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Our initial approach to the promotion of fuelwood production was to distribute seedlings and advice on agroforestry to individual smallholders. Problems arose, as in many other similar projects, not with persuading people to plant out seedlings, but with ensuring that the young trees were adequately tended after planting. The survival rate among seedlings distributed to individuals was correspondingly poor.
The fundamental problem, noted above, was that the value set upon fuelwood trees by the project target community was clearly lower than the project anticipated, and too low to provide adequate motivation for the afforestation programme.
We developed three distinct strategies in response to this observation:
· using market forces more effectively in a project aimed at individuals, through an alteration in pricing policy for seedlings (and, indirectly, through a change in project evaluation procedures).· presenting fuelwood production units as viable economic investments for fuelwood-using institutions.
· using education as a means of influencing the community’s priorities such that the perceived value of trees becomes closer to their “true” value, which takes into account their long-term role in ensuring the stability and productivity of the agricultural economy.
It is a familiar situation: we have a nursery producing seedlings and the idea is that the local farmers will plant them out and (we hope) look after the young trees. Leaving aside the question of the overall validity of this approach, how can we best set about it?
The seedlings’ poor chances if
left untended
The key, in most such projects, is that the supply of seedlings is strictly limited by the nursery’s production capacity. There will probably never be any question of our failing to distribute them all. Thus we can concentrate entirely on maximising the survival rate.
Our priority must be to target the seedlings towards individuals who will look after them. Left untended, they have an extremely poor chance of survival. This targetting should be relatively easy to achieve, but involves a move which many rural afforestation programmes may find unpalatable: the use of price as means of controlling the seedling distribution operation. We assume that the individual farmer is in a much better position to Judge how many trees he can afford to look after than is the project management.
If the price of the seedlings is set at or close to zero, the cost of collection and planting being negligible, then demand per individual purchaser is essentially unlimited: he or she may as well buy as many seedlings as possible on the offchance that some may survive even though only a very small proportion can be properly tended.
The seedlings will prove enormously popular; if the project is evaluated in terms of numbers of seedlings distributed it will be adjudged a great success; and the survival rate will be appalling. The seedlings will have been distributed more-or-less at random according to who arrives first and how many they can physically carry away.
If, on other hand, we set the price of the seedlings such that it becomes a substantial factor in the decision as to how many to buy, then the individual will only purchase seedlings up to the number he/she can afford to look after. With only a limited number of seedlings available and an essentially unlimited market, we must set the price such that we only Just manage to sell all the seedlings available: we either increase the price until some seedlings remain unsold and then get rid of these at a small discount, or use auction, or whatever the established technique might be, in the project target community, for exploring what the market will bear.
The problem is that evaluation procedures built into the design of many, perhaps the majority, of rural afforestation programmes encourage project managers to maximise the number of seedlings distributed, and the simplest way to achieve this is to discount the price, ideally to zero. The overall impact of the afforestation effort might be substantially improved if project managers were not given the target:
“Here are 20,000 seedlings, distribute them to the target community as fast as possible so that we have something concrete to include in the first six-monthly progress report”
but instead:
“Here are 20,000 seedlings, make as much money as you can...”
The other attractive feature of charging a higher price for the seedlings is that private-sector seedling production then becomes a possibility in the long-term. No one is going to set up in the business of seedling production as long as the project is distributing them for free.
We can make better use of market forces, but this does not mean we can rely on them entirely. There are problems.
First of all, to depend upon narrow economic considerations to drive the afforestation programme is undeniably a long-term approach. While it would be impossible to place a figure on it, the value of fuelwood in the project area is clearly still too low for it to have become established as an economically viable crop.
Even if it had done, given the long maturation time of fuelwood species in arid areas, it would be many years before an increase in the value of a mature tree due to fuelwood shortage was reflected in an increase in supply.
And anomalous occurences may complicate the picture yet further: for example, the 1984 drought killed a large number of mature trees, resulting in a temporary but heavy over-supply of fuelwood, which actually depressed the effective value of fuelwood trees, hampering afforestation efforts despite the fact that in the long term it made the environmental situation substantially more serious.
