The Hardest Harvest, Episode 3 of 3, RTÉ One, Wednesday, May 16th, at 9.35pm
Jamie Hawan comes from a long-line of foresters: his great grandfather was a logger in the Ukraine, and Jamie’s grandfather and father were both foresters (in Scotland and then in Ireland). But Jamie took a roundabout route into the family profession working everywhere from a call centre to the civil service to the bank. Six years ago he took the chance to go back to education, and studied forestry. Now a harvesting manager for the State forestry company, Coillte, working with machines that can cost up to half a million euro, 32-year-old Jamie was determined to take on The Hardest Harvest with everything he had to offer.
Young, fit and confident, Jamie is a good fit for an assignment living and working with a forester and his family on the side of a mountain in Uganda, near the border with Congo. But logging by hand with just an axe and a machete inside a tropical rainforest is a far cry from managing national forestry in Ireland: working in the searing heat is not just hard, but perilous. Jamie needs his wits – as well as his skills – about him if he’s to emerge from the rainforest unscathed. From tracking illegal loggers at night deep inside the rainforest and attempting to arrest them, to moving colonised Bee hives by hand to hauling trees by hand over a mountain peak all present Jamie with some of the biggest challenges of his life.
Ireland’s forests may be as valuable for recreational use as for timber production, but forestry in Uganda is fraught with danger, making this perhaps the most hazardous assignment of all. Logging crews lack elementary safety equipment; injuries from falling trees and from transporting the logs by hand across the mountain are common. Illegal logging, mostly at night, is rife, driven by Chinese demand for timber but with local villagers providing their own, ill-equipped security forces, there is always the danger that they will confront an illegal logging crew that is prepared to fight back rather than accept arrest. Jamie will run greater risks in Uganda than mere homesickness.
Series Overview
An Irish farmer, forester and fisherman travel to the harshest of environments in some of the world’s poorest countries to live off the land and sea using nothing but their bare hands and basic tools. Can they cope with the gruelling day-to-day reality of subsistence living and the struggle for survival in sub-Saharan Africa?
Cork dairy farmer Paula, Waterford forester Jamie, and Dublin skipper ‘Big’ John each leave behind family and friends to spend two and a half weeks living a hand-to-mouth existence in remote rural Africa, amongst the poorest of the poor. Plying their trade with primitive tools and practices – hunting and herding with spears, logging by hand and fishing an open ocean in the flimsiest of vessels – they push themselves to the physical and psychological edge in a bid to better understand the struggle for survival their African hosts battle with every day.