Social and Economical Aspects of Miombo Woodland Management in Southern Africa: Options and Opportunities for ResearchPeter A. Dewees |
| [Back to
OccPaper Top Page] [Chapter 1] [Chapter 2] [Chapter 3] [Chapter 4] [Chapter 5] [Chapter 6] [Chapter 7] [Chapter 8] |
Policy, legislation and macroeconomic impacts on woodlandsImpacts of forestry and natural resource policies and legislation Much of the research agenda discussed so far has focused on micro-level issues. A larger question is of their relevance at the policy level, to the economy as a whole, and to the development of legislation. Social and economic research should, in many respects, be driven by the policy process, though they are often undertaken independently. This is partly because responsibilities for and interests in different types of research rest with different institutions, and partly because there are few institutions with the capacity for undertaking research initiatives covering such a broad area. Because policy formulation is the responsibility of national-level institutions, policy research per se is usually undertaken either by, or in close cooperation and collaboration with, these institutions. A concern is that, because of these types of ties, policy research tends to be co-opted by political processes within these institutions, and this undermines its credibility. Within the region, few national institutions have a well-developed capacity to undertake policy, legislative, or macroeconomic research. National institutions with natural resource management responsibilities are usually staffed with foresters, wildlife specialists, ecologists, and other scientists. Staffing policies and manpower constraints have limited the possibilities of employing staff with the training to carry out policy research. Recognizing the need for better information, senior management in some institutions has encouraged junior staff to explore areas of special interest to them of relevance to the policy process. While not the optimal situation in terms of involving trained manpower in policy initiatives, this approach has produced some promising results. To inform more fully the policy process, there is a very considerable need for sustained local support for policy research. A considerable amount of policy research in the region with regard to miombo woodlands has been supported, undertaken, and in some cases, instigated by international development assistance agencies. While the process hasn't been as one-sided as it sounds, aid agencies have their own agenda which may not coincide with national priorities and interests. Indeed, policy formulation may be the victim of its numerous constituents, which may include aid agencies, rural people, traditional authorities, civil servants, and academics. All of these groups have different competing, or sometimes complementary, interests. The policy outcome is not always in favor of how society best will be served, but who has the most political clout. The use of policy research to promote a political agenda is an unfortunate, but inevitable, outcome. Much of this discussion has focused on how appropriate policies can ensure long-term access for rural communities and households to benefits from woodlands in southern Africa. Especially in this respect, policy research must consider the scope and nature of natural resource-related policy and legislation and how it has affected woodland cover. Although contemporary woodland management and use are in part a longer term outcome of policies and legislation which date from earlier periods, an assessment of the more recent experience is critically important as well. Policies have seldom been developed independently of past experience. Rather, they build on these earlier policies, and use new information as it becomes available and as new development priorities emerge. Research must explicitly recognize and take into account the dynamic nature of policy formation (see particularly the discussion in Gregersen et al., 1992). For instance, a concern about the woodfuel crisis' focused policies and project planning on developing effective responses to what were perceived to be growing woodfuel shortages. There is increasing agreement that wood energy policies are in serious need of reassessment, as they were based on a number of weak premises about the nature and impact of energy supply and demand. Much natural resource legislation in southern Africa reflects the dualistic nature of earlier policies which were fundamentally regulatory in nature. In customary lands, an emphasis often remains on regulated control of natural resources with few options for the encouragement of active participation in resource management by local populations. Obvious conflicts developed where there were strong local traditions of resource management which were at odds with the models of management imposed by the technocracy. There is a growing need to introduce policies which enable local people to manage, rather than to regulate management. The conflict between the desire to involve local people in more intensive natural resource management and the statutory requirement to enforce existing regulations is clearest in national forestry institutions which have both extension and regulatory responsibilities. In many instances, these responsibilities need more clearly to be separated. A final point to make about the nature of policy research is that it has usually been re-active, rather than pro-active -- undertaken in response to the concerns of one (or of a group of) constituent, rather than as part of an on-going process. There are encouraging signs that this is changing in southern Africa, that public sector institutions are increasingly aware of the longer term impacts of policy change, and that policy research is being used to develop an understanding of some of these impacts. Intersectoral policy linkages Agricultural and other land-use policies. The most profound impacts on woodland cover in southern Africa were not the result of forestry policies, but of other attempts to regulate and control