Kenya: The Shamba System and Deforestation

In a column published in Kenya's Daily Nation of September 18th, 2009, Dagi Kimani staunchly defends the shamba system, long practised in Kenya, against the call for its abolition by the likes of Wangari Mathai and Kenya's PM, Raila Odinga. He rejects the notion that it is a factor in the country's loss of forest cover. However, his minority view does not stop the truth (the weight of evidence) from being true (that is, from pointing to its incontrovertibility and many-sidedness).

Kimani acknowledges that his stand on the shamba system is not based on "any particularly wide experience in conservation or education in environmental matters, but on the fact that [he] was born and brought up in Lari constituency, a third of which is under forests where the "shamba system" was successfully practised until the mid-1990s."

In his view, the shamba system is simply "an arrangement where farmers are allowed to farm on government forest-land for a period of up to three years after commercial timber plantations have been harvested."

He elaborates:

"THE HARVESTING IS DONE AFTER THE trees have matured and can produce good timber and other products. This phase, in which all trees are cut down leaving bare ground, is called "clear-felling". Clear-felling only applies to plantations of exotic tree species, such as cypress and pine. In Lari, which, on the Nairobi-Naivasha Highway, stretches from the Uplands junction to a kilometre short of Fly-over, travellers can see examples of these plantations, with rows and rows of trees planted just like any other crop.

The shamba system was designed to allow farmers to benefit from the fertile soils just harvested of trees. But this was not exactly charitable. About two years after the farmers were allowed into the forest-land, government workers would replant the land with rows and rows of pine or cypress.

It was a neat trick. As the farmers weeded their crops growing alongside the young tree seedlings, they would, in effect, ensure that the latter were not choked by vines and fast-growing weeds. This, in effect, saved the forest department from the need to hire thousands of workers to tend to the young trees. In the third year after the young trees had become sturdy, the forester would relocate the farmers to a new clear-felled ground, and the cycle would go on.

Contrary to Prof Maathai's assertion, the shamba system was never designed for areas that carry indigenous plantations...In Lari, when the law worked in the 1970s and 1980s, the only indigenous trees that one was allowed to harvest from time to time were fallen bamboo, and this very sparingly under the watchful eye of the forester..."

[Read more]

Like Kimani, Peter Oduol sees considerable merit in the shamba system, arguing that:

The Shamba system, a form of Taungya where agricultural crops are grown together with forest tree species, has been quite widespread in the high-potential areas of Kenya since the early 1900s, and still is very popular. When properly practiced, the system allows sustained, optimum production of food crops along with forestry species from the same land and thus meets most of the social and economic needs of the shamba farmer.

The weight of available evidence suggests that this spirited defence of the shamba system is too narrowly cast -- Kimani on his neighbourhood in Lari (which allegedly never had a natural forest cover) and Oduol on the economic benefits of the commons to those who "plunder" it for their particular gain. In effect, both are in denial vis-a-vis the accelerating, across-the-country depletion of natural forest cover that is evident all around for any unbiased eye, and mind, to see.

A report of the African Conservation Foundation, though mild in its own assessment of the deleterious effects of the shamba system on natural forest cover, nonetheless captures, non-commitally, the essential and powerful evidence against the shamba system:

"The shamba system failed in some places because the Forestry Department had no staff to supervise the protection of the young plantations after retrenching most of the forest guards and phasing out the cadre of staff referred to during the colonial era as patrol men...

By the late 1980s, conservationists had started raising the red flag on the system's failure as signs that the scheme was being mismanaged and abused begun to emerge...

Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) was the first government organisation to criticise the system following its restoration by Presidential Decree in 1993 with claims that 19 per cent of natural forests had been encroached upon by the shamba system.

For instance, KWS argued that the shamba owners had secretly extended their boundaries to the Naro Moru Gate of Mt Kenya National Park, and that the remaining forests were being subjected to extreme pressure from squatters, who were felling more trees, and burning indigenous forest areas for cultivation.

Later, KWS was to expose an even more flagrant abuse of the system when its surveys indicated that 143 plantations, of approximately 200 hectares along Ruguti and Thuchi rivers, had been planted with the lucrative, but illegal marijuana instead of trees...

In 2004, the Government decided to stop the system and gave all the cultivators notice to vacate the forests by March the same year."

[Read more]