Robbing the Rain Forest

April 30, 2007 — -- Promising little more than trinkets -- bicycles, a few bars of soap, some bottles of beer -- foreign logging companies working in Congo often broker deals with village chiefs, which allow them to cut down huge swaths of the world's second-largest rain forest.

The trees they fell are worth millions of dollars on the international market and are essential to maintaining the planet's climate, said experts.

In addition to small gifts, companies sometimes agree to build schools or hospitals for local communities. But Greenpeace, which exposed the practice in a report released earlier this month, says companies rarely follow through on those promises and take advantage of people who don't know the true value of the forests in which they live.

In one contract obtained by ABCNEWS.com, Sodefor, a Congo-based company owned by Liechtenstein's NST Group, promises a local chief "two bags of salt, 18 bars of soap, four packets of coffee, 24 bottles of beer [and] two bags of sugar" as a "customary fee to enter said forests."

The company also agreed to pay the chief about 13 cents for every cubic meter of wood cut for export.

"But on the international market, a single meter of this wood sells for several hundred dollars," Greenpeace's Stephan Van Praet told ABCNEWS.com in a phone interview from Brussels.

A single African teak tree can fetch up to $8,000 in Europe.

"When you consider they are talking about 200,000 hectares, that is a lot of money," Van Praet said, referring to the size of a typical logging area.

Some 15 million hectares of rain forest -- an area roughly the size of the United Kingdom -- have been logged in the Democratic Republic of Congo. According to Greenpeace, most of the companies working that land signed contracts after a 2002 moratorium on logging.

The trees, mostly African teak, are used to make furniture, flooring and doors.

Van Praet described a typical negotiation, which took place in the town of Sange, outside the capital city of Kinshasa. Representatives from the Safbois company and government officials, he said, showed up in the middle of the night and pressured village leaders to turn over access rights to the forest.