Disappearing forests in Malawi Causes and solutions

Amber Kerr

EEP 153 Research Project May 30, 2005

Abstract Malawi has exceptionally high rates of population growth (3.1%) and deforestation (2.4%), suggesting a Malthusian link between the two. The most important proximal cause of forest loss in Malawi has been the expansion of agricultural land. Population growth has been an important driver for this process, but is an insufficient explanation by itself. In Malawi’s case, it has been coupled with a lack of outmigration and an inability to intensify agricultural production on existing land due to high input costs. Furthermore, unequal land distribution resulting from the colonial estate system accelerated the displacement of farmers into marginal areas, while a loss of traditional land tenure rules left communal forests vulnerable to encroachment and exploitation. Now that most arable land has already been cleared, the main threat to Malawi's forests is continuing fuelwood demand. Malawi’s current environmental laws have many provisions for forest protection, but are lacking in enforcement. Nevertheless, a variety of short-term solutions seem possible, including agroforestry trees to increase wood supply, efficient charcoal-making to reduce demand, and agricultural intensification and land redistribution to reduce forest encroachment. Long-term solutions include community management of forests, diversifying foreign exchange beyond Malawi’s environmentally destructive mainstay of tobacco, and reducing fertility rates with integrated family planning programs. Most of these solutions will have additional benefits such as economic growth, food security, and public health. When all the costs and benefits are considered, tackling the problem of deforestation in Malawi seems not only possible but imperative.

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Introduction Disaster is the only reason this tiny African country ever makes the news. “Hunger in Malawi,” reads the headline from the UN World Food Programme1. The accompanying photo shows a Malawian farmer, Helen Mripe, in her maize field. She tries to smile for the camera but her brow is creased with worry. She holds out a few cobs of maize, all that is left to feed her family of eight. Behind her, as far as the eye can see, stretches a patchwork of withered fields and shrubland. Standing watch over the landscape is a single lonely tree. Is this story as simple, and as hopeless, as it appears? Have the forests have disappeared because of Helen Mripe’s eight children and countless others like them? At first glance, it looks as though rapid population growth has led to a downward spiral of soil erosion, land degradation, poverty, and hunger. However, the causes of Malawi’s deforestation may be more subtle than they seem at first. This paper will attempt to unravel some of the causes, with the goal of identifying short-term and long-term solutions.

The central question: Does population growth cause deforestation? Malawi has one of the highest rates of population growth in the world, a 3.1% annual increase (PRB, 2004). Malawi’s annual deforestation rate is approximately 2.4% (FAO, 2001), also among the highest on record. The sheer magnitude of these rates of change makes Malawi an interesting case study to explore the population-deforestation link. Are the two trends related, and if so, is it a case of cause and effect? If the link proves as robust as many researchers believe, this has bleak implications for Malawi. Malawi is among the world’s least developed nations; its Human Development Index rank is 165th out of 177 countries (UNDP, 2004). With indicators such as life expectancy and per-capita income near rock bottom – and showing no signs of improvement – it is not realistic to expect a prompt demographic transition in Malawi. Furthermore, Malawi is heavily dependent on agriculture, heightening its vulnerability to the effects of deforestation. The country’s future hinges upon the presence of intervening factors that can moderate the environmental impact of its population. There is a more hopeful reason to focus on Malawi, too. It has recently made a peaceful transition to democratic governance and has enacted several key pieces of environmental legislation. Malawi seems to have the political will to pursue solutions to deforestation. However, the existence of solutions is by no means guaranteed; as French (1986) laments, “to say the problem is intolerable does not necessarily mean that it can be solved.” What is deforestation, and what are its effects? Even defining the issue is not straightforward, as there are a variety of definitions for “forest” and “deforestation.” Probably the most widely-accepted definition is that of FAO (2005), which considers a forest to be any land with greater than 10% cover of trees over 5 m high. By this

1 Source: http://www.wfp.org/newsroom/photo_gallery/Malawi/03.html (July 15, 2002).

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standard, deforestation is the act of depleting forest cover to less than 10%. If that threshold is not reached, the change is instead considered “forest degradation.” Simply defining a threshold for tree cover is not enough, however. Should significant agricultural encroachment disqualify an area as “forest,” regardless of the percentage tree cover? Should a distinction be made between depleted forests and natural savannahs? Should monoculture plantations, or indeed any planted trees, be excluded? And how should the original tree cover of an area be estimated? These decisions are necessarily arbitrary, and it is important to note that they often vary depending on the purpose of the study. It is also worth questioning whether deforestation, however it is defined, is always undesirable. Certainly, the process has many harmful effects: as well as the loss of fuelwood and other tree products, deforestation can cause soil erosion and degradation, flooding, and changes in local and global climate, not to mention cultural and biological diversity loss. However, these costs should be weighed against the benefits of deforestation, namely food production and income generation. Many countries have benefited from unsustainable exploitation of their forests: for example, between 1700 and 1900, approximately 55% of the forests in the eastern United States disappeared (Houghton and Hackler, 2000). So, although the costs of deforestation can be severe, sometimes deforestation is a logical economic decision (Walker, 2004). Theories of deforestation Tropical deforestation has become a topic of great concern to environmentalists over the past several decades. This concern has sparked a variety of theories, some complementary and some contradictory, about the causes of deforestation. Several of the more influential theories are described below. The classic Malthusian viewpoint is straightforward: more people, less forest. In other words, increasing population in rural areas leads to deforestation, usually through the mechanism of land clearing for agriculture (Figure 1). This is still the prevalent discourse amongst natural resource managers in the tropics (Adger, 2001; Walker, 2004). However, it is increasingly being supplemented by other theories, or rejected altogether in favor of more populist viewpoints (Kaimowitz, 2002). After a thorough review of literature worldwide, Carr (2004) concludes that “data generally support a positive association between deforestation and population growth at the farm, national, and regional levels,” but adds that there are always intervening factors. Another well-known theory with Malthusian overtones is the “fuelwood gap,” which states that deforestation occurs when fuelwood demand exceeds the net fuelwood production of available forests. An extension of this idea is the “fuelwood trap” (Figure 2), describing a vicious circle between deforestation and poverty. The “fuelwood gap” theory has to some degree fallen out of favor, as evidence accumulates that fuelwood harvesting is often sustainable and comes from non-forest trees (for example, Mahiri and Howorth, 2001). Timber extraction by multinational logging companies has received much attention as a cause of deforestation (perhaps a disproportional amount of attention, as only a small fraction of tropical timber is actually destined for the export market). A more important effect may be that road-

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building for timber extraction opens up previously inaccessible areas to human settlement, thus indirectly leading to land use change (Wunder, 2000; Walker, 2004). More generally, it is thought that free trade can accelerate deforestation, especially when massive external debt pushes a country to produce agricultural or forest products as quickly as possible in order to repay its loans (Wunder, 2000; Ehrhardt-Martinez, 2002). There is some evidence that that trade liberalization has contributed to deforestation in Tanzania and Zambia (Minde et al., 2001); however, the opposite effect has been observed in Mexico. It is unclear whether a general trend can be claimed in either direction. The above theories, while some of the more commonly mentioned, are by no means a complete list. For example, other authors have suggested that insecure land tenure encourages unsustainable land use, including deforestation (Wunder, 2000); that poverty in and of itself is a driver of deforestation (Minde et al., 2001; Fisher, 2004); and that decisions about the use of trees can only be understood in the context of cultural and gendered power relations (Rocheleau, 1995). No single explanation is likely to be sufficient in any given case. Fairhead and Leach (1998) introduced a new element into the debate by claiming that in West Africa, native people often helped to maintain tree cover, or even planted trees where there had been none before. However, these instances of stewardship had been ignored due to colonialists’ preconceptions of Africans as environmentally destructive. Fairhead and Leach contend that deforestation statistics in West Africa have been exaggerated by three times or more. It is worth keeping this in mind when considering any instance of deforestation, though lack of data usually makes it impossible to describe any area’s land-use history definitively. We now turn to a closer examination of Malawi itself, in an attempt to determine whether any of these existing ideas accurately describe Malawi’s forest loss. Before exploring deforestation in detail, it will be helpful to briefly review some key facts about the country and its population.