agricultural and other land-uses. For instance, various programs between the 1950s and 1980s relied on the implementation of a technical exercise to `rationalize' land-use, by consolidating villages along roadsides, and demarcating arable and grazing blocks based on calculations of carrying capacity.These initiatives were often linked to cattle destocking programs. In some areas, this period had a major impact on woodlands. Planners sought to shift arable production away from water resources (such as dambos and streambeds) to wooded toplands. Grazing areas were shifted from these areas to lower, often unwooded, slopes. The outcome of these shifts was woodland clearance on a massive scale in support of arable production. More recent resettlement schemes have also had a significant impact on woodlands. Settlement of wooded areas has been increasingly possible because of tsetse eradication programs. Some of the most rapid rates of woodland clearance are being encountered in former tsetse areas. Rapid woodland clearance has posed considerable problems for the agricultural sector. In areas which have been long-settled, institutions have had a longer time to adapt to environmental stresses and to the stresses imposed by increased population pressures. The functional role of these adaptive processes has been to broaden the range of responses open to households, including a reliance on wild food resources and other woodland-derived benefits. This type of diversification has not been immediately available to resettled households which have moved into new environments with different soils, vegetative types, and climatic conditions. Arguably, productivity will fall and malnutrition rates in areas of resettlement will remain high until households are able to develop adaptive responses to environmental stress, and the institutions within which these responses can be framed. An underlying issue for planners and policy makers has to do with the need to maintain land under woodland cover in the first place. There is considerable evidence that, within viable institutional constructs, agricultural intensification in woodland areas, resulting in heavy woodland modification and clearance, increases both agricultural production and the diversification of inputs into the farming system. When these processes accelerate to such an extent that few productive woodland elements remain, there are considerable costs to the economy in terms of the need for alternative inputs. The balance between woodland modification, demands for new agricultural land, and the longer term costs of the loss of woodland cover must all be assessed during the policy process. There are unfortunately few tools which can enable planners to fairly assess these costs and benefits,and how they should be weighted in the policy process. The further expansion of agriculture in already settled areas, and pressures on woodlands associated with this expansion, can largely be accounted for by the growth of the resident population. Depending on the nature of local resource management institutions, responses to these stresses can be moderated by adaptive processes. The pressures on woodlands which are the most difficult to moderate are those which are brought about by the in-migration and by the rapid settlement of new populations in wooded areas. Migration, and the factors which cause it, is of considerable concern because of its impacts on both dry and wet tropical forests and woodlands. Structural adjustment and the environment. Structural adjustment, whether externally imposed in exchange for increased lending by development assistance agencies, or internally adopted as an element of national planning, has become an increasingly important means of economic management. Structural adjustment may involve the floating of exchange rates, liberalized trade and interest rate policies, a rationalization of taxation policies, banking and public sector reform. Most analysts accept that sustainable development is intractably linked with environmental stability. Arguably, structural adjustment should be seen as a process which contributes to sustainable development and, hence, to environmental stability. Nonetheless, structural adjustment programs seldom focus on anything more than their immediate impacts on national economies. This is understandable. Structural adjustment involves discrete mechanisms for economic management which produce measurable changes in economic performance over the short and medium term. While understandable, it is not desirable. It is increasingly accepted that structural adjustment programs can have social impacts or can contribute to broader objectives such as poverty alleviation, distributional objectives, and a reorientation of public sector financing toward education and health. There have been few efforts, however, to understand the impact of structural adjustment on a country's natural resources (some of the few attempts to do so are reported in Reed, 1992) . Structural adjustment may be linked to sectoral lending programs, through which aid agencies agree to lend funds for structural adjustment provided that certain sectors are liberalized. For instance, lending may be committed on the condition that fertilizer subsidies are removed or that crop prices are decontrolled. Sectoral lending which is contingent on reform in the natural resources sector is virtually unheard of. Some aspects of adjustment have unintended consequences on the environment. For instance, exchange rate adjustments which resulted in a devaluation of a country's currency would make it more lucrative to export valuable hardwoods and timber products. This is all good and well -- an intended outcome of adjustment. Most timber, however, is not sold at rates on-the-stump which reflect its export value. A devaluation would greatly reduce the cost of roundwood on-the-stump as a proportion of the export price, considerably increasing the incentive for extraction, and speeding up the rate at which valuable hardwoods are depleted from miombo and other woodlands. A more sensible approach would