Nobel Laureate wants Native Trees for Kenya
Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt movement and winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, criticised many forestry projects this week.
She was giving the keynote address at the second World Agroforestry Conference in Nairobi and her concern was that imported tree species often became invasive and when they did so, two things happened. Either the trees took over the ecosystem and then, when they were felled, left nothing behind, or they damaged elements of the environment that were essential to local people and wildlife. She used the example of eucalypts, which are often planted in African agroforestry programmes and said, ‘they [the trees] are over promoted for commercial reasons. These trees are good for beauty but consume a lot of water when they are planted along rivers, wetlands and water shed areas.’ Maathai fears that such plantings cause havoc in Kenya’s complex biodiversity.
Cash crop funding destroys forests
In particular she said that in Kenya’s Central Province, cash crops have been the focus of projects, rather than food security crops. ‘The diversity of food crops that guaranteed food security at homesteads where I grew up has diminished as the canopy of indigenous tree species which favours growth of food crops … [has been] replaced with exotic species,’ she claimed. Many thousands of Kenyans are enduring a severe drought, caused in part, it is believed, by cutting down ancient forests.
Four billion trees is not enough
Four billion trees have been planted world wide since the Billion Tree Campaign was launched by UNEP four years ago but demand for timber, wood fuel and other tree products will keep on rising with the renewed global economic growth and population increase. Speakers at the conference said that demand for wood would far outstrip supply, prices would skyrocket, and they feared that efforts to protect the remaining forests will fail.
Kenyan forest courtesy of aiace at Flickr under a creative commons licence