Overpopulation

Poverty

Unsustainable

acceleration of

traditional “slash -&-

burn” agriculture

DEFORESTATION

Figure 1. The currently dominant “Neo-Malthusian” discourse on tropical deforestation (adapted from Adger et al., 2001.)

Figure 2. The “fuelwood trap” theory as described by Wunder (2000).

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History and background Malawi is a small landlocked country in southeastern Africa (Figure 3). Its dominant geographical feature is Lake Malawi, nearly as large as Malawi itself. Despite its tropical latitude, Malawi’s location on an inland plateau gives it moderate temperature and rainfall. The northern region is mountainous, while the south is more densely populated; ethnic groups and languages also vary greatly from north to south. Table 1 summarizes Malawi’s geography.

A brief history of Malawi Due to its remoteness and susceptibility to malaria, Malawi was never as heavily settled by Europeans as were many other African colonies. In 1891 it became Nyasaland Protectorate, administered by the British. During its colonial years Nyasaland served as an important source of labor for the mines and plantations in Rhodesia and other neighboring countries, perhaps at the expense of its own economic development (Vaughan, 1987; Mkandawire, 1999). After independence in 1964, Malawi was ruled for 30 years by “President for Life” Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda, effectively a dictator. Under his leadership, Malawi’s agricultural estates and other business interests were well supported, but conditions did not improve for ordinary Malawians (Ellis et al., 2003). Banda stepped down peacefully in 1994, and today Malawi is a multi-party democracy2, albeit struggling with allegations of government corruption. Though Malawi itself has not experienced a war in recent history, it has been significantly affected by the long-standing civil war in neighboring Mozambique. This war disrupted transport and economic stability across the whole region, and caused a flux of over one million refugees into Malawi (GoM, 2001), many of whom stayed on after the 1994 peace treaty.

Agriculture in Malawi Agriculture in Malawi can be summed up in two words: maize and tobacco. Maize is overwhelmingly the dominant food crop; about 80% of Malawi’s arable land area is planted to maize (Smale, 1995). Tobacco, the main cash crop, accounts for most of the rest. There are small amounts of cassava, rice, and bananas for subsistence, as well as tea, sugar, cotton, and groundnuts for income, but these play only a minor role. 2 Malawi’s transition to democracy was precipitated by foreign aid donors, who demanded a change in government in return for continuing aid (GoM, 2001).

Figure 3. Map of Malawi and region.

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Under colonial rule, much of Malawi’s best agricultural land was set aside for tobacco estates, and smallholders were legally prohibited from growing tobacco and other cash crops. Not until 1990 was this system was finally overturned in order to comply with a World Bank credit scheme (Orr, 2000). Since then, smallholder production of cash crops has greatly increased (Harrigan, 2003), but maize production is still the overriding concern of Malawian farmers. Malawi’s agriculture is low-input and low-output. Nearly all cropland is rain-fed; despite the abundance of fresh water in Lake Malawi, irrigation schemes are too costly (Mkandawire, 1999). This leaves farmers susceptible to drought during the eight-month dry season. Furthermore, most smallholders cannot afford fertilizer and other inputs. The cost of nitrogen fertilizer in Malawi is approximately five times the world average (Dewees, 1995), in part due to high transport costs (Harrigan, 2003). These and other factors have led to Malawi missing out on the “Green Revolution” (Dorward and Kydd, 2004), even more so than other African nations; average maize yields in Malawi are only about 1 ton per hectare (Mwafongo and Kapila, 1999)3. Malawi’s economy By any standards, Malawi is a desperately poor country, with a per-capita GDP among the lowest in the world (Table 1). Malawi’s internal economy is almost entirely non-monetized. Employment is difficult to measure, as approximately 80% of the population is employed in

3 By comparison, average maize yields in the United States are approximately 8 tons per hectare.

Table 1. Geography and economy of Malawi.

Geography Economy

Land area1 118,480 km2 (of which 24,400 km2 is Lake Malawi) Currency

(May 2005) Kwacha (US$1.00 = K118)

Annual rainfall 75 cm (SW) to 180 cm (N) GDP 2 $1.9 billion (2002) Average annual temperature 16°C (plateau) to 25°C (lowland) Per capita

GDP1,2 $190 ($580 PPP)

Shared borders Zambia (NW), Mozambique (SW and SE), Tanzania (NE) Aid received

(2002)2 $377 million

Colonial history Independence from Britain, 1964 Foreign debt1 $3.13 billion Government Democratic republic, as of 1994 Debt service2 $36 million (2002)

Languages English (official), Chichewa (official), regional languages Exports1 $503 million

(tobacco, tea)

Religions1 Christianity (75%), Islam (20%), other (5%)

% urban pop.2 16%; growing at 0.3% per year Imports1

$521 million (food, manufactured goods, petroleum)

Major cities3 Blantyre (646,000); Lilongwe (capital, 598,000); Mzuzu (120,000); Zomba (90,000)

Income distribution2

Highly unequal (Gini coefficient = 0.503)

Sources: 1CIA (2005), 2UNDP (2004), 3Brinkhoff (2003). Currency values in current US dollars.

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subsistence agriculture (GoM, 2001). Poor infrastructure, lack of information, and government disincentives have discouraged the development of internal trade (Dorward and Kydd, 2004), and this poses a formidable barrier to poverty reduction (Ellis et al., 2003). Malawi’s economy has been profoundly shaped by the agricultural estate system and its effects on land distribution. Poor Malawians often forgo working on their own land (if they have any) to work as laborers for wealthy farmers or estate owners. This agricultural wage labor, or ganyu, is a crucial source of livelihood for much of the population (Dorward and Kydd, 2004). Unequal land distribution has contributed to Malawi’s extraordinarily unequal distribution of income, which in turn causes low “growth elasticity”: when the economy grows by 1%, poverty is reduced by much less than 1% (Mkandawire, 1999). Malawi has the dubious honor of being the most tobacco-dependent economy in the world (Tobin and Knausenberger, 1998). Tobacco accounts for about 70% of the country’s export revenues (Figure 4) and directly or indirectly employs over half the population4. There are several reasons for the continuing dominance of tobacco: it is ideally suited to Malawi’s climate, has high labor and low land requirements, and has built up a great deal of infrastructure and political support (Yurekli and de Beyer, 2001; Shorter, 2002). However, as anti-smoking campaigns attempt to reduce tobacco demand, diversification seems increasingly necessary. Other options for Malawi are limited. Lack of suitable land has prevented Malawi from increasing production of tea, its other main cash crop; an alternative might be to focus on especially high-value crops such as paprika, garlic, or cut flowers (Dorward and Kydd, 2004; WAC, 2004; Shorter, 2002). To develop Malawi’s currently insignificant manufacturing industries, such as textiles, would require major investments in infrastructure and a solution to high transport costs (GoM, 2001). Perhaps a better opportunity would be the promotion of tourism, which currently cannot even be measured as part of Malawi’s GDP (GoM, 2001). However, there seems to be no near-term alternative to tobacco as a source of export revenue. Foreign aid provides a significant boost to Malawi’s economy, accounting for about 20% of GDP in 2002 (UNDP, 2004). However, aid payments are being curtailed due to donor concern over government corruption (Dorward and Kydd, 2004). Malawi is also heavily burdened with foreign debt; during the 1990s, its annual debt payments exceeded 25% of its GDP (UNDP, 2004). A succession of structural adjustment programs in the 1980s and 1990s have done little to reduce that debt. Flotation and subsequent devaluation of the kwacha in the mid-1990s have only worsened matters (Tsoka and Mvula, 1999). To say Malawi’s economic situation is precarious would be an understatement. Paradoxically, the resulting

4 Nevertheless, since Malawi is a small country, it accounts for only about 5% of world tobacco exports (Yurekli and de Beyer, 2001), and is a “price-taker” in the global tobacco trade (GoM, 2001).

