In a detailed response to Greenpeace‘s recent Carving up the Congo report, Danzer has reiterated that its activities in Africa are transparent and has highlighted a number of areas from the report that it claims have been manipulated to “create an overall negative picture of what we are doing”.
This includes accusations levelled at a number of UK timber importers that they are undertaking forestry negotiations on a local level in order to gain a strategic advantage, including paying nominal amounts for access to large areas of timber and paying for inspection staff to come to their forests to grant legality and logging rights.
However, Danzer has said that it believes that social investments are an integral part of the timber trade in countries such as the DRC and that, far from undermining the process, they help to ease relations between local populations and timber firms and further local developments.
As such, it has stated that its DRC-based subsidiary firm SIFORCO has invested US$1m into the Bumba and Aketi territories since 2002.
In addition, it has added that the payment of wages for forestry officials in countries such as the DRC is recognised in Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development guidelines and is a practice that is legitimately undertaken across a range of industries.
