When ending poverty outweighs sustaining environment

Lizinet Josiah, 28, knows that her village is no longer getting the rainfall it used to get not so long ago. Her measurement of changes in the rainfall pattern is the volume of water in a river that roars near that village.

In yesteryears, she says, the Diamphwi River was impassable in February. The water in the river only receded to the point of people walking across around September.

Yet for the previous few years, the people of her Beni Village in Traditional Authority (TA) Masula in Lilongwe have no longer waited for September to walk across this river. They can do it in February and did it in February of 2012.

Although she dropped out of school in Standard four, Josiah is able to connect this diminishing rainfall pattern to the depletion of the village’s giant, the Dzalanyama forest reserve.

Scientists say forests assist in the rainmaking process called evapo-transpiration, a combination of evaporation from land and transpiration from vegetative cover including trees.

And for long, this forest had attracted rains to Josiah’s village. But that is not the case now that the forest is not longer there.

Hundreds of, mainly, men from around the forest have been descending on it, camping deep inside it, felling trees for charcoal burning. Josiah reckons that there are no culprits worse than those from her village.

Blame it on poverty

She also knows that sustaining the forest would bring back the reliable rainfall. But she chooses to stun you.

“As long as the charcoal alleviates our poverty and gives us something with which to buy food, the forest can go,” she says.

“It’s all because of poverty. We want to have food but we don’t have money to buy the food or fertilisers to boost our food yields. We get something from the charcoal from the forest. We buy food and top up what we get under the farm income subsidy programme. What we get is little and this season was worse.”

Every day, bicycles loaded with charcoal zigzag their way out of Dzalanyama forest to Mitundu where it is traded to middlemen. These middlemen later take it into the centre of Lilongwe where they sell it to final consumer.

Beating the system

Those burning the charcoal are so sought by forestry officers from the Department of Forestry. As such, they have to be artful dodgers to get to the middlemen.

Pilato Elefanti is among those who make a living out of selling firewood collected from the forest. He says every day an average of 400 bags of charcoal trek from the forest to the middlemen.

“Each bag fetches between K1,300 and K1,400 at the middlemen,” he said.

Elefanti says he is not involved in the charcoal business himself. He forms a group of people that get out of the forest will towers of dry wood on their bicycle carriers to Mitundu where they also sell to middlemen.

Each of them pays K300 a day to get a pass from the forestry officers into the forest. They are rarely monitored because of shortage of staff. So they may deliberately fell trees to collect dry wood the other day.

“I don’t collect the wood every day. But there are people who get out of the forest with bags of charcoal every day,” he says.

That is how the forest is drifting towards extinction. Unfortunately, it is those that perpetrate this extinction that are feeling the pinch.

Vicious cycle

Village Head (VH) Beni says rains have been inadequate and irregular since signs of the forest’s depletion started showing vividly over six years ago. And people there have not been harvesting enough.

“People are still planting because the kind of rains with which we plant our crops started coming very late. Before that, it was only showers,” said Beni in an interview in February.

This change in the rainfall pattern because of the depletion of Dzalanyama forest is also threatening water supply to the whole of Lilongwe and the cost of that water.

The forest is a source of rivers supplying the Kamuzu Dam which supplies Lilongwe.

District Forestry Officer (DFO) for Lilongwe Jipate Munyenyembe says a depleted Dzalanyama will raise the cost of water because more would be spent on treating the water.

“The absence of trees in catchment areas leads to sedimentation of rivers. And it is very expensive to restore the quality of water from rivers that are filled with sediment,” says Munyenyembe.

“Because the cost of treatment rises, the cost of that water also rises.”

He says halting the depletion of the forest has always been a problem due to lack of manpower and inaccessible roads.

This, he says, has given the villagers an opportunity to camp in the forest, fell trees and burn the charcoal. Only joint efforts between the Forestry Department and the Malawi Defence Force (MDF) or the police have flushed out the encroachers.

Hoping against hope

Munyenyembe says his department is currently dressing the depleted Dzalanyama and other areas in the district with 11 million trees.

People of Beni Village have also been given tree seedlings for them to plant. In fact, they have planted some. However, if you ask him, the answer you get from VH Beni tells you that Dzalanyama will keep going and protection of the young trees once mature is not guaranteed.

“The people want money to buy food and fertilisers and there are no other sources of money for this,” he says. “The poverty is what is driving them into charcoal burning.”