Figure 4. Malawi’s major exports (% share of total), 1991-1997. Source: Government of Malawi (2001).

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poverty probably contributes to Malawi’s population growth, as described below.

Demographics of Malawi Most other African countries seem to be undergoing a significant fertility decline (Cohen, 1998), but Malawi is not among them. Its birth and death statistics point to a country early in Stage II of the demographic transition (Table 2). Malawi’s population increase began in the 1930s as major diseases like smallpox were brought under control (Vaughan, 1987), and although both death and birth rates are still high, death rates have fallen enough to enable rapid population growth – over 3% per year, among the world’s highest. No single factor can be invoked to explain Malawi’s high fertility rates. However, as might be expected, Malawi scores poorly on most measures of gender equality, ranking 134th out of 144 nations measured (UNDP, 2004). Girls are underrepresented in school and tend to marry early (Cohen, 2000). Education and employment opportunities are very limited for women in Malawi, 68% of whom cannot read or write (GoM, 2001). Because Malawi’s population is mostly rural5, the majority of Malawian women are employed in farm labor. Cultural influences also undoubtedly contribute to high fertility. The use of birth control in Malawi is sometimes frowned upon for religious reasons, or even because of suspicion that it is a Western plot to harm Africans (Kaler, 2004). On the positive side, Malawian children fill the role of status symbols and risk insurance for their parents (Cohen, 2000). The risk insurance that additional children provide is especially necessary in a country like Malawi with high death rates and few economic opportunities.

Poverty, hunger, and AIDS Western stereotypes tend to reduce the entire continent of Africa to three problems: poverty, hunger, and AIDS. Sadly, in Malawi, there is truth to this stereotype. A survey in 2000

5 Malawi is one of the least urbanized countries in Africa, with only about 15% of the population living in cities. Malawi also has low rural-to-urban migration rates, perhaps because Malawi’s cities do not have much to offer: two-thirds of city dwellers live in “squatter settlements” (Mwafongo and Kapila, 1999).

Table 2. Basic demographic data for Malawi, compared to regional and world averages. Malawi E. Africa

average World

average Population 11,900,000 – – Population growth rate 3.1% 2.3% 1.3% Birth rate1 51 41 21 Death rate1 21 18 9 Infant mortality rate2 121 98 56 Total fertility rate 6.63 5.7 2.8 Life expectancy (years) 44 46 67 Population density/km2 101 42 47 HIV infection rate 14.2% 7.6% 1.1%

Notes: 1Per 1,000 population per year; 2per 1,000 live births; 3Conflicts with Cohen (2000), who suggests a TFR of <5, but closely matches UNDP (2004).

Source: All data from Population Reference Bureau (2004); availability code “B” (data reasonably complete).

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indicated that 65% of Malawi's population fell below the state-determined poverty line, equivalent to an income of US$120 per year (Ellis et al., 2003). A large fraction of Malawians are food-insecure, and three-quarters of young children experience stunted growth due to chronic malnutrition – one of the highest rates on the continent (Tobin and Knausenberger, 1998). HIV/AIDS only adds to these challenges. The official statistic for HIV prevalence in Malawi is 14.2% (PRB, 2004), eighth highest in the world, though some estimates are as high as 20% (Devereux, 2002a). AIDS has caused Malawi’s already low life expectancy to decline even further (UNDP, 2004). An increasing number of AIDS orphans in Malawi means an increasing dependency ratio (Mukherjee and Benson, 2003), making it even more difficult for families to escape chronic poverty and hunger. The difficulty of meeting basic needs is placing extreme stress on social relations in Malawi, bringing people to say “Everyone is for himself and God is for us all” (Devereux, 2002b). With poverty and death rates high, it may be difficult to make progress on population control as a goal in and of itself. Unfortunately, population growth in turn hampers poverty reduction: Malawi’s population growth rate of 3.1% equals its GDP growth rate (GoM 2001), meaning that tremendous efforts at poverty reduction are necessary simply to avoid losing ground.

Population policy Population policy in Malawi has had a short and turbulent history. Not until the early 1970s did the government attempt to institute family planning services. These met with such opposition that they were quickly discontinued (Cohen, 2000). A decade later, as the costs of population growth became increasingly obvious, the government re-introduced family planning, but this time more cautiously focused on health benefits (Kaler, 2004), such as the spacing of births. Malawi adopted a National Population Policy in 1993, emphasizing that education, access to contraceptives, and mortality reduction would allow parents to make wise choices about their family size (Cohen, 2000). Though the Malawi government recognizes that birth rates are still unsustainably high (PRB, 2004), it has never used direct incentives or coercion. Population control is not currently a top priority for Malawi (Kaler, 2004). In the mid-1990s, the rate of contraceptive use by Malawi women suddenly doubled from 7% to 14%, but not because of population policy. Rather, this was a byproduct of condom awareness campaigns aimed at stemming the AIDS epidemic. This and other evidence indicates that the mass media can have a powerful influence on the use of modern contraceptives in Malawi (Cohen, 2000). However, 14% is still very a very low rate of contraceptive use, and the government has no forthcoming strategies to increase use beyond that amount. Two issues that dominate the population policies of many other countries – the status of women, and international immigration – are given little attention in Malawi. Malawi’s newly formed Department of Gender Affairs focuses on training women in income-generating activities (GoM, 2004) but is not clearly aligned with population policy. Immigration is no longer a major concern now that the Mozambican civil war is over and Malawi’s net national migration is negligible (CIA, 2005). Currently, Malawi’s population policy mainly consists of distributing contraceptives and information to those who are interested.

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The future of Malawi’s population Looming over Malawi’s present-day challenges is a seemingly impossible forecast from the Population Reference Bureau (2004) stating that in the next fifty years the country’s population will increase by 296%. By all accounts, every hectare of arable land has already been used; food security is precarious, and soil fertility is declining. How, then, can the struggling country of 12 million support an additional 35 million people? If there is any truth to the forecast, it will be of the utmost importance that Malawians devise ways to use their natural resources with much greater efficiency. One of Malawi’s most important – and most rapidly changing – natural resources is its native forest, to which we now turn.

Malawi’s forests Malawi does not possess vast tropical rainforests like the Congo, gorilla-inhabited cloud forests like Uganda, nor even the “biodiversity hotspot” status of the otherwise unassuming South African fynbos. Malawi’s forests may not be glamorous, but they are of utmost value to the people who live there: nearly 90% of Malawians depend on woodfuel for energy (UNDP, 2004), and Malawians derive on average 30% of their income from forest products (Fisher, 2004). The dominant forest type in Malawi is miombo (Figure 5), an open-canopy woodland dominated by leguminous trees in the genus Brachystegia. The miombo woodlands, together with the similar woodland type munga, account for about 85% of Malawi’s forested area. The remainder is closed-canopy broadleaved forests and small areas of montane forest. Forest in Malawi falls under several different jurisdictions (Figure 6). Nearly half the forested area is “customary woodlands,” nominally managed by the Forestry Department but in fact essentially unmanaged (Mwafongo and Kapila, 1999). National parks and forest reserves, each about a quarter of the total area, are more actively protected by the state. Plantations, a small fraction of the total area, are usually state- or privately owned. Distribution of forests in Malawi varies greatly from north to south: the rugged northern region has large forested areas, including most of the parks and reserves, while the southern region has almost no forest remaining.

Figure 6. Distribution of Malawi’s forest resources. Source: FAO (1991).

Figure 5. Miombo woodland in Malawi, dominated by Brachystegia trees. Miombo is the main source of fuel and timber for many East Africans. Source: Universität Hamburg.