have linked adjustment policies with sectoral reform which coupled devaluation with concession policy reform. This would ensure government was capturing rents for valuable hardwoods, for instance, by selling concessions at auction or by more quickly responding to a devaluation with adjustments to the schedule of royalties. Even in the best of circumstances, sawmillers are going to complain about increases in royalty rates. Millers in Zimbabwe, for instance, complain that domestic timber is more expensive than imported European hardwoods. Arguably, this is as it should be. The result of increased royalties though will be unemployment in the timber industry, or the reallocation of resources to more productive sectors. Liberalizations often result in incompatibility between different policies. Wood energy policy in Malawi, for instance, is geared toward increasing investments in plantations and woodlots in identified wood deficit areas, and to reduce rates of woodland exploitation by controlling woodfuel flows into urban areas. Government also maintains the price of plantation-produced firewood at low levels to mitigate the impacts of price increases on urban consumers. There is an essential contradiction between these policy objectives if Government intends, on the one hand, to encourage investment in plantations and woodlots, while, on the other, seeking to keep the price of plantation production low. Policies are incompatible which attempt to limit woodland extraction, but which keep the price of woodfuel from rising in response to economic scarcity. Similarly, liberalized energy policies which favor the adoption of marginal-cost energy pricing result in higher prices for conventional fuels such as paraffin, coal, or electricity. Fuel switching to cheaper substitutes will result, likely causing a heavier dependence on woodfuels in the short term and faster rates of woodland clearance.[9] Structural adjustment programs often argue in favor of blanket decontrol and market liberalizations. While this might improve, for instance, food security, some markets have traditionally been controlled because of concerns about the impacts of decontrol on the environment. Arguments for market control are strongest where markets have failed. Open access resources are especially subject to market failure. In these instances, blanket liberalizations could have seriously negative impacts on woodland cover, unless clear initiatives are undertaken which seek to mitigate these impacts. Subsidies are a common target of structural adjustment programs. They are an often expensive means of shifting economic activity toward particular sectors. Fertilizers are often subsidized. Devaluation coupled with a removal of fertilizer subsidies can greatly increase the cost of these inputs to rural households. The removal of subsidies could significantly improve the economic viability of agroforestry systems, or could increase the value of managing woodlands for the production of leaf litter.[10] If it is accepted that subsidies need to be removed, this policy should be coupled with active steps to shift nutrient management to more sustainable household-based systems. Higher crop prices, which can be an outcome of structural adjustments, arguably increase the rate of agricultural land clearance. Most available evidence shows that this is going to happen anyway. The question is more one of how it can be brought about in the least-cost way to the environment. Studies by Tiffen et al (1994) strongly indicate that environmental improvements can be anticipated, even in the most degraded of dryland areas, if market developments and technical change are coupled with focused public investment. Careful design of these types of initiatives which considers their impact on woodlands is urgently needed. Research to date has failed to inform on this important subject. There is no easy answer to the problem of structural adjustment. The means for exploring the impact of adjustment programs on woodlands have not been widely reviewed or discussed. Macro incompatibility makes the implementation of research findings problematic because of competing objectives of adjustment. Complementarity between policies which seek on the one hand to improve economic performance, while on the other are geared toward natural resource conservation and management, is uncommon. Are miombo woodlands valuable? For whom and for what? Valuation ... again. Valuation was discussed to some extent in Section 4.2. We pointed out that valuation studies have different audiences and can be used for different purposes. For instance, valuation of publicly-owned woodlands may be of interest for helping a national forestry department to identify how these lands should be used in the future. Valuation of privately-owned woodlands may be of use in establishing rates of taxation, or rates at which governments should be compelled to buy land which has been acquired by compulsory purchase. Valuation could also be used to make the case that some lands are underutilized and could be far more economically productive under alternative management regimes. Finally, valuation studies can be used as an input into a system of `green' national accounts. The way in which valuation is considered and carried out must, in large measure, reflect the concerns of the end user. More than with other types of micro-level research, there are clear dangers for multiple user groups to extrapolate their own conclusions from the results of valuation studies. At the household level, the obvious questions to ask are, firstly, what benefits from trees do farmers most value, and secondly, have these benefits provided (or could they provide) any incentives for households or communities to conserve and manage miombo woodlands. The first of these questions can be addressed by exercises such as contingent valuation or farmgate pricing. In Zimbabwe, for instance, households which were involved in a contingent valuation exercise placed the highest value on benefits from fuelwood, building material, and from tree-derived inputs for crop