Jeffrey Gogo Climate Story
TOBACCO-related illegal logging has in the last two years doubled to 30 percent of the national total, latest data from the Forestry Commission of Zimbabwe shows, placing ecosystems and biodiversity in extended danger. The data also demonstrates that interventions by Government, the Forestry Commission and the tobacco industry to combat deforestation linked to the production of the golden leaf are failing to achieve the intended outcomes.
Tobacco now accounts for the second largest share of all forest loss in Zimbabwe ahead of perennial culprit sectors like energy (firewood), and other land use changes in urban development.
At 55 percent, agriculture expansion remains the biggest driver of deforestation, says Mr Abednigo Marufu, Forestry Commission deputy director general.
In other words, small-scale tobacco farmers – which numbered 100 000 between 2013 and 2014 – are now responsible for cutting down the equivalent of 98 100 hectares of native forests each year to help cure their crop, up from 49 500ha per year previously.
“For the years we have had those big numbers (of smallholder growers), surely it (the rate of tobacco-related deforestation) ranges between 25 and 30 percent,” said Mr Marufu by telephone on Friday.
Smallholder farmers account for two thirds of Zimbabwe’s annual output of over 190 million kg of flue-cured tobacco, which raked in export earnings of more than $550 million in 2015.
But their reliance on fuel wood to cure the crop has decimated the country’s natural woodlands – key to stabilising climates at both the macro and micro levels.
According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation, Zimbabwe lost 327 000 hectares of plantation forests and natural woodland on average each year between 1990 and 2010. Now there are only 15,6 million hectares remaining.
From virgin land clearing for farming to barn construction to curing, flue-cured tobacco production naturally consumes vast amounts of wood, experts say.
For curing alone, some 9kg of wood will be required to treat a kg of tobacco, say experts, meaning for every half hectare with a 600kg output, 60 full grown trees must fall – and never to rise again.
Catch 22
Concerned at the unsustainable deforestation rate, authorities in 2012 passed a law restricting the use, trade and movement of firewood.
The law forces smallholder tobacco growers to establish a hectare of the fast-growing eucalyptus for every 10ha under tobacco, but, as the latest numbers show, loggers have had a mind of their own.
And this has become a nightmarish Catch 22 for the forest regulator.