Customary land 47% National

parks 27%

Forest reserves

22%

Plantations 4%

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Changes in forest cover Unfortunately, there are few reliable statistics on Malawi’s forests (Minde et al., 2001). Estimates of the current forest cover range from less than 20% (Place and Otsuka, 2001) to almost 40% (Minde et al., 2001). The 2001 FAO estimate of 27% forest cover, or 2.5 million hectares, is probably a reasonable median value. A more difficult question is the extent of forest cover in the past. Data from the Malawi government (2000; cited in Alden Wily and Mbaya, 2001) indicate that approximately 41% of Malawi’s forest area disappeared between 1972 and 2000. The FAO (2001) gives a higher estimate, stating that 57% of Malawi’s forests were lost between 1972 and 1992. Table 3 provides data from a recent aerial survey. Regardless of which estimate is closest to the truth, the magnitude of loss is considerable. Might Malawian farmers have partially offset this loss by actively maintaining or replanting trees? The usual assumption is that no such management takes place, but according to Dewees (1995), farmers in Malawi actually do plant and manage a great variety of tree species on their farms, ranging from mangoes to native agroforestry trees such as Acacia albida. Useful though this may be at the farm level, it appears unlikely that these activities have had any significant effect on tree cover at the national level (Place and Otsuka, 2001). What are the effects of deforestation? The consequences of Malawi’s forest loss are serious, according to most evaluations. Tobin and Knausenberger (1998) warn that “Malawi cannot safely sustain further damage to its fragile ecosystems.” Place and Otsuka (2001) strike a less catastrophic tone, but concede that deforestation “almost certainly exceeds the socially optimal level.” Soil erosion is probably the most often-cited negative effect of Malawi’s deforestation. According to Mwafongo and Kapila (1999), the average annual rate of soil erosion in Malawi could be as much as 20 tons per hectare; the Government of Malawi (2001) estimates 29 tons6, and claims this is equal in value to 8% of Malawi’s GDP. Deforestation also has other negative effects on soil quality; for example, lack of trees forces people to use maize stover for fuel instead of returning it to the soil to replenish nutrients (Park, 1997). These processes are of great concern in a country where yields are already low and declining. Other effects of deforestation can be seen in Malawi across multiple scales. At the household level, negative social outcomes can result (for example, women spend more time gathering fuelwood; Brouwer et al., 1997). On a regional basis, deforestation is thought to contribute to flooding (GoM, 2001), which may have been the cause of the 2002 famine (Devereux, 2002a),

6These numbers are considerably higher than the already high average erosion rate for land under maize in sub-Saharan Africa, which is about 14 tons/ha-yr, according to Wiebe (2003).

Table 3. Changes in land use from 1971 to 1995 across 57 enumeration areas in Malawi.

1971 1995 Agriculture 51.5% 67.7% Woodland and bushland 33.0% 18.5% Forest and plantations 1.3% 0.2% Other (e.g. built areas) 14.2% 13.6%

Source: Place and Otsuka (2001)

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and possibly also to long-term disruption of climate patterns (Mkoka, 2004). The effects of deforestation on Malawi’s biodiversity are unknown but almost certainly significant.

Links between problems, causes, and solutions With some of the problems of deforestation now enumerated, it is tempting to jump directly into a discussion of solutions, but first it is necessary to identify the causes. It is difficult to know where to begin: explanations in the literature range from the minutely detailed – such as cutting mature Brachystegia trees to provide wood for smoke-drying fish (Abbott and Homewood, 1999) – to the nebulous, such as trade liberalization (Minde et al., 2001). We will attempt to organize this universe of ideas by using a somewhat artificial distinction: immediate causes and underlying causes. As Wunder (2000) cautions, such a dichotomy can be unhelpful if it allows policymakers to shift blame to the underlying causes and thereby escape responsibility for the immediate causes. Keeping this in mind, we will aim for a balance between the two.

Immediate causes of deforestation There are several straightforward mechanisms causing deforestation in Malawi: subsistence agriculture, fuelwood use, and tobacco production7. We address each of these briefly below.

Subsistence agriculture The expansion of subsistence agriculture is frequently cited as the leading cause of deforestation in Malawi (Park, 1997; FAO, 2001; Fisher, 2004). It seems to be a reasonable explanation, but is not easy to prove. Minde et al. (2001) found that the land area under maize in Malawi increased by 30% from 1970 to 1990 – approximately the same total land area which is thought to have experienced forest loss – but they could not conclusively link expansion of agricultural land to deforestation, since comparable statistics on forest cover change were unavailable. French (1986) estimated that about 30% of Malawi’s wood use8 was due to clearing for agriculture, and the rest was accounted for by fuelwood demand. However, fuelwood can be harvested sustainably from existing forest, whereas land clearing by definition leads to a loss of forest. Thus agriculture, even if responsible for a smaller proportion of total wood use, may cause the majority of the actual deforestation. Data are too sparse to clarify the picture further. Land clearance for subsistence agriculture was probably a much bigger cause of deforestation in the past than it is today, according to the Malawi Environmental Affairs Department (2002). This is simply because all the arable land in Malawi has already been cleared. Deforestation is continuing in marginal areas, but the extent of this phenomenon is not known.

7Elsewhere, the extraction of commercial timber is an important immediate cause of deforestation, but this does not seem to be a significant factor in Malawi. Fisher (2004) provides the only recent discussion of the topic. 8 This conflicts with Park’s (1997) interpretation of French’s data; according to Park, the fraction of forest loss caused by agriculture is considerably higher.

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Fuelwood and charcoal About 90% of Malawians depend on wood as their sole energy supply, and approximately three-quarters of this wood is derived from natural forests; the remainder comes from trees grown on farmlands (Brouwer et al., 1997). The sheer magnitude of this demand certainly suggests that fuelwood could be a major cause of deforestation. However, it is unclear whether a “fuelwood gap” – a difference between demand and sustainable supply – in fact exists. The Malawi Environmental Affairs Department (2002) estimates that the national demand for forest products, mainly fuelwood9, is approximately double the sustainable level; French (1986) closely agrees. However, another report by the Malawi Government (2001) estimates that woodfuel demand exceeds the rate of natural replenishment by only 30%. The most optimistic assessment is that of Abbott and Homewood (2004), who found that wood use in Lake Malawi National Park was almost entirely sustainable. It is likely that a local fuelwood gap exists in some parts of the country but not others (Mwafongo and Kapila, 1999); the total magnitude of the gap is uncertain. Some authors (Schramm, 1987; GoM, 2001) have suggested that the magnitude of Malawi’s fuelwood gap is immense, but in the past has not been felt because of the “liquidation of capital” resulting from forest clearing for agriculture. This theory predicts major fuelwood shortages, and subsequent destruction of intact forests, now that most agricultural land has been cleared. Further complicating the picture is the fact that a large fraction of Malawi’s fuelwood is actually used for charcoal production (Bailis et al., 2005). Charcoal is produced by allowing wood to smolder in earth kilns. Though almost half of the wood’s energy is lost in this way, the resulting fuel is more compact and burns more cleanly. In Malawi, as throughout Africa, charcoal is mainly produced by rural dwellers and consumed by city dwellers (Fisher, 2004). Charcoal production is illegal in Malawi without a permit (GoMEAD, 2002), but this law is rarely enforced, and many rural Malawians depend on charcoal-making for their income. Due to charcoal’s high market value and its inefficiency of production, the use of charcoal almost certainly increases rates of deforestation (Kalipeni and Zulu, 2002).

Tobacco production There is considerable disagreement about the effect of tobacco growing on fuelwood use in Malawi (Tobin and Knausenberger, 1998). Burley tobacco, which accounts for most of Malawi’s tobacco crop, does not require fuelwood for curing (Figure 7); its main wood requirement is in the form of poles to build drying sheds (Orr, 2000). However, according to the Malawi Government, tobacco may be responsible for as 30% of Malawi’s total wood use (1998a; cited in Fisher, 2004). The World Bank (cited in Minde et al., 2001) gives a much lower estimate of 7%. Regardless of total demand, it does appear that most tobacco estates are not self-sufficient in wood (Tobin and Knausenberger, 1998), leading to pressure on the surrounding forests. To prevent this problem, legislation was passed in 1973 that required at least 10% of each tobacco estate to be planted in trees. However, a recent survey showed that most estates were out of

9 Another use of wood is for building materials, but this and other miscellaneous uses account for only about 10% of the total demand (Minde et al., 2001).

