Degraded forests being reclaimed

George Ankomah wraps his hand around a skinny mahogany tree. This one, he says, isn't doing so well — he thinks it was planted too close to other trees that take more than their share of the sunlight, and maybe the nutrients in the soil aren't so good. But, he says, it's all part of learning.

The tree is still a baby, planted four years ago. And what Ankomah, technical officer with the Lake Bosumtwi reforestation project, is learning is how to transform a scrubby patch of depleted forest to the natural tropical growth that was once here.

Patches of depleted forest like this exist throughout Ghana and across Africa. The trees have long been plundered by both foreign and domestic farmers and loggers and have left environmental groups calling for calling for change that some governments are just recently starting to provide.

Ankomah and his crew of village volunteers are trying to make this forest — and more than 20 other similar deforested patches around Lake Bosumtwi in Ghana's Ashanti region — like it used to be. They looked at the area and tried to figure out which species are indigenous, and then mix it up “like a natural forest,” Ankomah says.

“The whole place was degraded,” he says, looking around where thin trees now poke out of the undergrowth. They're marked by red paint on their trunks, put there by local school children who come on annual field trips to measure the trees' growth.

The project, supported by the non-governmental organization Friends of the Earth [1] and the community that once took part in its degradation, is a hopeful corner in what has been a long history of a losing battle for Ghana's forests — a story that can be repeated across the continent.

Africa's tropical forests are part of what makes this continent beautiful, the lush greenery setting beautiful landscapes and providing shade from the relentless sun.

And they're also what have made Africa attractive to many foreign companies, which for years have taken advantage of corrupt public officials and few or no regulations enforcing the forestry industry, says Theo Anderson, head of Friends of the Earth's Ghana office in the capital city, Accra.

That led to massive deforestation that is now thought to contribute to the perpetual drought and subsequent famines that plague Africans, like the one that has left millions now on the brink of starvation in Eastern Africa since the failure of rains late last year.

In Ghana, current rates of deforestation mean all timber reserves will be gone in fewer than 10 years — with one estimate putting it as close as under four years, says Francis Amoah, director of plantations with the government's Forestry Commission [2].

Amoah admits that in the past, the forestry industry was poorly managed. But he says the government is trying to change that, now using a transparent bidding process.

And they recognize that the collapse of the timber industry would mean the loss of a source of revenue worth about six percent of the developing West African nation's gross domestic product.

The government launched its own reforestation project, now in its fifth year. Amoah, who heads up the project, says degraded land is given out to local farmers who plant trees and intersperse food crops among them.

The idea is that farmers will tend the trees while benefiting from the income and food security the crops bring. And then when the trees are large enough to be felled, the farmer will share in the revenue gained when logging companies make bids for the parcels of land.

So far, they have replanted some 60,000 hectares of land that was highly degraded. But the involvement from the communities has been sketchy and sceptical. Amoah says many farmers question whether they will actually see benefits in the future, and some will purposely kill trees when, after three years, their canopies grow high enough to block out sunlight to crops.

Amoah says they are encouraging the farmers to grow crops like certain types of berries, cocoa-yams and plantains that grow in trees when the seedlings get too big to grow in-ground crops.

But since it's all in the early stages — most of the trees are at least another 10 years away from being ready to be felled — Amoah says they too are learning just what works.

“I think we're doing quite a lot, despite the constraints,” he says.

Amoah also hopes to branch the project out to sensitive environmental sites like wetlands, and to areas that have been degraded by the local illegal small-scale gold miners.

While the government's program is on a larger scale — and focused more on making money — than the Friends of the Earth project, they both have one thing in common that could prove to be vital to success: the involvement of members of the local communities.

A majority of Ghanaians rely on agriculture for their livelihoods, and farmers cut trees to find fertile land to grow their crops, both for large-scale commercial farms and for their own uses. And Ghanaians, like other Africans, also cut trees to make charcoal for cooking.

The project at Lake Bosumtwi is meant to repair the damage done by residents. Each village around the lake has clear-cut areas for use as a community cemetery.

But Friends of the Earth convinced locals to replant. Ankomah says one village chief told him reforesting was a good idea so that their loved ones under the ground don't get burned by the hot sun.

On the climb into the sacred grove at the village of Abono, Afia Nkrumah uses a machete to dig footholds into the hard-packed ground. Wearing an oversized Homer Simpson t-shirt, jogging pants and her Friends of the Earth-issued rubber boots, she hacks away at the undergrowth around the young trees.

Nkrumah volunteered for the reforestation project because she realized that having trees and the nutrients they provide could make her work as a farmer easier.

At another village, the chief agreed to go along with the project as long as it could become a source of revenue for his community, Ankomah says. So they planted plantain trees among the mahoganies, teaks, cedrellas and other sorts. Plantains are staple in the diet of many Ghanaians. It's hoped that more community members will support the project if they see it as a viable source of income.

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