The problems of supply-side
agroforestry
Moreover, relying on market forces may further the very simple objective of getting more trees growing in an area, But the aims of rural afforestation are probably substantially more complicated than merely growing more trees. If all the trees supplied are healthy and well-tended but concentrated in the compounds of the four well-off farmers who could afford the seedlings, then the programme may not be contributing towards the community-development priorities of the district
The fundamental problem may, of course, be that market forces are and will always be inadequate to motivate the community towards a collective benefit such as fuelwood conservation. These issues take us well beyond the scope of this report.
Accordingly, we turn to consider the two strategies developed in the course of the project which side-step altogether the problem of how to provide the individual with sufficient economic incentive to grow trees before it is too late.
The situation of an institutional fuelwood consumer is very different to that of an individual farmer. An institution depending on firewood for large scale catering needs a reliable, regular supply. It cannot rely on the casual, manual collection methods adopted by individuals, except in unusual cases. Thus the majority of institutions have to resort to the cash purchase of fuelwood with mechanised collection.
Since fuelwood is not a viable commodity to transport over long distances, the market is heavily localised, with prices varying widely around the country. Within a limited area, however, institutional fuelwood purchasers, unlike individuals, are in a position to “shop around” somewhat, because they are using mechanised collection. Thus a relatively well-defined cash price can become established.
In a survey carried out in 1985 by the Kenya Energy and Environment Organisation (KENGO), the nationwide average price paid by institutions for uncut firewood was found to be KSh 155/= per tonne including delivery (US$8.3), with a standard deviation across a sample of 40 institutions of over 30%. The situation is complicated by government regulations on the harvesting of trees, which means that most institutional consumers make special arrangements with a particular supplier, and pay a somewhat lower price than the open-market figure of over KSh 500/= per tonne.
Despite these complications, the administration of an institution normally has a fairly clear idea of how much, in cash terms, fuelwood is costing them per month, unlike the individual farmer who has no way of putting a cash figure on the monthly opportunity cost of fuelwood collection. Moreover, the key decision-makers in an institution are generally financially astute enough both to project fuelwood costs on a five-year time-scale and to assess the viability of investments over a similar period. Few individuals, particularly in an area where the majority of small-holders do not yet even have title deeds to their land, are in a position to work on this basis.
Thus the establishment of a fuelwood plantation may be an economically attractive proposition for an institutional fuelwood consumer even in an area where fuelwood is not yet a viable crop for the individual farmer. This, coupled with the fact that institutional fuelwood consumption tends to be derived from logged firewood, i.e. entire cut trees rather than gathered dead branches, and therefore potentially does more environmental damage than domestic consumption, provides a strong argument for focussing reafforestation efforts on institutions, at least initially.
In the framework of the District. Focus Firewood Conservation Projects (DFFCPs) established in the last phase of the UNEP/Bellerive project. Bellerive Foundation is currently developing. In conjunction with the Kenya Forestry Department and with the assistance of the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA) and the Overseas Development Administration of the UK, a technical assistance package to enable an institutional fuelwood consumer to become energy self-sufficient through the establishment of a fuelwood production unit. The details of the package need to be tailored to the individual requirements of the areas covered by each DFFCP, and are therefore of limited interest in a general report such as this one. The overall structure, however, should be widely applicable.
The package, which has not yet been finalised and is scheduled for introduction on a pilot scale in 1989, is intended for use by extension officers: specifically the Foundation’s own network of Field Officers, the Forest Department’s extension services and the network of District Energy Officers being established by the Ministry of Energy. With it, they will provide the institution with advice and assistance in the following:
· Current and projected fuel requirements with existing and/or proposed cooking systems -it is envisaged that the fuelwood production package will, in many cases, be introduced together with the improved cooking systems described below.· Current and projected expenditure on fuel
· The most appropriate fuelwood species for the climatic and soil conditions in the area
· The land area required for an adequate, sustainable fuel supply
· The optimum planting and cropping cycle to adopt according to the species selected
· The infrastructure required in terms of personnel, equipment for tending the plantation, structures for seed-beds and nurseries (if appropriate), irrigation systems if any and so forth
· An estimate of capital and running costs and projected payback period.
