate the risk of African countries amassing more foreign debt in the future.

If, instead, our climate justice position was squarely situated in the global economic structures, our framing of these issues would also change. Our claim would be that Africa has the least historical carbon emissions because policies advanced by imperialist economic institutions like the World Bank, International Monetary Fund and the European Union, have systematically underdeveloped African countries and undermined our capacity to develop energy and social infrastructures. Or, that the US is responsible for 25 percent of historical emissions (the highest of all) because its imperialist government imposes ecologically destructive economic policies to build CO2-emitting industries as a means to grow its economy. Then, climate justice discourse would focus on the function and character of institutions such as the World Bank, IMF, and the imperialist economic policies. Fortunately, these conversations are emerging in climate negotiations, as economist and senior advisor of powershift Africa, Fadhel Kaboub has discussed. Such framings would bring to the table bolder demands to transform the world system instead of endlessly appealing to the collective morality of the imperialist core that never existed.

As I have argued so far, reducing the ecological crisis to CO2 emissions and global warming leads to technocratic neo-colonial solutions while sidestepping the demands that arise from our struggle against the extractive oppression of imperialism. To conclude, I reflect on the central role of endogenous agrarian systems and food sovereignty in averting the climate crisis while prioritizing the majority of Africans’ material and development needs.

Amidst the ecological crisis, the 2022 Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services reports that the continent still holds a quarter of the world’s biodiversity hotspots and some of the most ecologically intact communities. Empirical evidence shows that the resilience of these landscapes is the outcome of agrarian systems that are life-sustaining for the human and non-human world. In his seminal 2013 book, From Agriculture to Agricology: Towards a Global Circular Economy, Ugandan scholar, Dani W. Nabudere, documents how African agrarian systems contribute directly to food production, livelihoods and cultural sustenance while preserving biodiversity, forests, soil organic matter, rangelands, and other ecosystems critical for averting the climate crisis. Nabudere also considered the key role of agrarian societies in transitioning to endogenous socio-economic systems as essential to averting the ecological and climate crisis.

In his 2015 essay entitled, ‘There is No Alternative to Food Sovereignty’, Samir Amin presents a strong case for why food sovereignty may be the most important path towards breaking from economic imperialism as essential to preserving our ecological base. There is, in fact, a strong case to be made for why food sovereignty in Africa should be central to climate actions and biodiversity conservation. Industrial agriculture is not only one of the largest carbon emitters and cause of biodiversity loss. Its global political and economic infrastructure also fuels the ongoing dispossession of African lands, eliminating the endogenous agrarian systems. The Oakland Institute reports that in 2009, Africa accounted for 70 per cent of the 56 million hectares worth of large-scale farmland deals. By 2016, an estimated 42.4 million hectares of land had come under contract, one-third of which involved land formerly used by smallholders. This trend is expected to intensify with the high volatility of food prices in Global North countries. Agrarian organizations on the continent such as the Kenyan Peasant League and African Centre for Biodiversity are fighting for food sovereignty as central to slowing the expansion of industrial agriculture that is accelerating the biodiversity and climate crisis.

The imperialist project is at its offensive on all fronts in Africa today, from the environmental agenda to agricultural development. The solutions to the climate and ecological crisis imposed by the international climate agenda are neo-colonial and capitalist ones that exacerbate unequal global development patterns. Fortunately, there is no shortage of lessons we can learn from over three decades of conservation and development projects. Additionally, anti-imperialist thinkers like Sankara, Nabudere and Amin among many others offer lessons that climate justice activists must not lose sight of. We must also pay attention to and support grassroots agrarian organizations like the Yèlimi founded by Blandine Sankara in Burkina Faso, and DyTAES in Senegal, who present pathways towards a more just climate and ecological future that is predicated on Africa’s right to meaningful development⎈