Losing Trees to War in Angola
9/23/99
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Title: ENVIRONMENT-ANGOLA: Losing Trees to War
Source: InterPress Service
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: September 22, 1999
Byline: Mercedes Sayagues
HUAMBO, Sep 22 (IPS) - Besides loss of agricultural land to
landmines, one major environmental casualty of Angola's long
running civil war is deforestation.
Drive across the hinterland of Angola, within a radius of 50
kms around the provincial capitals, and one will see only a few,
scattered groves of trees.
Chances are they are fruit trees, more valuable for their
mangoes and papayas than as firewood. Or, the trees may belong to
a mission still operational, hence respected. Or, it is a forest
where the military and the government get their firewood, so no
one touches it.
Otherwise, trees are cut down at shocking speed by the waves of
displaced people who need firewood for cooking and heating. One
million people have become displaced since the war erupted again
last December. They join 1.5 million who were displaced between
1992-94.
This redistribution of population, forced to settle in large
numbers in small areas, usually lacking any means of survival and
income-earning, translates into accelerated damage to land and
vegetation.
''All the trees along the road are gone,'' says Roque Goncalves
of the Angolan Ngo ADRA. He points at the road leading from
Malange to Luanda, 350 kms to the east. Until this year, it was
lined by 30-year-old eucalyptus. Not anymore.
When shelling began in January, Malange was swamped by 70,000
displaced people. They cut down the trees and pulled out the
cassava stems from the fields. Now they are building a camp of
thousands of basic huts made of straw and grass, denuding the
river banks in the search for building materials.
The forests planted by the Portuguese colonial regime have been
thinning since independence at 1975. But today, with these huge
waves of displaced people, the forests are disappearing at
alarming speed. Near Huambo, 3,000 hectares of eucalyptus were cut
down in the last three years.
Provincial capitals, once surrounded by forests of eucalyptus
and pine trees and groves of indigenous species, are enclosed in
ever-widening circles of barren scrubland. In the central
highlands, the heavy downpours of the rainy season wash out tonnes
of fertile topsoil from the tree-less plains, accelerating
erosion.
During the nine-month old siege of Kuito in 1993, even the
ornamental trees that lined its streets were cut down for
firewood. They have not been replanted.
''Angola has an acute problem of deforestation,'' says Heinz
Fichtmueller, an agronomist with the Red Cross in Huambo. ''It's
high time to do something.''
Some may argue that feeding the starving and healing the war-
wounded is a more urgent priority. But relief workers point out
that kitchens in the feeding centers need fuelwood to cook meals
and it is scarce.
It is not unusual for the displaced to walk at least 15 kms to
find firewood. Early in the morning and late in the afternoon,
long lines of women and children make their way back into the
squalid camps, carrying bundles of firewood on the head. If they
meet a policeman or a soldier at a checkpoint, they must leave a
portion as ''tax'' to the security forces.
Recently, the government has confined the hundreds of thousands
of displaced people to the outskirts of the besieged provincial
capitals. Around Malange, Kuito and Huambo, grass and straw
settlements are springing up.
Due to the scarcity and competition for these natural
resources, in order to build their huts, people have to go further
away, straying from well-known paths. In doing this, they risk
landmines.
In September, at Kuito's provincial hospital, out of 26 mine
casualties, 10 were children under 16 who stepped on a landmine
while looking for firewood, fruit and food.
While a nurse dresses his stump without giving him pain
killers, Augusto Kapako, 10, howls and writhes in pain. His mother
explains he was looking for firewood near Kuito in August and went
beyond the paths where mines had been cleared.
Deforestation affects all of Angola, but it is worse in the war-
ravaged central highlands. Although war has pretty much spared the
dry southern Namibe Province, fighting has reduced the areas where
pastoralists used to roam, pushing them into a corner against the
sea.
Overgrazing and the loss of nomadic patterns translate into
excessive pressure on the land. The wind accelerates erosion. The
coastal desert is encroaching.
The great teak forests of the southern provinces are long gone.
Jonas Savimbi, leader of the rebel National Union for the Total
Independence of Angola (UNITA) has acknowledged in interviews that
his rebel movement paid with teak and ivory for the South African
military support in the late 1980s.
In the logic of a war economy, now running for 25 years, short
term profit weighs more than long term sustainability, whether it
is a displaced farmer cutting down a tree for firewood or an
entrepreneur cutting down centenary teak in northern Cabinda.
Being Africa's second oil producer after Nigeria, Angola need
not be so dependent on fuelwood. It pumps more than 800,000
barrels a day and plans to reach two million a day in 2000.
At 0.08 (eight US cents) a litre, its petrol for cars is the
cheapest on the continent. But petrol is only abundant in Luanda.
Provincial capitals are starved for it.
It would be possible for Angola to provide low-cost fuel for
cooking and heating, such as paraffin or kerosene, for its people.
But the majority of its people are peasants who count little in
the country's energy and social welfare policies. The countryside
remains mired in the last century's technology, using hand-held
hoes and firewood.
The Red Cross is doing something about the problem. It has set
up tree plantations and nurseries on the outskirts of Huambo.
Eventually, nearby villages will be able to get here seedlings to
set up their own fuelwood lots. Right now, the priority is
harvesting fuelwood for the soup kitchens, the feeding centers for
malnourished children and the camps for the displaced.
Ficthmueller looks proudly at a dozen women potting black
plastic bags with seedlings of fast growing fuelwood trees and
slow-growing species for repopulation of indigenous species.
Their work may go almost unnoticed among Angola's pressing
needs, but it is a step in the right direction. (END/IPS/ms/pm/99)