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compliance (GoMEAD, 2002). The available data, despite their inconsistencies, suggest that tobacco production is a significant and to some extent unnecessary cause of deforestation.

Underlying causes of deforestation The above mechanisms help to clarify how Malawi’s forests are disappearing, but cannot fully explain the reasons why. Why is it necessary to clear ever-increasing amounts of land for subsistence agriculture? Why has the fuelwood gap developed? Why is tobacco production pursued even at the expense of environmental quality? A variety of explanations have emerged, including land shortages, land inequality, land tenure, perverse economic incentives, and poverty; population growth is a cross-cutting theme. Here we explore each of these ideas in turn. Population density and land shortages Hectares of land are a fixed resource. As Malawi’s population increases, land availability per capita must necessarily decrease10. The average family currently has slightly under one hectare of land, and in most villages, plots are simply subdivided with each successive generation (Ellis et al., 2003). Mwafongo and Kapila (1999) predict that by 2010, the majority of households will have less than half a hectare. This is alarming considering that already more than half of Malawi’s rural households have insufficient land to meet their food requirements (Orr, 2000). The effect of increasing population density can be buffered by expansion into undeveloped land, but after a point the remaining land becomes increasingly unsuitable. Malawi has clearly passed this threshold. According to the Malawi Government (2001), 31% of Malawi’s land area is arable, but the area actually under agriculture is 49%. In other words, 18% of Malawi’s land surface is already inappropriately cultivated, presumably in an attempt to maintain some minimum landholding per capita. Such “extensification” has negative consequences not only for forest cover but also for human well-being. As many authors have pointed out, this process is not inevitable. Boserup, often cited in contrast to Malthus, argues that land-limited farmers can compensate by adopting more labor-intensive techniques. Tiffen (1996) describes how capital can also substitute for land, even for very resource-poor farmers; productivity gains are possible through low-cost investments such as terraces, trees, buildings, and simple irrigation systems. However, these processes much ultimately reach their limit (Dreschel et al., 2001), and there is little evidence that they are happening at all in Malawi. Extensification

10Because Malawi is not currently experiencing net international migration, population growth must necessarily lead to increased population density at the national scale. Migration on the sub-national scale may be important, but is not addressed here due to lack of available data.

Figure 7. Most tobacco grown in Malawi is air-dried. Unlike flue-cured tobacco, this method uses no firewood. However, it does require wood for drying racks and sheds. Source: Shorter (2002)

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continues to be the rule (Tobin and Knausenberger, 1998). Even if some improvement is possible through low-cost investments, it seems that efforts at agricultural intensification in Malawi have been crippled by the fact that farmers cannot afford fertilizer, irrigation, or other inputs.

Unequal land distribution To say simply that Malawi has a land shortage misses a key aspect of the picture: land distribution. Unequal distribution of land leads to a more rapid saturation of a region’s carrying capacity, and thus intensifies pressures on land clearing (Tole, 2004). This is especially likely where land availability and access to capital is limited, such as in Malawi. Therefore, might the fundamental cause of deforestation actually be the appropriation of land for agricultural estates, rather than the unchecked population growth of poor farming communities? There is some evidence to support this. Vaughan (1987) says that during colonial rule, the seizure of large quantities of estate land forced Malawian farmers into marginal areas, thereby causing much of the environmental damage that occurred on smallholders’ land during the 20th century. Kalipeni and Feder (1999) agree, describing Malawi’s land scarcity as “artificial.” The actual statistics on estate land are inconclusive. Estates occupied approximately 13% of Malawi's cultivated land in 1981 (Smale, 2002) and 20% in 199911 (Mkandawire, 1999). These percentages may seem too small to explain widespread encroachment of marginal land. The explanation becomes more persuasive, however, if one assumes that the very best land was seized (Kalipeni and Feder, 1999) and that much of the currently cultivated land is highly unproductive; this implies that much as a quarter or a third of Malawi’s potential agricultural productivity was taken over by estates. Combined with Malawi’s extremely unequal Gini coefficient, this suggests that land inequality is a major problem. There are reasons to hope the situation might improve. After the ban on smallholders growing cash crops was lifted in the 1990s, the agriculture estate system began to fall apart. Many estates consolidated or were put up for sale. This may be the start of a much-needed land redistribution process (Harrigan, 2003), but the political challenges will be considerable. Uncertain land tenure It is generally thought that secure land tenure encourages farmers to make investments in their land, such as planting or maintaining trees (e.g. Tiffen, 1996). Conversely, weak or unclear tenure systems can result in rapid deforestation (Place and Otsuka, 2001). This may help to explain the extent of Malawi’s forest loss. Most of the land in Malawi is “customary land,” which includes both individually held land (such as smallholder farms) and communally managed land. Woodlands are usually communally managed; the permission of the village headman is required to clear or otherwise alter them (Place and Otsuka, 2001). However, the 1965 Land Act allocated the control of customary lands to the state, rather than to their traditional owners (Alden Wily and Mbaya, 2001). This introduced uncertainty that threw the existing system into disarray (GoM, 2002). A weakening of traditional control resulted, 11 These percentages equates to approximately 6% and 9% of Malawi’s total land area, respectively.

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effectively converting the customary woodlands into open-access land, which not surprisingly appears to have encouraged their unsustainable use (Mwafongo and Kapila, 1999; Fisher, 2004).

Migration Both internal migration and international migration have affected Malawi’s forests in unexpected ways. The one million Mozambican refugees who fled to Malawi between 1987 and 1990 had a clear impact on Malawi’s natural resources (Park, 1997); the Malawi Government (2001) blames them for severe deforestation and erosion in some areas. Most have now returned to Mozambique, but lasting impacts remain. The opposite effect results from the large number of Malawians who cross the borders in search of ganyu, or temporary wage labor: when they are not in Malawi, most of their environmental impacts occur elsewhere. In more subtle ways, migration within Malawi has influenced deforestation by changing local land use practices. For example, Place and Otsuka (2001) concluded that high migration rates sometimes weakened land tenure systems, hastening the conversion of woodland to agriculture; Abbott and Homewood (1999) found that immigrants from northern Malawi had introduced the technique of gill fishing to Lake Malawi National Park, enabling the capture of larger fish which required more fuelwood to dry. It is an open question whether internal migration in Malawi would be expected to have a positive, negative, or neutral net effect on forest cover. Poverty and economic incentives Poverty, a frequently mentioned cause of Malawi’s deforestation (Minde et al., 2001; Fisher, 2004), has proven difficult to disentangle from other causes. Certainly poverty can drive Malawians toward unsustainable land use practices, such as intensive charcoal production (Kalipeni and Feder, 1999). But wealth can also drive deforestation, as happens in Amazonia (Carr, 2004). Wunder (2000) concludes that poverty-deforestation relationships are sufficiently complex that no generalizations can be made. Nevertheless, they have often been attempted. One such framework for thinking about this problem is the environmental Kuznets curve12. Ehrhardt-Martinez et al. (2002), in their regression analysis of 70 less developed countries, found that deforestation rates increased with GDP per capita up to a threshold of about US$1,000. Malawi’s per-capita GDP is far below this, leading to the simplistic interpretation that decreasing poverty in Malawi would at first lead to an increase in deforestation. However, the changes necessary to reduce poverty in Malawi are numerous and interwoven, making it impossible to say with any certainty whether deforestation would increase or decrease along the way. A related question is the extent to which economic interventions directly influence deforestation rates. It seems that deforestation does sometimes directly follow from structural adjustment programs that emphasize short-term economic growth (GoM, 2001; Minde et al. 2001). If such programs focus on ramping up agricultural exports, greater land clearing pressure is likely to result. This does not imply that economic growth must necessarily lead to environmental damage, but the question is too fundamental to address here. 12 The environmental Kuznets curve is a model postulating that increases in affluence will have first a negative, then a positive impact on environmental quality. It is still debated how widely, if at all, this model should be applied.

