Niger's vanishing forests: last hope to keep desert at bay

Boureima Hama Yahoo News 11 Dec 07;

"That is paradoxical in a country which has coal reserves and whose neighbours are major oil and gas producers,"

It is not yet daybreak when the trucks, the donkeys and the camels pour out of Niamey across the Kennedy bridge. Night has fallen when they return, loaded down with huge cargoes of wood from south western Niger's last forests.

Local people continue to cut down the few forests still standing to keep themselves in firewood, unaware or unconcerned about the impact their routine has on global warming and desert encroachment.

The Sahara has already swallowed up two-thirds of Niger's surface area and continues to progress at a rate of 200,000 hectares (494,000 acres) every year, according to the environmental website Mongabay.

The desertification advances despite the planting of more than 60 million trees in this western African nation between 1985 and 1997.

Specialists say the desert is creeping towards the west and the south of the country, where the last forests remain, at a rate of six kilometres (four miles) every year.

Between 1990 and 2005, Niger lost 679,000 hectares of tropical forest, more than one-third of its total wooded land, Mongabay said on its website.

The environment ministry does not publish cumulative statistics, but estimates that 120,000 hectares of tropical forest are lost every year, in addition to some 340,000 hectares that were lost between 2000 and 2006 due to forest fires.

"Wood's getting scarce. We go more than 150 kilometres (93 miles) to find it, near the border with Burkina Faso," said Ali Amadou, a woodcutter from Dar-el-Salam, one of Niamey's markets.

In 2006 the country consumed more than 3.4 million tonnes of wood. By 2010 it is expected to be consuming 4.2 million tonnes annually, according to government forecasts.

"Wood provides more than 90 percent of domestic household energy," said Moustapha Kadi from the non-governmental organisation SOS-Kandaji.

"That is paradoxical in a country which has coal reserves and whose neighbours are major oil and gas producers," one specialist who asked not to be named noted, referring to northern neighbor Algeria and Nigeria, to the south.

But the same specialist recognized that people living on less than one dollar a day in one of the world's poorest nations have little other option, especially faced with a recent increase in oil and gas prices.

"Ignorance and poverty are not sufficient excuse for committing an ecological crime," said Mamane Lamine, an official with Niger's water and forestry agency.

However NGO worker Kadi said, "Everywhere where you have protected forests, the people who live round about there set up cooperatives, chop down trees and sell the wood, and they don't even spare protected species."

In Niamey wood is priced like gold dust. A lorry-load sells for between 200,000 and 300,000 African CFA francs (from 303 to 455 euros, 440 to 660 dollars). An average donkey or camel load brings more than three euros.

Again though there are no precise statistics, the government estimates that in 1975, Niger had between 10 and 30 times more the trees it has today.

Most of this wood ends up under cooking pots in Niamey, according to a French government think-tank Institut de recherche pour le developpement (development research institute, IRD).

The Niamey municipal authorities, who levy taxes on the sale of wood, admit that they are powerless to put an end to abuses in a sector controlled by rich traders.

For climate specialists -- and delegates from nearly 190 countries gathered at the UN conference in Bali from December 3 to 14 to hammer out a timeframe for a new deal on tackling climate change -- deforestation has three direct and worrying consequences: the sun is reflected more off bare ground, there is no longer anything to shelter the ground from the wind and the air is less and less humid.

Moreover, desert encroachment, exacerbated by scarce rains, is one of the direct causes of the cyclical food crises that hit Niger, whose population is increasing at more than three per cent every year.

As the population keeps growing, there is a risk that more people will turn to the wood trade, unknowingly sabotaging their country's prospects for economic development.