Dead wood and faces weary from work. Nigerian photographer Nyancho NwaNri documented the slaughter trees in Ondo State, southwestern Nigeria. She thus followed the loggers in the swamps of the humid, deep forest, located around the village of Ipare, about 150 kilometers as the crow flies south of Lagos.
Between 2001 and 2021, Nigeria lost 1.14 million hectares of forest. This is the equivalent of an 11% reduction in the country’s forest area in twenty years, or 587 million tonnes of carbon dioxide released, explains the press agency. Reuters, which is based on data from the Global Forest Watch platform.
The photos, taken between March 2021 and January 2022, show loggers aware of the catastrophic evolution of the state of the forest, but whose priority is to “win their life”.
After felling the mahogany trees, Egbontoluwa Marigi marks the pieces of wood to come and collect them “months later”. He then tied the logs into a raft and towed them through the waterways of Ondo State to Lagos.
Along with other loggers, they hire a tugboat that stops regularly to pick up other workers and their goods, until they reach the Nigerian economic capital, where the logs will be processed and sold. A single boat can carry a thousand rafts, each containing up to 30 logs.
Last May, during COP15 in Abidjan, the President of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, announced the creation of a “Special Fund for the Safeguarding of Nigerian Forests”, remember Reuters.
“But it may not be enough, because the country’s forests are disappearing at high speed..”