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Summary: Causes of deforestation in Malawi All the factors mentioned above probably influence Malawi’s deforestation in important ways. Agricultural expansion has a clearly negative impact on forest cover, but the process of agricultural expansion can only be understood in the context of population growth. Furthermore, population growth alone is not sufficient to explain the encroachment onto forest land; in Malawi’s case, crucially, it has been coupled with a lack of outmigration and a failure to intensify agricultural production on existing land. The highly unequal distribution of Malawi’s land accelerated the displacement of farmers into marginal areas, and the loss of traditional land tenure rules left communal forests vulnerable to encroachment and exploitation. With so few opportunities to earn cash incomes, rural Malawians have understandably turned to whatever options are available, even at the expense of the country’s environmental health. Tobacco growing and charcoal production are two such activities: despite their destructive effects on forests, they form the lifeblood of Malawi’s meager cash economy. Pervasive poverty makes it difficult to for Malawians to invest in more sustainable options, while a rapidly increasing population makes poverty reduction difficult – and increases the pressure on the very resources, such as fuelwood and charcoal, that are causing the destruction in the first place. Deforestation in Malawi has also been influenced by factors outside its borders. Malawi’s economic limitations arise partly from being a landlocked region surrounded by civil war. Buffeted by the uneven and painful process of economic globalization, Malawi’s clearest option is to maximize its output of agricultural products, but perhaps at the expense of the resources it can least afford to lose: its soil and its trees. Despite these immense challenges, it may still be possible to slow or even reverse deforestation in Malawi. The remainder of this paper will focus on the range of potential solutions.

Government response Before discussing solutions more generally, it will be useful to briefly review the past and current interventions of the Malawi government, which has long been concerned about deforestation. Some of its past interventions have been ineffective or outright destructive, but provide useful learning opportunities, and current efforts appear more promising. Forestry policy up to 1994 Malawi had a well-developed system of indigenous forest management before colonization (Vaughan, 1987; Kalipeni and Zulu, 2002). The first colonial policy was the Village Forest Area (VFA) scheme in 1926, which designated forest patches to be managed by local communities. This system survived for several decades, until increasing population pressure among other factors began to precipitate the destruction of the VFAs and other communal forests (Kalipeni and Zulu, 2002). The government responded with a variety of centralized approaches, perhaps most importantly the Forestry Act of 1964. This act focused on both forest protection (which proved too poorly enforced to have any effect) and afforestation.

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One of these afforestation initiatives was the Tree Planting Bonus Scheme, which provided subsidized seedlings to farmers willing to plant them. This achieved only limited success, perhaps because the government focused on fuelwood species whereas people still perceived natural fuelwood as abundant (Dewees, 1995). The government also initiated huge plantation projects, such as the Viphya pine plantations in the north and the Blantyre Fuelwood Project in the south. The latter, a 20,000-hectare eucalyptus plantation, ran into two major problems: resentment from smallholders whose land was appropriated, and an inability to provide fuelwood at anywhere near market price (Kalipeni and Zulu, 2002). However well-intentioned, neither the plantations nor the farmer incentives had a significant effect on Malawi’s ongoing forest loss. Forestry Act (1997) Malawi’s 1997 Forestry Act changes course from the centralized approach of earlier decades. It emphasizes the role of management by local communities, provides a modest role for private investment, and relegates the government to an advisory role (GoMEAD, 2002). Perhaps most significantly, it revives the VFAs (Village Forestry Areas) of the colonial era, but with more explicit enforcement mechanisms. Recognizing the futility of attempting to exclude forest users completely, the Forestry Act introduces a system in which each VFA is managed under its own set of rules agreed upon by the community and the village headman. The Forestry Act also promotes agroforestry, plantations, nurseries, and small-scale forest product industries. Despite its many promising aspects, the success of the Forestry Act will ultimately depend upon the resources allocated for its implementation, which so far have not been sufficient (Mkoka, 2004). Land Act (2002) The new Land Act officially recognizes customary title, thus reversing the one of the unpopular aspects of its 1965 predecessor (GoM, 2002). It also provides an extensive discussion of environmental issues, recognizing that Malawi’s remaining forests would greatly benefit from effective communal management. To alleviate the problem of acute land shortages, the Land Act recommends reallocating failed agricultural estates to landless or land-poor farmers, though the specific legislation and funding to enable this is not in place. All in all, the Land Act provides a variety of carefully considered solutions to Malawi’s land problems, and in the process also addresses many of the causes of deforestation described above. In summary, Malawi’s current environmental laws show potential for addressing the deforestation problem, especially because of their emphasis on the recognition on the needs and the responsibilities of local resource users (Kalipeni and Feder, 1999). However, government interventions continue to be hampered by limited resources and inadequate enforcement.

A palette of proposed solutions For decades, not only the Malawi government but also NGOs, multilateral organizations, academics, and many others have been searching for solutions to Malawi’s forest loss. As described below, there are a variety of possible solutions aimed at both the immediate causes of deforestation and the underlying societal structures that lead to incentives for deforestation.

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Planting trees This seems like an obvious way to address the fuelwood gap, but is less straightforward than it appears. There are two main approaches: large-scale plantations, or tree planting by farmers. Large-scale plantations suffer from the apparently insurmountable problem of production costs. Because wood collected from customary lands is almost free, anything else becomes expensive by comparison. The Malawi Environmental Affairs Department (2002) has proposed solving this problem by limiting access to customary lands until collected wood equals the cost of plantation wood. However, as French (1986) points out, desperately poor farmers would then no longer be able to afford fuelwood. Plantations also run into the problem of displacing large numbers of people, and, as monocultures of exotic species, fail to provide some of the functions of a natural forest. It probably makes sense for Malawi to continue operating its existing plantations, but creating more plantations would not necessarily be a benefit. The economics of such projects would have to be studied very critically. Instead, could farmers be encouraged to plant trees to meet their own fuelwood needs? Perhaps, with many caveats. Because fuelwood from natural forests is still available in most areas, farmers are unlikely to plant trees for that purpose alone (Dewees, 1995). A better approach might be to focus on multi-purpose trees, those that provide not only fuelwood but also (for example) fruit or livestock fodder. Regardless of how useful trees might be, land-limited Malawian smallholders are usually unwilling to give up any of their maize in order to plant trees (Park, 1997). This argues for the selection of agroforestry trees such as Acacia albida, which can be grown amongst the maize crop and actually increase yield. So far, tree planting by farmers has not reached a significant level, but it may represent the single biggest opportunity for increasing Malawi’s tree cover and reducing pressure on existing forests (Place and Otsuka, 2001; GoM, 2002). The key to this strategy will be to provide farmers with low-cost, low-risk options that meet their immediate needs.

Efficient stoves and charcoal making Even if rural Malawians continue to collect most of their fuelwood from natural forests, perhaps total wood demand can be reduced. Demand-side solutions include efficient cookstoves (Trick and Manning, 2002) and improved charcoal-making techniques (Fisher, 2004). The potential savings seem significant: Bailis et al. (2005) conclude that the efficiency of charcoal-making could be greatly improved by a modest amount of research, while Schramm (1987) describes a modification to the tobacco curing process that can reduce fuelwood use by 70%. Improved stoves have been mentioned in several national policy documents, but no action has been taken, perhaps because cultural and cost barriers may hamper efforts to change end-use technology.

Agricultural intensification Agricultural intensification could help reduce encroachment into forested areas. It could also alleviate two of Malawi’s other most pressing problems – food security and income generation – making it a seemingly ideal solution.