The proposed package sets out to provide the institution with a systematic approach to fuelwood production and management. Many institutions in Kenya obtain all or some of their fuelwood requirements from trees on their own compounds, and many more have land available and are seriously considering entering fuelwood production. The problem, which in almost all cases results in less than optimal use of the land and capital available, is the lack of clearly defined systems to ensure that replanting is carried out at the right time, cropping is undertaken correctly, and so on.
In wealthy institutions with abundant land and capital this problem does not matter - but these institutions usually own their own forests and are thus effectively energy-self-sufficient already. There is no reason why many smaller institutions should not also achieve self-sufficiency if the systems are available to enable them to use the resources they have as efficiently as possible.
The third strategy identified by the project, and the most thoroughly developed to date, is to integrate tree planting activities into the educational programmes of local primary schools through the establishment of tree plantations on school compounds. The basic concept is use the school’s “green island” (plantation) to introduce the children to environmental issues in a variety of different subjects, in the same way that school farms are used to facilitate education in agriculture and related topics. Although the plantation may provide a source of fuelwood, this objective is secondary and thus the exercise does not necessarily have to be an economically profitable undertaking.
The Green Islands project has been developed by Bellerive Foundation in collaboration with the Conservation Foundation of the United Kingdom, with the generous support of the Aluminium Federation of the UK. A highly successful method of fundraising was used to launch the project: British schoolchildren were organised by the Conservation Foundation to collect used aluminium cans for recycling. For every can collected the Aluminium Federation made a contribution to the fund which enabled Bellerive to launch the Green Islands in Kiambu district, Kenya.
The money contributed from the UK is primarily used to maintain the nursery where seedlings are produced and to cover the salaries of essential extension staff. The cost of establishing and maintaining the school plantations is borne by the community, with Bellerive contributing seedlings and advice. Parents provide the materials for fencing, and the children themselves plant out and tend the young trees.
We are now approximately one year into the implementation of this project, and the response of the local community has been very encouraging. The survival rate of seedlings planted in the long rains of 1988 is estimated at the time of writing to be between 95 and 98% - with the most dangerous period for the young trees, their first dry season, now over. This is largely thanks to the efforts of the children and teachers responsible for looking after them, but credit must also be given to the local authorities, who were responsible for some valuable initiatives in support of the project - for example, a complete ban, decreed by the locational chief, on goats in the village centre and school compounds.
Figure
We have found that both project activities, the introduction of agroforestry techniques and the distribution of seedlings, suffered in the early stages of the project from unclear objectives and a lack of structure.
The distribution of seedlings must both be, and be seen as, a means to an end which is both genuinely achievable and aligned with the priorities of the key people involved: the inhabitants of the project area. The general environmental benefits which accrue from afforestation are probably too nebulous and global an objective to provide the necessary immediate goal.
We have discussed how economic forces might be brought to bear on the problem, to provide the necessary structure and goals, and concluded that, although they could be exploited more effectively than they are at present, through an alteration in pricing policy for seedlings, they will remain an inadequate incentive for the individual farmer for the forseeable future.
We found that economics may be exploited directly in the case of institutional fuelwood consumers to encourage the adoption of a sustainable resource utilisation strategy. But, in the case of individuals, the value of trees in the district, being based on the opportunity cost of collecting firewood, is still too low to encourage large scale planting by individual members of the local community.
One way in which this problem may be resolved is for us to wait until firewood becomes so scarce, and this opportunity cost so high, that extensive replanting becomes attractive: by which time the environmental situation is probably past regeneration.
A more attractive approach would seem to be to use the process of education to change the perceptions of the community, thereby changing the perceived value placed upon fuelwood trees. It will be a long time before such an approach begins to have a tangible impact. But given that the present perceived value seems to be effectively zero almost everywhere, except in certain sectors such as among institutions, there is no clear alternative.
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