NAIROBI, Kenya, Nov 5 – The government now wants to legalize the charcoal business in an attempt to beat illegal charcoal burning which is largely to blame for the loss of the country’s forest cover.
Charcoal market
How Charcoal Fuels Irregular Armed Groups
President Barack Obama announced Friday (July 2oth) that the US was banning the sale of charcoal from Somalia to third countries. The effort is intended to deprive the Somali-based, Al-Quaeda affiliate, Al-Shabaab, from important revenue collected from the export of Somali charcoal to countries in the Gulf region.
NEWS: Nature Kenya said in a press release on March 14 that forests are rapidly disappearing as a result of charcoal and firewood for salt manufacturing factories at the Coast despite a ban on firewood collection by the National Environment Management Authority and Kenya Forest Service in January.
NEWS: When ending poverty outweighs sustaining environment
“Hundreds of, mainly, men from around the Dzalanyama forest reserve in Malawi have been descending on it, camping deep inside it, felling trees for charcoal burning. Lizinet Josiah, 28, reckons that there are no culprits worse than those from her village.
She also knows that sustaining the forest would bring back the reliable rainfall. But she chooses to stun you, instead.
“As long as the charcoal alleviates our poverty and gives us something with which to buy food, the forest can go,” she says.”
“It’s all because of poverty. We want to have food but we don’t have money to buy the food or fertiliser to boost our food yields. We get something from the charcoal from the forest. We buy food and top up what we get under the farm income subsidy programme. What we get is little and this season was worse.”
VIDEO: The Business of Charcoal in Dar es Salaam, TZ.
This is the trailer to a short documentary on the charcoal sector in Africa portraying the specific example of the city of Dar-es-Salaam in Tanzania. The film was published jointly by the World Bank and the Government of Tanzania in August 2009.
We featured the longer version of this film in a post back in August.