The three-year project, funded by the Swedish International Development Co-operation Agency (Sida), aims to determine the best ways to alleviate poverty in the communities that rely on dry forests, without jeopardising the forests themselves.
Under the leadership of Swedish forester Daniel Tiveau, CIFOR has opened a project office in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou.
“In the past decade, world attention has tended to concentrate on the destruction of tropical rainforest, even though worldwide degradation and conversion of dry forests is far more advanced than that of wet forests,” Daniel Tiveau said.
Dry forests also occupy more area than wet forests. They exist in all developing regions of the world, including Asia and Latin America, but are most prominent in Africa.
In fact the wide variety of dry forests in Africa - from the desert margin scrub through to closed woodlands and deciduous forests - support the the majority of the people and livestock of all the continent’s ecosystems.
The resources drawn from these forests are intricately interwoven with all aspects of the local’s lives and the national economy, in ways that are not always considered in either local or national planning.
Dry forests provide construction material for farm structures and homes for millions. They also provide the bulk of dry-season fodder for vast livestock populations, without which this sub-sector would often not be viable.
“They provide fuel-wood for domestic and rural industry uses, including drying major agricultural crops and fish. They actually protect the water and soil resource base for agriculture, yet they are seen as far less important than agriculture because they don’t produce timber of great monetary value,” Tiveau said.
Many species have medicinal value, bark for curing diarrhea, roots used for treating malaria and the leaves of species such as the baobab (the monkey bread tree) can be used for human food.
Most villagers appreciate the forest’s myriad uses and avoid harvesting many species for fuel wood. They use traditional axes and their cutting methods encourage the vegetative reproduction that maintains the resource.
But the pressures of increasing population, overgrazing, clearing for agriculture and ongoing droughts may be increasing the rate of desertification.
“Our team’s challenge is to find ways to both preserve the resource, and use it better,” Tiveau said.
One option In Burkina Faso might be to develop a honey industry. But while the honey industry has been very successful in Zambia, and could possibly be further developed in Burkina Faso, the team knows circumstances vary across Africa.
“"Differences in vegetation affect the prospects of an industry like honey, but there are also big differences in development” Tiveau said. “Burkina Faso, for instance, still has virtually no electricity outside the main cities.”
Options such as eco-tourism could also be considered, but again, west African drylands have a lot less wildlife than southern Africa.
“There’s really no bush in western Africa without villages” Tiveau said. “"You only have to drive for a couple of minutes and you’ll see a village, and they are all desperate for resources.”
They will also look for solutions completely outside the forests. For example, until two or three years ago, the price of propane gas for cooking fuel was subsidised in Burkina Faso.
When the subsidy ended, most people, even in the cities, went back to wood for fuel, increasing the pressure on the dry forests once again.
Whatever options they explore, the team will be very wary of past pitfalls.
“Most of the ideas in the past have been ‘technical fixes’ that didn’t work, like the many donors who began huge fuel-wood planting projects during the ‘Sahelian’ drought of the late 1970s and 80s, which coincided with the energy crisis” Tiveau said.
“The land is simply too dry and the seedlings died. The efforts should have been concentrated on protecting the naturally-regenerated dry forests.” (MJ)