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However, intensification programs have been repeatedly tried and have failed. In the 1980s Malawi showed signs of a “Green Revolution” with rates of fertilizer use and hybrid maize increasing, but the trend has since reversed (Dorward and Kydd, 2004). This is probably in part due to the discontinuation of the fertilizer credit scheme in 1997, which has made fertilizer unaffordable to most farmers (Harrigan, 2003). Promotion of alternative food crops such as cassava has met with little interest (Devereux, 2002a) and farmers consider it too risky to grow cash crops in place of food crops (Ellis et al., 2003). Currently, maize yields across Malawi are actually declining (Place and Otsuka, 2001), and without some mechanism to replenish soil fertility, this trend is bound to continue. If there is no way to make inputs more affordable to farmers, major gains in productivity should still be possible with better soil management and more appropriate choice of crops and varieties. However, Malawi sorely needs more agricultural extension workers in order to disseminate this information; currently there is only one extension worker per several thousand farm families (Mwafongo and Kapila, 1999). Improving this ratio would probably have many benefits, forest conservation among them.

Creation and enforcement of protected areas If all the above options fail, then the only remaining solution may seem to be the strict exclusion of people from forests. Alden Wily and Mbaya (2001) argue that this mechanism has undoubtedly saved huge amounts of forest in sub-Saharan Africa during the past century. Nevertheless, it is not clear that the creation of more forest reserves or national parks in Malawi would have a beneficial effect. By most accounts, the Forestry Department lacks the resources to effectively manage existing reserves (Mwafongo and Kapila, 1999; Mkoka, 2004). Furthermore, because Malawians rely so heavily on forests for income generation, efforts to limit access to Malawi’s remaining forests will probably lead to reduced welfare, especially among the poor (Fisher, 2004). As might be expected, past attempts to restrict forest access have led to increased pressure on nearby, unprotected forests (Kalipeni and Feder, 1999). These problems do not entirely rule out the future addition of parks and forest reserves. With better-funded enforcement mechanisms, and most importantly, alternative opportunities for rural income generation, the creation of more protected areas could be a valuable long-term goal. But it is not currently a widely discussed alternative. Community-based natural resource management In contrast to the idea of top-down government protection, CBNRM is based on the idea that natural resources can be most effectively and equitably managed by the local communities that use them. This approach has gained momentum in Malawi recently, including support from the national government and from USAID (Mwafongo and Kapila, 1999). Some CBNRM projects have succeeded admirably (Box 1). However, challenges remain in integrating the CBNRM approach with Malawi’s new decentralization policy13; the government has been reluctant to grant a high degree of autonomy to local authorities (Trick and Manning, 2002). Nor would

13 The conflict here is between decentralization and devolution of power, which are not synonymous (Murphree, 2000); under a decentralized system, the national government still retains ultimate control.

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complete autonomy guarantee success, as community-based forestry projects may fall victim to village politics (Kalipeni and Feder, 1999). Attempts at CBNRM in Malawi, though promising so far, must recognize the often severe resource limitations of rural communities. The approach will be unlikely to succeed without support from government or NGOs (Mwafongo and Kapila, 1999). In Malawi’s most stressed villages, urgent matters such as food and water shortages make it impossible to involve the residents in forest management projects, no matter how well planned (Park, 1997).

Box 1: A CBNRM case study from Makalani Village, Dowa district, central Malawi Villagers had stripped the trees from a marginal hillside to obtain wood for tobacco curing, resulting in excessive runoff and other problems. The local Christian Service Committee and the Group Village Headman worked with the community to choose and replant tree species on the deforested area, obtaining seeds from Malawi’s Forestry Research Institute. The community set up its own nurseries and has since planted over 60,000 trees, which are managed and protected by the villagers themselves (Moyo and Epulani, 2000).

Rural-to-urban migration This is a process that some authors suggest could solve the deforestation problem without the need for explicit intervention. Supposedly, the movement of rural populations to the cities will buffer the effects of population growth on deforestation (Sponsel et al., 1996; Ehrhardt-Martinez et al., 2002). This effect certainly may be important for other countries, but is not likely to help Malawi. First, Malawi’s urban population is small and growing slowly (UNDP, 2004); and second, even if rural dwellers did move to the cities, the lack of energy alternatives would force them to rely on charcoal, which consumes even more trees than does firewood (FAO, 2001). Do nothing The do-nothing approach was seriously proposed by French (1986), whose analysis is probably the single most often-cited work on deforestation in Malawi. He assesses possible solutions in turn, concluding that government plantations would be far too expensive; that farmers themselves will not plant trees because they need the land for food; that more efficient stoves would barely make a dent in the problem; and that limiting forest access would prove impossible to enforce. French concludes that “it seems necessary to abandon further talk of reversing deforestation.” Much of the subsequent evidence has seemingly upheld French’s pessimism, or at least not proven him wrong.

Policy recommendations and conclusions With a myriad of causes, and a variety of attempted and failed solutions, deforestation in Malawi may indeed begin to seem like an insoluble problem. It is fair to say that no one solution could be sufficient by itself. However, the right combination of interventions might be able to slow or even reverse Malawi’s forest loss. Past failures should serve as useful lessons learned, rather than reasons for despair. Because Malawi has many other pressing needs, and limited resources

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to allocate, the best approach is probably to focus on “no-regrets” solutions: that is, activities which contribute to forest protection as only one of their many benefits.

Short- and medium-term actions Several good options are available for relieving the fuelwood gap – both by increasing supply and reducing demand – and for minimizing forest encroachment by agriculture (Table 4). Agroforestry trees probably offer the widest variety of benefits of any short-term solution. First of all, there is reason to believe they could provide a significant amount of fuelwood. If Brouwer et al. (1997) are correct that almost one-quarter of Malawi’s wood already comes from farm trees, then this figure could possibly be increased to a third or half. The emphasis should not be on fuelwood trees per se, but on trees with multiple uses: timber, fodder, fruit, honey, medicine, and perhaps most importantly, soil improvement. By using farm trees to restore soil nutrients, the fuelwood problem and the forest encroachment problem can be addressed simultaneously: higher yields on existing cropland reduce the need to expand into marginal land. This solution can also improve food security and provide rural income-generating opportunities. To implement the promotion of agroforestry trees, additional support should be given to the Forestry Research Institute and agricultural extension programs, which in turn can coordinate with NGOs and community groups. A participatory approach will help to avoid the pitfalls of earlier government tree promotion efforts: farmers should be asked which trees would be most useful to them. Furthermore, gender issues will need to be considered, as Malawian women use trees differently than Malawian men (Park, 1997). Similar implementation strategies could be used for the promotion of alternative cash crops14. The benefit of alternative cash crops would be not to increase wood supply, but to reduce wood demand from tobacco production. The benefits would double if farmers could grow crops that are compatible with tree cover, or even require tree cover. Fortunately, there are many such crops suitable for Malawi, such as black pepper, vanilla orchids, or shade-grown coffee. Crops with low land and high labor requirements are more likely to succeed; it may be helpful to study why past crop promotion efforts (such as paprika) have failed, perhaps because of social and cultural barriers to adoption. Though alternative cash crops must compete with well-established tobacco production systems, diversification from tobacco is in and of itself an important goal. Perhaps the single most effective way to reduce fuelwood demand would be to promote improved stoves and techniques for efficient charcoal-making. These solutions have received little attention so far, perhaps because research is still needed to develop technologies suitable for Malawi. This seems a good opportunity for Malawi’s National Research Council, perhaps in concert with international development agencies. Once suitable technologies have been developed – again, with utmost attention given to the actual needs of rural dwellers – NGOs and community groups can play a key role in dissemination. The health benefits alone could be enormous: Bailis et al. (2005) suggest that a transition from traditional fuelwood use to clean charcoal production in Malawi could, over the next few decades, save tens of thousands of lives. 14Changes are needed at the local government level to create incentives for cash transactions; currently, taxes and other restrictions create significant disincentives (Ellis et al., 2003).

