It's not just Greenpeace that has a problem with industrial scale logging. Local communities do too.
Last month a team of Greenpeace observers attended a meeting between logging company SODEFOR and local communities in Oshwe, in the western part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
SODEFOR arranged the three day meeting to negotiate contracts with local people over logging rights to their forest. It did not go well, ending with hundreds of protestors marching from the town to demonstrate outside the conference hall, chanting "Toboyi SODEFOR": "We don’t want SODEFOR anymore".
Clearly, the communities do not trust this company - and why should they? Earlier this year, Greenpeace and several other organisations identified SODEFOR as the instigator of a conflict amongst neighbouring communities, which culminated in the tragic death last February of George Nkaka.
When actress Marion Cottilard (star of the film Inception) recently visited DRC , she found out more about this tragic case, the broken promises of schools and hospitals - and how communities often end up selling their forests for bags of salt or soap to companies like SODEFOR (who's parent company, Nordsudtimber Group, already holds logging titles of over 7 million hectares of this forest).
And this is a forest we can ill-afford to lose: 40 million people in the DRC depend on it in one way or another. It's also critical for the survival of our closest animal relatives, including gorillas, chimpanzees and bonobos, and like all large intact forests, plays a crucial role in regulating both the local and global climate.
Greenpeace has had an office in the DRC since 2008, and is working to show that industrial logging is not a solution to any of the problems the country faces: it will not lift people out of poverty, and it will have disastrous consequences for biodiversity and the climate.
We want donor governments, like our own here in the UK, to fund forest protection and projects that truly benefit communities in the DRC.
Read our report: Forest reform in the DRC: leaving people out »
