Massive deforestation risks turning Somalia into desert

Massive deforestation risks
turning Somalia into desert

Hassan Hussein
cuts down 40 trees
every month to fuel
his charcoal
business, fully aware of the
impact his action has on the
environment.
But for the livestock keeper, the
forests are the last remaining
resource. And he is not alone.
Hundreds of thousands of
Somalia's traditional pastoralist
herders do the same, putting
their impoverished country on a
path of heavy deforestation that
risks turning large swathes of
their country into a desert.
"I used to keep animals, but I lost my herd to famine and
disease and am the eldest in the
family," says Hussein, 27,
adding that he has 10 mouths to
feed back home -- two children,
seven brothers and his mother.
Four years ago, Hussein had 25
camels and 300 goats. Now, only
three camels and 15 goats from
his once respectable sized herd
are left.
Thus every morning, with an axe
slumped over his shoulder, he
sets off in search of wood for
charcoal.
Once he locates and cuts down a
tree, it takes two days of
burning, and two more days of
cooling the smouldering heaps
before he can sell the charcoal,
at six dollars (five euros) for a 20
kilogramme sack.
The village of Jaleo, in the
northern self-declared state of
Somaliland, once prided itself on
being at the heart of the
savannah.
British explorer Harald Swayne
recounted, in his 19th century
memoirs, the adventures he had
while tracking and hunting "a
large herd of elephants."
But the last elephant was killed
in 1958, and were Swayne to
retake his journey today, he
would only find the smallest of
game in a rocky landscape
dotted with shrubs and charred
tree stumps.
"Twenty percent of the forest
has disappeared in the last ten
years -- definitely this country is
turning into a desert," Ahmed
Derie Elmi, director of forests in
Somaliland's environment
ministry, recently tells AFP.
"If the deforestation continues at
this pace, this country will be a
desert in two or three decades,"
echoes Ahmed Ibrahim Awale of
the Candlelight organisation,
which tackles environmental
and health issues in Somaliland.
Charcoal burning has not always
been preferred in Jalelo.
Three years ago an outbreak of
Rift Valley Fever in the Horn of
Africa forced Gulf states to
suspend importation of animals
or animal products from the
region, forcing the herders to
look for alternative sources of
income.
But it is urbanisation and a
population explosion that are
the biggest threats to the
country's environmental well-
being.
Somaliland's capital Hargeisa
has a population of 850,000
people, six times its population
in the 1970s, which consumes
approximately 250 tonnes of
charcoal daily.
Elmi says that charcoal is the
main source of energy, as
electricity is rare and expensive
for many.
The rampant deforestation is not
unique to Somaliland. In
southern Somalia, Al Qaeda-
linked Shebab insurgents turned
charcoal burning and
exportation into one of their
major sources of income.
In a report, the UN monitoring
group on Somalia and Eritrea
says the Islamist group made up
to 25 million dollars every year
from charcoal trade.
Several regions of southern
Somalia were declared famine
zones by the United Nations last
year, with the deforestation
contributing to an extreme
drought.
In a bid to put an end to
rampant deforestation,
Somalia's newly elected
President Hassan Sheikh
Mohamud in one of his first
official duties banned all
exportation of charcoal, in line
with a UN embargo in February.
However, much more than a UN
declaration and a presidential
decree are needed to bring the
deforestation to an end.
"The underlying causes of
poverty and the general decline
of the size of livestock herds
have to be addressed," says
Awale.
Alternative sources of energy
must be harnessed to cater for
the population, massive
reforestation campaigns need to
be initiated and some of the
pastoralists need to switch to
agriculture.

"All the mature trees have
disappeared.... In the past one
could get six or seven 25
kilogramme sacks of charcoal
from a tree. Today, maybe one
or two," Awale says.
As a consequence, charcoal
prices in Somaliland have
doubled in the past four years,
to 10 dollars a sack.

"Each time I cut down a tree, I am left with a bitter taste in my
mouth," Hussein says. "The
future is bleak.... All the trees
will have disappeared."


