Pit-Sawers

A term used to describe small-scale (usually illegal) loggers in Liberia. (Pit-sawing is a crude method of cutting planks from a log.)

Liberia is electronically tagging its trees to prevent logging revenue falling into the wrong hands †, Richard Powell reported for the BBC.

According to Powell, Liberia’s finance minister, Augustine Ngafuan, is confident that the tagging system (operated by British company Helveta) will work:

“Our new system tags the trees and monitors their whereabouts from stump to port,” she says. “It will deliver 99% of the resulting revenues back to us.”

Liberia’s aptonymic forestry minster, John Woods, hopes that the jobs created by this legitimate logging venture will occupy former combatants and help to cut crime. Derek Charter, who works for Helveta, noted that many thousands of former fighters had turned to illegal logging since the end of the war, and commented:

“Illegal loggers or ‘pit-sawers’ waste around 70% of each trunk when they try to cut planks from them with chainsaws. … So the contractors are doing all the hard work, fixing the roads and bridges necessary to move the wood and the pit-sawers are using the same infrastructure to steal it from them.”

Powell reported that Helveta has run successful tagging operations in Indonesia, and Cameroon – where they have helped stop illegal logging. Under the tagging system, trees are individually bar-coded according to species and location, and all exports are entered into an electronic database.

(† In 2003, the U.N. imposed trade sanctions on Liberian lumber after it determined that revenue from the logging industry was being used to purchase illegal arms, fueling conflict in the region. The sanctions were liftedin 2006, but no trees have been exported since then as Liberia has struggled to reform its lumber industry.)