Kwo-Chief Investment Limited had begun an unprecedented industrial charcoal production in Nigeria towards the last quarter of 2018 after the country started the export restriction to rein in charcoal-fuelled deforestation.
The factory is about the size of six football fields.
Sturdy Nigerian men hack off hardwood with chainsaws and stack the logs inside brick ovens. They shovel out the hot charred remains after some days, and then bury them in the sand, forming a heap, when SaharaReporters visited the factory.
Women with wheelbarrows harvest the charcoal later. They cut, grade and pack the charcoal in corrugated boxes, each weighing about 10 kilograms.
Despite not having a charcoal export permit, the company still exported its product to South Korea in 2018. It was a long time that the Nigerian charcoal was imported into the east Asian country after $7,000 worth of charcoal import in 2012 and another import in 1995, according to Comtrade, the United Nations import and export database.
In 2019, the Nigerian charcoal imported into South Korea was 3.6 million kilograms worth $3.7 million, amounting to a 1,405 percent increase from the previous year. The value of the charcoal import was $2.8 million in 2020, according to the UN Comtrade.
However, Nigeria underreported its charcoal export to South Korea with only $60,089 in 2018 and none in the following years, according to UN Comtrade.
The inrush of Nigerian charcoal into South Korea, one of the top five importers of charcoal globally, could have been more if NESREA had not temporarily shuttered the Kwo-Chief Investment’s factory. The coronavirus pandemic also frustrated operations at the factory as the country went on lockdown for a few months last year.
From Asia to Europe and America, high-income countries look away from imported illicit charcoal from Africa. For example, charcoal is not covered by the European Union Timber Regulation and therefore illegally imported tropical charcoal can be sold in member countries, according to World Wildlife Fund, a non-profit environmental organisation.
Such regulatory gaps reveal certain weaknesses in global climate action policies whereby countries with strong forestry protection allow imports of illicit charcoal from countries like Nigeria, where forests are being decimated to satisfy these demands.
Most forest degradation in Africa is caused by charcoal and firewood, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations. The continent accounts for about two-thirds of global charcoal production.
As the world’s second-largest producer of charcoal, Nigeria has lost most of its forests. But this depletion is not caused by charcoal alone as timber, farming and construction also accelerate deforestation. The country moved from having 12.2 percent of forest area in 2007 to 7.7 percent in 2017 – deforestation of a landmass bigger than Belgium in a decade – according to the World Bank’s The Little Green Data Book.
Illicit charcoal trade is rampant in Nigeria and elsewhere in Africa, but the production has been informal, driven by local artisans who produce it through mound earth kilns and traded by middlemen.
Kwo-Chief Investment’s charcoal production is unequalled by these small scale local producers.
“It’s very rare to have foreign investors in charcoal production,” says Tuyeni Mwampamba, a Tanzania native and research professor at the Institute of Ecosystems and Sustainability Research in Morelia, Mexico.
Mwampamba observed that almost everywhere in the Global South where charcoal is produced, the business tends to operate in a “fuzzy area between illicit but openly conducted, legal but non-compliant.”
“A lot of rules are knowingly broken; a lot of regulators are knowingly complicit. It’s fertile ground for corruption and given the high stakes associated with charcoal, it makes it a very difficult sector to control, monitor or reform,” Mwampamba says.
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