Echoes of the Forest: Finding balance between People's Needs and Forest Protection - Team Europe Initiative on Deforestation-free Value Chains

Echoes of the Forest

Finding balance between People‘s Needs and Forest Protection

Forests breathe life into our planet, they sustain water, soil, and climate, nourish bodies withfood and medicine, and shelter countless species, including us humans. For millions of people, forests are also sources of livelihood and belonging, providing various products that sustain families and entire communities. For many Indigenous communities, forests are sacred homes, sources of identity, knowledge, and dignity.

Yet across the world, forests are under strain, caught between conservation demands, encroaching agriculture and the daily realities of those who depend on them for survival.

The following exhibition explores the tension between human livelihood and forest preservation -between global consumption and local experience. Through the stories of farmers and guardians of the forest in Indonesia, Cameroon and DR Congo, we are invited to recognize our shared humanity and responsibility to honor the human dignity at the heart of the beginning of the value chain.

The exhibit features images of three implementing countries of the GIZ SAFE project, with most of the photos taken between August and October 2025 and is part of the Team Europe Initiative on Deforestation-free Value Chains.

About the Artist

Nyani Quarmyne is a freelance photographer whose work centres on global health, social justice, and environmental issues. He is drawn to ‘One Health’ themes – stories that remind us that the wellbeing of humanity, our planet, and all its biodiversity must be seen as intrinsically connected.

Nyani has worked with a range of internationally recognised organisations and publications on topics ranging from famine in the Sahel to grassroots connectivity efforts in rural Kyrgyzstan. His personal projects include work on climate change, snakebite envenomation, antimicrobial resistance, and the illegal importation of ‘bushmeat’ from the African continent into Europe.

Multi-ethnic and having lived on five continents, Nyani’s background and international worldview profoundly shape his photographic perspective. He is based in Germany, but is in many ways most at home on the move. He is represented by Panos Pictures, one of the world’s leading photojournalism agencies.

The entry to a forest grove where a deity is said to dwell behind a Baka extended family homestead in Akom in the South region of Cameroon.

Once forest dwellers, now at the forest’s edge, the Baka people navigate a fragile balance between tradition and survival.

The entry to a forest grove where a deity is said to dwell behind a Baka extended family homestead in Akom in the South region of Cameroon.

Once forest dwellers, now at the forest’s edge, the Baka people navigate a fragile balance between tradition and survival.

Etienne Mopolo, a Baka community elder, addressing the ancestors before leading visitors into a sacred forest.

Traditionally forest-dwelling hunter gatherers, the Baka were forced out of the forests by colonial and subsequent post-independence governments beginning in the 1960s, to make way for logging concessions and fortress conservation.

Jeanne Nomo, the matriarch of a Baka family, in her cocoa grove close to her home in Akom, Cameroon.

Baka growers speak of exclusion from cooperatives and thus having to sell their crops to middlemen at lower prices.

Fabrice Ondoa (left) and Antoine Ngono, members of a Baka family, as they and other members of their extended family clear an area of forest in which to plant crops. They intend to plant cocoa seedlings as well as food crops, and will harvest the latter while waiting for the cocoa trees to mature.

Harvested cocoa pods on the forest floor.

The SAFE project in Cameroon is supporting cocoa and coffee growers with technical assistance, intensifying traceability systems and promoting reliable and stable partnerships. Amongst various work streams it aims to improve economic outcomes and EUDR readiness amongst small-scale cocoa growers, including indigenous groups like the Baka people, by countering stereotypes and gender discrimination; strengthening leadership capacity, improving access to knowledge and addressing exclusion from growers’ cooperatives.

Marie Eboutou, a member of a Baka family, amidst her cassava crop.

She and her family practice shifting cultivation.

Ferdinand Woulo, head of a Baka family, posing for a portrait.

The family are subsistence farmers, growing food crops and cocoa. He also traps small game and works as a traditional healer and spiritualist using medicinal forest plants.

Ferdinand Woulo, head of a Baka family, posing for a portrait.

The family are subsistence farmers, growing food crops and cocoa. He also traps small game and works as a traditional healer and spiritualist using medicinal forest plants.

