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Charcoal, Poor Man’s Black Gold

Pascal Maitre

Pascal Maitre / MYOP pour *Le Figaro* Magazine et *Paris Match*

In the world today, 2.5 billion people depend on charcoal for cooking.

Over the many trips I have made to Somalia since 2002, I developed an interest in charcoal (“makala”). Seeing lines of trucks loaded with charcoal on the roads, I thought that for a country with so few trees, at this rate there would soon be none left at all.

According to the United Nations, of all the trees cut down in the world today, more than half are used to produce charcoal and firewood. Every year in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, 500,000 hectares of forestland is turned into charcoal. Cambodia has lost more than a third of its primary forests, and much of that has become charcoal, and one of the main uses is to produce steel.

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Democratic Republic of the Congo, Kinshasa, Ndjili municipality, 2021. The women selling charcoal at the market work in appalling conditions, sitting on the ground and covered in soot.

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Somalia, 2008. Charcoal stockpiled at a market in the city of Merca. Since 2012, there has been a ban on charcoal exports from Somalia in a bid to cut off funds flowing to the Islamist group al-Shabaab, but it is easy to bypass the ban by using fake documents certifying that the charcoal has come from other countries such as the Comoros, Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. It is then shipped to Iran and ultimately to Oman or the United Arab Emirates. In 2018, the illegal trade generated $7.5 million in income for al-Shabaab.