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ETHIOPIA: They Have Become Farmers of Trees

Omer Redi * - IPS/IFEJ

KAFA, Ethiopia, Nov 19 2010 (IPS) - They have spent the better part of their lives destroying the forest, but Kochito Gabre and his cohort are now the guardians of a UNESCO-recognised resource in the Ethiopian highlands. After shrinking to barely half its original size, the Kafa Forest is now a model for sustainable use in the country.

Home to over half of Ethiopia’s remaining afromontane forest and the centre of origin for the wild coffee arabica, Kafa is a dense tangle of forest, bamboo thickets and wetlands 475 kilometres southwest of the capital, Addis Ababa.

Annual rainfall here is over 2,400 mm and the area is watered by three major rivers, the Gojeb, Dinchia and Woshi. More than 100 plant species have been recorded here, and the forest teems with wildlife. Monkeys and gelada baboons can be seen along the roads, and locals say troops of these animals can destroy a farm in a single night.

Slash and burn gives way

Decades of deforestation by smallholder farmers as well as large state and privately-owned farms destroyed 43 percent of the Kafa rainforest.

“Farmers in this area use extensive and shifting cultivation making forest protection very challenging,” said Terefe Weldegabriel, soil, water development and conservation expert at the Kafa Agriculture Office.  

Routine clearing of new farmland, the cutting down of trees for charcoal, fuel wood and timber; and expanding commercial farms threatened the forest in Kafa as in the rest of Ethiopia, leaving vast areas parched, dry and unable to sustain farmers.

But to visit 50-year-old Kochito’s farm today is to step into a different vision for the future. Push through tall grass to walk among rows of coffee, avocado, and enset trees (a “false banana” tree grown for its edible roots).

Kochito is the head of a local Participatory Forest Management group, which manages 1,200 hectares of forest. There are 60 PFMs in Kafa. Their members harvest honey, spices and wild coffee in the protected forest and grow coffee, cardamoms, long pepper (piper longum) and fruit in agro-forestry schemes on their own farms in buffer zones around the forest.

“Just last year, I harvested 150 kilos of honey, 200 kg of coffee and spices from the deep forest, while producing fruits, coffee and other crops from my own farm,” Kochito said.

When they grew cereals, wild animals would frequently destroy an entire crop leaving families with nothing; their new crops are less vulnerable to animals.

Lessons took root

Kochito got his start with agro-forestry and sustainable harvesting of non-wood forest resources thanks to the efforts of Farm Africa, a UK charity that worked in Kafa between 1998 and 2004.

The community took the lessons from Farmoch, as locals called the charity, to heart.

“The forest is source of life for us. But we didn’t realize we were destroying it so badly. We just focused on our own needs and expanding our farms until Farmoch educated us,” Kochito told IPS.

The successful registration of more than 750,000 hectares as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in June 2010 will help to consolidate sustainable use of the forest.

Biosphere Reserves are areas designated under UNESCO’s Man and Biosphere (MAB) Programme to test approaches to integrated management of natural resources and biodiversity.

“That our forest is recognised in the world is a motivation for us,” Kochito said.

The registered area is divided into three zones – a Core Zone, undisturbed forest that has always enjoyed a measure of protection by communities as sacred places; a Buffer Zone, in which locals practice various kinds of farming without harming the significant forest cover that remains; and a Transition Zone, land already stripped of trees, and occupied by farmers growing cereal crops and mechanised farms such as coffee and tea estates.

Sustainable future

Kafa officials hope the recognition of the forest will enable products from the area, especially coffee, to fetch higher prices if they are recognised as sustainable forest products.

People like Kochito are the key implementers of the Man and Biosphere Programme’s principles, protecting the forest and rehabilitating degraded areas. The Berlin-based Nature and Biodiversity Conservation Union (NABU), which was instrumental in applying for Biosphere Reserve status, has committed to assisting the locals.

“We have now secured 3.1 million Euros from the German Ministry of Environment and Nuclear Safety to implement a number of projects in this area,” said NABU’s Kafa project coordinator Mesfin Tekle.

The funding will support projects on sustainable coffee management, reforestation of 10,000 hectares, and distribution of 10,000 improved stoves as well as forest and climate change monitoring.

But there are still challenges that endanger Kafa forests; deforestation is still going on by individuals and mainly by commercial farms licensed by the government, the agriculture ministry’s Terefe told IPS.

“We want UNESCO to support us beyond just registering the area as Biosphere Reserve. We are now preparing document detailing the kind of support we want and what we plan to do,” he said.

The local administration has developed a plan for reforestation, construction of roads, health and education facilities as well as farms protection through soil protection, agro-forestry, apiculture and value addition in the degraded Transition Zone.

*This story is part of a series of features on biodiversity by Inter Press Service (IPS), CGIAR/Biodiversity International, International Federation of Environmental Journalists (IFEJ), and the United Nations Environment Program/Convention on Biological Diversity (UNEP/CBD) — all members of COM+, the Alliance of Communicators for Sustainable Development (www.complusalliance.org).