A logging truck seen through laundry drying in front of a roadside Baka homestead in Ekombite in the South region of Cameroon.

No longer permitted to live in the forest, the Baka are forced to live along the sides of highway, essentially watching their former home being trucked away.

A homemade toy truck belonging to Samuel Sangha, a member of a Baka family, is seen as he washes the dishes at his extended family homestead in Akom in the South region of Cameroon.

A view from the Wan Abdul Rachman Forest Park in Lampung, southern Sumatra, Indonesia.

According to Sumisno, head of the Wanakarya Farmers’ Association, many areas that are now part of the forest park have in the past been used for agriculture and completely deforested. When the forest park was established in 1998, the farmers and the Department of Forestry began working together to find a balance between conservation and farmers’ needs. The area is now classified as a “social forestry” zone, in which the community may farm in agroforests and harvest non-timber forest products such as natural rubber, cocoa, or coffee, but may not cut trees or cause further deforestation. Thanks to the reforestation work, water sources that were running dry due to deforestation of the slopes now serve farming communities as well as the nearby city of Bandar Lampung. Beyond the Reserve, smoke haze from burning rice stubble shrouds the mountain’s lower slopes.

Yarmiatun* preparing to depart her home in Bogorejo in Lampung, Indonesia, for her and her husband’s nearby rubber farm.

They have approximately one hectare of land planted with 500 rubber trees, and 400 coffee trees on a further half acre. Their income is split roughly 50/50 between the two crops.

*Some Indonesians go by a single name.

Yarmiatun in a shaft of sunlight on her and her husband’s rubber farm near Bogorejo in southern Sumatra, Indonesia. She says they have approximately one hectare of land planted with 500 rubber trees, and 400 coffee trees on a further half acre. Their income is split roughly 50/50 between the two crops.

A drop of latex falling from a spigot on a rubber tree on a farm belonging to Yarmiatun and her husband near Bogorejo in southern Sumatra, Indonesia.

Warto using a cup fashioned from a leaf to taste honey from a stingless beehive being opened by Sumisno (bottom), head of the Wanakarya Farmers’ Association, on Yuswanto’s (left) rubber agroforest.

Suhado on his way home with livestock fodder from an abandoned area of rubber plantation (right) in Bogorejo, Lampung, Indonesia. In the background a monoculture rubber plantation can be seen, with the agroforests and the Wan Abdul Rachman Forest Park beyond.

Luther Bongga planting a seedling – one of several fruit and other tree seedlings he planted – on his farm near the village of Winatu in Central Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Farm earnings, split roughly equally between cocoa and durian, support his family. He also runs a small milling business for rice and maize, with proceeds going to extended family obligations and his granddaughter’s education.

Luther Bongga spreading out cocoa beans harvested during the day to dry across the street from his home.

Bongga participates in the Cocoa Life programme, a Mondelēz International initiative, the stated aim of which is to “make cocoa sourcing more sustainable in key cocoa-producing countries. His land has been digitally mapped under the SAFE project, thus making his cocoa traceable down to the plot and giving him a better position in the value chain.

Princip Alowakinnou emerging from a banana grove after performing maintenance on a beehive in Yangambi in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He is responsible for developing beekeeping and honey production as an alternative livelihood to reduce pressure on the natural resources of the surrounding forest. The CIFOR-led FORÊTS project is breathing new life into the Yangambi research station, centering on capacity development, including masters and doctoral programs, and science-led conservation and sustainable development initiatives and the research to support and shape them.

Similarly, the SAFE project is partnering with CIFOR in Yangambi to build on this approach and ensure capacities for new agricultural developments in various value chains, like coffee.

Victorine Monganga manages the FORÊTS project pilot farm in Yangambi in the Tshopo province of the DR Congo. The farm uses a scientific approach to develop and optimise agroforestry and mixed cropping methods with a view to boosting yields and incomes, improving soil fertility and reducing pressure on the surrounding forest.

Approaches like these are strongly supported and further complemented by the SAFE DRC-CIFOR partnership to increase sustainable agricultural practices for more value chains, resulting in strengthened business relations for farmers based on increased trust, transparency, and sustainability starting at the production point of supply chains.