Focus on deforestation

Halima Bibi, 60, walks for kilometres through northern Pakistan's Himalayan foothills each day, gathering firewood. For as long as she can remember, this has been her daily chore. But it is getting harder each year as forest cover in Pakistan shrinks at an alarming rate. "We have neither a job, nor a business. This jungle is all what we have," Bibi told IRIN in her small two-roomed mud house, perched on a slope overlooking the picturesque Ayubia National Park - a government-protected forest. Her village, Tohidabad, nestled in between the famous hill resorts of Ayubia and Nathiagali, 50 km north of the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, is typical of hill settlements where poverty is widespread. Men travel to the plains or to the Gulf for menial jobs, and women stay behind to maintain and manage their homes, depending mostly on what the forest and its natural resources offer them. "But the forest is disappearing fast, threatening the lives and livelihood of thousands of people," field assistant for World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), Sabiha Zaman, told IRIN. Experts and conservationists agree. Despite its huge potential, forest cover in Pakistan is estimated at around five percent of the surface area. This is coupled with the fact that the rate of depletion and degradation is also high. "In the last 20 years, 48 percent of the forest area in Kashmir has been reduced to 43 percent," a WWF adviser, Ashiq Ahmed Khan, told IRIN in Saidu Sharif, a town in the historic Swat Valley, 110 km north of Islamabad. "We have also lost 44 percent of the area of coniferous zone." Trees, apart from being an essential natural resource for any country, are crucial also for the survival of mountain and forest communities. They provide wood - both for personal consumption and commercial use - plants, fruits, shrubs and pasture. "It's the poorest communities which rely on forest resources," Zabta Khan Shinwari, a leading ethnobotanist with WWF, told IRIN. "If the forest degrades, the poorest will suffer most." Shinwari is leading a team of scientists exploring and promoting ways that will allow communities to exploit the forest resources in a sustainable way. In Bibi's village and immediate surroundings, the WWF has distributed - at subsidised rates - special stoves, which consume only half the quantity of wood as traditional stoves, but producing the same amount of heat. The stove suffices not only for cooking but also warms dwellings during freezing winter temperatures. It was designed by another forestry project run by the Aga Khan Foundation. "My fuel wood consumption has come down by half," Nisakat, another villager, told IRIN. Reducing wood consumption by half it means that villagers can pay more attention to exploring other livelihoods. The national park in Ayubia has an area of 8,500 acres with about 42,000 people dependent on it. According to official estimates, each household consumes 11.1 mt of fuel wood and 13.6 mt of fodder annually. "For the poor people living here, it means a lot," Zaman said. For Shinwari, the stove is just one of many ways poor communities can be helped. His project also educates villagers on how to collect medicinal plants efficiently. Of the 6,000 plant species in the country, those with medicinal properties have been known to traditional healers in the region for centuries. But Shinwari said this knowledge was teetering on the edge of oblivion. "When the plants are lost, so is the knowledge of their value to humanity," he added. Abdul Latif Rao, the national project manager of the Mountain Areas Conservancy Project of The World Conservation Union, told IRIN that the best strategy was first to halt deforestation and later initiate reafforestation by actively involving the communities dependent on the resource. "The depletion of forests in Pakistan is quite alarming," he said. "If the situation does not change soon they will disappear in 20 to 25 years." He said environmentalists and conservationists were all concerned about the situation, because a vast majority of the Pakistani population - estimated at more than 140 million - was rural. Of the latter many were directly or indirectly involved with forests. "Sustainable livelihood programmes are needed. You cannot order them to stop cutting [down] trees, they have to survive," Rao noted. Experts point out that deforestation has been caused by rapid population growth, illegal felling of trees, unsustainable use of natural resources and half-hearted efforts to effect reafforestation. Muhammad Iqbal, the deputy secretary of the food and agriculture department of the Northern Areas of Pakistan, told IRIN that the situation was critical. He said organised vested interests or commercial exploiters had done the worst damage to the forests. "For the poor people, forests are the main sources of income, and that is why they sometimes cut trees discreetly and illegally," he said, noting that such people had only a minor responsibility for the deteriorating situation. "We need social forestry, which is for the people and by the people." Another forest official told IRIN on condition of anonymity that inappropriate government policies had encouraged those with vested interests to fell more trees each year. He said that the first major illegal tree-felling had taken place in 1988. "About 400,000 cubic feet of forest wood was illegally cut that year," he recalled. "The government, instead of seizing that wood, allowed it to be exported to the other provinces without a fine." Forest conservationists say that this had encouraged the "timber mafia" to cut down even more forest the following year, believing that it could get away with it by using political clout. "One million cubic feet was extracted illegally in the three years after 1988," one official said, recalling that three more huge fellings have taken place since then. "The government did fine subsequent fellings, but the amount was so small that it encouraged people instead of discouraging them," the official added. Even now, huge piles of timber can be seen lying in Dargai, a village in the North West Frontier Province's tribal belt neighbouring Afghanistan. Although the timber is now legal because the fine has been paid, it is the best illustration of how unsustainably the forests are being exploited. Meanwhile, for villagers like Nisakat and Bibi, each tree is precious. "If not for me, for my children, because otherwise the next generation will be in trouble," Bibi said.