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A completely different approach would be to reintroduce the fertilizer credit scheme. Because most smallholders cannot afford fertilizer, maize yields are low and getting lower; reversing this trend would allow smallholders to meet food production requirements on their existing land, thus reducing the need for forest encroachment. It may be worth pursuing this course of action for food security alone. Compared to widespread chronic malnutrition and the threat of famine, forest protection seems less important. Another way to alleviate land shortages and forest encroachment is to reallocate estate land to smallholders. Now that many of the estates are in financial disarray, this is to some extent already happening. The Malawi government would prefer a more organized process of land redistribution, but calculates that interventions on the necessary scale would be unaffordable without international aid (GoM, 2002). In the meantime, redistribution should be facilitated as much as possible with available resources. Surviving estates can also contribute to forest protection by complying with the law requiring 10% tree cover. Unlike smallholders, they have the land to do so. A modest investment in government enforcement should enable this change.

Longer-term actions Ideally, the above short-term solutions to deforestation will also alleviate some of the underlying social problems, such as lack of income-earning opportunities. However, underlying problems also need to be addressed directly. This will be challenging, but once again, there are many possible actions that would be worthwhile even in the absence of the deforestation problem. One solution that is already underway, and should certainly be continued, is the emphasis on community-based natural resource management. CBNRM is not a panacea, but it could potentially help to prevent the unsustainable exploitation of forest lands that has resulted from past failures of centralized management. However, to be effective, CBNRM programs will almost certainly need funding, oversight, and logistical support from the government. It is encouraging that the Land Act and the Forestry Act make explicit provision for this. Unfortunately, no amount of legislation can help if enforcement mechanisms are not in place. Thus far, environmental laws in Malawi have been so poorly enforced as to be practically useless (Mwafongo and Kapila, 1999). Better enforcement will require more resources, and there is no immediate way to obtain those resources; it would be unreasonable to suggest that funding be diverted from programs such as AIDS prevention or infrastructure development. The first step to ensure best use of these limited resources is to eradicate government corruption. Foreign aid can also help fill the gap. In the long term, only economic growth can provide the necessary revenue. Economic growth does not seem like such a good idea if it requires an increase in tobacco production; that causes enough environmental damage already. A better alternative might be the development of the tourism industry. Malawi is a beautiful country: it has a vast inland lake with sandy beaches; colorful cichlid fish found nowhere else in the world; striking mountain ranges; a pleasant climate; and the popular safari species of elephants, rhinos, hippos, buffaloes, and lions. Furthermore, it is politically stable and has never experienced a major conflict. Despite great

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- 25 -

potential, Malawi’s tourism industry is currently non-existent, making it a major investment opportunity either for the government or for private enterprises. There are also many ways in which local communities could benefit directly (Mwafongo and Kapila, 1999). Finally, we return to the question with which we started: is controlling population growth necessary for the protection of Malawi’s forests? There can be no definitive answer. Improving the efficiency of land use, and improving the equity of land distribution, might be sufficient to relieve the currently overwhelming pressure on Malawi’s forests. But rapid population growth makes the task more difficult (Dreschel et al., 2001). Whilst pursuing the many opportunities to help Malawians do more with their existing resources, it seems appropriate to work toward stabilizing the number of people those resources must support. The situation would be different in a country with room to expand; however, it is hard to deny that Malawi is reaching its limit of environmental sustainability – or at least, that it would reach that limit well before its predicted three-fold population increase. With its current approach of distributing contraceptives and information to willing customers, Malawi has avoided ethically questionable coercion techniques, but has barely made a dent on population growth rate. Progress may be difficult as long as the status of women in Malawi remains low. The government has taken a step in the right direction with the creation of the Department of Gender Affairs, but so far has not explicitly focused on the link between fertility rates and the status of women. The next step in tackling this immense challenge might be to expand and integrate existing family planning programs with the Department of Gender Affairs. Hopefully, many of the above solutions to forest loss will also indirectly help reduce population growth by improving health and creating economic opportunities. The synergies between population stabilization and other goals make it reasonable to approach population policy as one of many ways to improve the livelihoods of the rural poor. Areas for additional study Although much is already known about Malawi’s forests, important questions remain unanswered. First of all, methods of indigenous forest management in Malawi deserve more attention. Indigenous knowledge has so far been largely overlooked in policymaking; yet it is native people who necessarily have the longest-term and most intimate experience with their own tree species. Elsewhere in Africa, closer investigation of traditional practices has resulted in improved forest management techniques and the “discovery” of valuable agroforestry trees as Prunus africana. The Malawi government’s current emphasis on participatory management is commendable, but it could make a more explicit effort to draw upon traditional knowledge. Second, it is important that the extent of Malawi’s “fuelwood gap” be better quantified. The current range of estimates – from 100% to zero or slightly negative – could mean that the fuelwood gap is a tremendous problem or no problem at all. More accurate data would be invaluable for policymaking. If demand for fuelwood does greatly exceed sustainable supply, then high priority should be given to interventions that increase supply (such as tree planting) or reduce demand (such as more efficient charcoal-making). On the other hand, if supply is adequate or nearly so, perhaps interventions should focus on reducing agricultural encroachment.

- 26 -

Finally, more information is needed on the costs of deforestation in Malawi. Efforts should be made to calculate the economic impact of soil degradation, reduced biodiversity, increased time spent gathering fuelwood, and other outcomes. Such calculations are never complete nor straightforward, but will be essential in order to decide how many resources to expend on solving the problem. If soil erosion is truly occurring at a rate equal to 8% of Malawi’s GDP, as the government has estimated, then almost any solution becomes affordable by comparison.

Summary and conclusions Malawi’s rapid forest loss is a result of many interwoven factors. The most important cause historically has probably been the expansion of agricultural land, but now that nearly all arable land is occupied, the greatest pressure on the remaining forests may come from fuelwood extraction. Population growth has undoubtedly played an important role in accelerating these problems. However, the effect of population growth can only be understood in the context of inequitable land distribution, detrimental land tenure laws, lack of income-generating opportunities, and pressure to maximize production of agricultural exports. The solutions to deforestation need to be as diverse and as integrated as the causes. There are many promising opportunities to increase fuelwood supply, reduce fuelwood demand, and intensify agricultural production. At the same time, the underlying social causes of deforestation can be addressed by long-term changes such as allocating greater control of forests to local communities. Implementing these solutions will not always be simple or cheap. Fortunately, in almost every case there will be additional benefits such as food security, economic growth, and public health. When all the benefits are considered – and when the costs of forest loss are added up – tackling the problem of deforestation seems not only possible but imperative. Even the most carefully thought-out solutions will need to be continually reassessed. Conflicts are bound to arise between short-term and long-term goals, between men and women, between government and community interests, and between national aspirations and international involvement. When faced with difficult decisions, it may help to keep in mind Helen Mripe and the millions of farmers like her. What kinds of interventions will help her care for her family today while ensuring that her children will benefit from productive farmland and forest land in the future? Pursuing appropriate interventions with the effort they deserve will one day make it possible to see a hopeful headline: “Forests making a comeback in Malawi.”

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Image credits

Front page: (L to R) Malawian women carrying fuelwood.

Source: http://www.worldagroforestry.org/ar2004/tf_story01.asp

Farmland with scattered trees in rural Malawi. Source: http://www.saijoto.dk/english/Cichlider_English/Malawi%20English.htm

Malawian boy preparing soil for planting. Source: http://www.cmo.nl/pe/pe19/pe-199b.html

Map of Malawi and region: Created from images at http://www.smilemalawi.com and http://www.e-i.org/Malawi/.

Brachystegia trees: Source: http://www.biologie.uni-hamburg.de/b-online/d57/57c.htm.

Tobacco drying: Source: http://www.abc.net.au/science/slab/tobacco/.