East Region

Cameroon's East Region is the country's largest by area — 109,000 square kilometres of Congo Basin rainforest — and its most sparsely populated, with barely seven people per square kilometre. The forest defines the economy: timber, gold, diamonds, and iron ore flow outward through concessions held primarily by foreign operators, while the region retains the environmental residue — deforested land, abandoned mining pits that have killed over a hundred people in recent years, and contaminated waterways.

The extraction pattern follows a predictable sequence. Logging roads cut into previously inaccessible forest; slash-and-burn farmers follow the roads; mining permits formalize what artisanal diggers started; and mega-infrastructure cements the trajectory. The Mbalam iron ore project, backed by Chinese capital, requires a 540-kilometre railway to the coast — each stage of development making the next cheaper to execute and harder to reverse, path-dependence written into physical infrastructure.

The cost falls most visibly on the Baka, indigenous hunter-gatherers whose forest occupation spans thousands of years. Logging concessions now overlay their hunting territories, displacing communities — documented cases in Bidjoumam show Baka expelled from forest when operators arrive, losing access to medicinal plants and game species their subsistence depends on. Longitudinal studies document that Baka populations forced into village settlement experience rapid nutritional and health decline — a dependence on the forest ecosystem so specific that removal triggers measurable fitness collapse. The East Region functions as a resource colony in the classical sense: raw materials flow out, capital flows in for extraction, and the region captures almost none of the value it generates — source-sink dynamics where wealth concentrates abroad and environmental cost accumulates locally.