Culled from france24.com

On 10/31/12, Abiodun Odedeyi <abiodunodedeyi@gmail.com> wrote:
> From the ditch of poverty, credit/loans services are spreading
> financial freedom throughout the realm of economically active poor,
> low-income persons and micro-enterprises especially in developing
> countries. To this end, governments and financial institutions
> continually look for ways of improving the sector; how to create
> conducive lending platforms for medium and low income
> business/individuals.
>
> At the end of World War two, almost all of developed Europe benefited
> from one loan scheme or the other. Some of the biggest benefactors
> till date are Poland, Switzerland, and Germany (who, apart from low
> interest loans also got many of it debts written off).
> In Nigeria, the same idea of economic empowerment played out in the
> creation of community-based lending institutions. During it first
> thirty years of existence, micro-lending sector in the West African
> state have seen different transformations, policies, over-hauling etc.
> Popular among them was the Community Banks which ran between 1990 to
> 2007, the People's Bank of Nigeria, between 1989 to 2002, Family
> Economic Advancement programme (FEAP) among others.
>
> In 2007, the biggest and widely spread of these community-based banks,
> Community Bank, was reorganized into Micro-finance Bank Banks (mfb)
> with the aim of re-branding, block loopholes and giving more strength
> to it.
>
> Virus dwindling micro banks
> Within two years of a robust restart, a major crack opened the newly
> reorganized micro-banks. Quick intervention by the apex bank however
> saved a waif-like; scores of the institutions that started strongly
> became a hard lesson for others that survived the scare.
> October 2012, one of the micro-finance institutions, by share of luck,
> discovered an impending bombshell!
>
> While going through her Black Book (an inventory of bad debtors and
> other customers the bank won't like to transact business with), it was
> discovered that some names on the 'Black Book' are re-accessing loans
> with the bank. These individuals have been chased, searched for months
> without success only for them to come back a year or two later.
>
> Cross Carpet Debtor
> September 17, 2012 was a cool bright day. A team of 11 officials of a
> mfb (name withheld) moved on some unsuspecting loan defaulters within
> it Lagos business district. After visiting three debtors, it was
> established they allowed a certain Iya Oyinbo use them in securing
> loan; they used their names to seek for loan then handed it over to
> the woman. When the heat from the bank became unbearable, one of the
> 'victims' moved in with police on Iya Oyinbo. Reports filtered in that
> she was under detection at Elere Police Station, Mushin, Lagos but on
> getting to the station, two other financial institution officials were
> waiting at the station deck, sweating, the person in custody wasn't
> Iya Oyinbo but her younger sister.
> Iya Oyinbo's debt tops several millions of naira and she is nowhere to be
> found.
>
> As at the time of this writing, a month after, Iya Oyinbo is yet to
> surface, several other cross carpet debtors have also been discovered.
> The cancer is spreading, many 'customers' are gaining on this pretence
> then fade away, move to another financial institution then disappear
> again; pandemic looms over a key sector saddled with providing
> financial service to about 65% of the country's population.
>
> Is there a way out?
> The absent of credit rating, which would have enlightened financial
> sectors on customers' credit profile, was however waived aside by a
> Lagos based financial expert (name withheld because he is not
> permitted to speak to media). He bemoaned the state of national data
> collection as a critical blow to any quest for credit rating agency.
>
> "Loan disbursing officers should get to know their customers more,
> this, not credit rating, will reduce the spate of cross carpet
> debtors."
>
> Chi-Tola Roberts, the managing director of InFocus PR lampooned the
> non-utilization of several national data collections which has taken
> place over the years.
>
> "With the national identity card, voting registration, Sim card
> registration, our journey to such national comprehensive database is
> like sixty percent completed; the pocket few can be worked on with
> time".
>
> Data from the Central Bank shows that 8.5 billion of the 28.8 billion
> (about 29.8%) earmarked for Small and Medium Enterprises Equity
> Investment Scheme (SMEEIS) fund so far have been utilized, and about
> ten percent of the fund meant for micro credit not yet touched. The
> pressure of meeting up with Vision202020 could have set in motion,
> rapid disbursement of these trapped funds yet dwindling confidence in
> market structure may affect the ball being kicked to motion.
>
> www.donabiodun.blogspot.com
>