How Sustainable Charcoal Can Help Fight Terrorism

President Barack Obama announced Friday (July 2oth) that the US was banning the sale of charcoal from Somalia to third countries. The effort is intended to deprive the Somali-based, Al-Quaeda affiliate, Al-Shabaab, from important revenue collected from the export of Somali charcoal to countries in the Gulf region.

We have no idea how much money Al-Shabaab collects from charcoal exports to the Gulf but there is sufficient reason to believe the amount is significant enough that the administration would see fit to expend time, ink, and breath on this issue.

According to CNN, which reported the news yesterday, President Obama’s decision is designed to support of an existing resolution that was proposed by the UK and approved by the UN Security Council earlier this year.

Starving Al-Shabaab of cash may be a good thing for the anti-terrorism effort but a bad thing for the thousands — probably tens of thousands along the entire supply chain — of extremely poor people who depend on the production of charcoal for a living. The social and economic impact of the UN-sponsored ban was recently reported by VOA, which describes the presence of mountains of charcoal sacks piled on the country’s shipping docks waiting to be exported. We wonder to what extend the deprivation of livelihood and the dislocation this may be causing among poor, ordinary people may actually be fueling the ranks of Al-Shabaab supporters.

We’ve seen this picture before

Whatever the case, Al-Shabaab is far from being the only group that derives important economic benefits from the charcoal-trade.

In fact, readers may recall we reported in earlier blog posts how the illegal charcoal trade helps funnel tens of millions of dollars to the irregular armed groups that operate in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo. Much of the charcoal in that trade is illegally produced from the forests inside Virunga National Park in North Kivu Province. Virunga is Africa’s oldest, most biologically diverse, and most threatened park as a result of the charcoal trade. A report produced by the park’s administration in 2008 estimated the illegal charcoal trade generates some USD 35 million for the multiple armed groups that terrorize the region. More than 130 park rangers have died over the last ten years fighting the irregular armed groups that operate in and around the park.

The charcoal trade in the Congo is similar to the cocaine cartels operating in South America where the drug producers (in this case, charcoal-producers) pay protection money to irregular armed groups, like the FARC or Sendero Luminoso.

Full disclosure: The Charcoal Project is working with Virunga National Park in developing a long term program that will transition the four million people that live within a day’s walk of the park’s border, to the use of sustainable produced and efficiently consumed charcoal. Our plan is to promote the planting of energy forests (WWF is already doing this in the region!), transform discarded agricultural waste into quality solid biomass fuels, and incorporate the use of energy efficient, clean burning cookstoves.

Long-term solutions needed

Depriving bad people of the funding they need to carry out crimes is obviously a good thing. But the Law of Unintended Consequences dictates that short-term impacts must be accompanied by long-term solutions for the innocent poor people who depend on their charcoal trade for their livelihoods.

We know the US Military is keen on finding green fuel alternatives to its massive dependence on fossil fuels. In the same spirit of innovation, we hope that putting sub-Saharan Africa on the path to sustainable charcoal, better fuels, and more efficient cooking technologies, becomes a priority for the US military commanders leading counter-terrorism activities on the continent.