production (Campbell et al. 1991). This still tells us little. Valuation exercises usually only assess the total value of specific benefits to the household, and do not consider either their relationship to source or quantity. Conventional valuation exercises also fail adequately to reflect the real value of some products to households (Behnke 1985). Farmgate price estimates and willingness-to-pay exercises tend to overvalue some commodities and undervalue others, particularly when they are used as a guide for establishing how farmers manage trees and other woody cover. Taken at face value, for instance, results from the Zimbabwe contingent valuation exercise suggest that high values placed on woodfuel and building timber should provide important incentives for farmers to plant trees or to otherwise manage woody cover. Studies of tree planting practices in Zimbabwe, however, have indicated that farmers have principally planted trees for fruit and for shade (Campbell et al. 1991). Valuation exercises tend to obscure the relationship between the costs of using particular commodities, and the benefits associated with their use. For example, woodfuel may be derived from a wide range of sources: miombo or mopane woodlands, trees growing on farms, trees in fields, recycled timber or construction material, and so on. The number of species which can provide woody biomass for woodfuel is quite high. There are also a range of potential low cost substitutes for woodfuel. While the total amount of woodfuel used, and its value, may be quite high, the value of woodfuel derived from any single source may be quite small. Particularly when woodfuel is collected opportunistically, the costs of extraction are low and perceived benefits of its use high. The incentive to replace particular extractive strategies with woodfuel from planted trees or from more intensively managed woodlands (which require investments of both capital and labor) will remain low. The few valuation studies which have been carried out of woodland products in Southern Africa seem to be empirically sound. They are, however, heavily qualified and based on a series of well-articulated assumptions. The problem for policy making, is that these qualifications and assumptions are often lost or obscured when the results of these studies are translated by others into a form which can be more easily understood for a larger, perhaps non-academic, audience to make a particular point. We offer as an example results reported in Campbell et. al. (1991) which assessed market values and replacement values for a range of woodland and tree products used by households. These are given in Table 1. The results are reported in terms of market values and replacement values of benefits from woodlands and trees, per household, and is heavily qualified by the assumptions given in the notes to the table. These notes make it clear that the study was only valid for sampled households in specific agroclimatic zones and that the results were based on a clear set of quite limited assumptions. The results applied to all benefits from trees and were non-specific about the type of trees or woodlands from where the benefits were derived. There were careful textual qualifications which emphasized that the study did not consider marginal utility, and that most farmers in the study area operated outside of the market and lacked the income to purchase these goods at market prices. A table from a second report, which drew on the Campbell study, is given in Table 2. This table, and the text which accompanied it reported the results of the Campbell et al. study in terms of `private woodland benefits' per ha of woodlands -- even though the original study never suggested it referred only to woodland benefits or that there was sufficient information to conclude for each product that household benefits were derived from a specific area of woodland. There were few textual qualifications in this report, and the impression was conveyed that the results hold true for all woodlands in Zimbabwe across all agroclimatic zones, and were independent of the households and the social and economic characteristics from which the information was originally derived and on which the results are heavily dependent. For the policy analyst who uncritically examines the second table, the next steps are clear. Find an estimate of the area of woodlands in Zimbabwe, and multiply this by the annual woodland value per ha given in Table 2. The results would be fatuous and have no empirical basis. The point here is only a cautionary one. Contingent valuation, hedonic pricing, and the assessment of market or replacement values all have their strengths and weaknesses. While there is great utility in the further development and application of these methodologies for clarifying woodland values, we emphasize that they have great potential for being distorted, intentionally or not, for the purposes of addressing an agenda for which they were not originally intended. Revising systems of national accounts. There have been a number of efforts to revise systems of national accounts to consider the value of the environment, and the impact of its degradation or improvement on GNP. While the depreciation of man made capital is accounted for in most systems of national accounts, the depreciation of capital in the form of natural resources is nowhere usually considered. For the economies of Southern Africa, the overexploitation of dry woodlands by the railway, mining, and timber industries, has nowhere been reflected in national accounts, nor are the considerable benefits, both real and potential, from miombo management considered. There have been a number of studies which have sought to develop alternative systems of national accounts, with applications to Costa Rica (Solorzano et al. 1991), Mexico (van Tongeren et al 1991) and Indonesia (Repetto et al 1989). Experiences with these types of studies have increasingly shown that the practical difficulties of putting together a system of national accounts which reflects environmental values are considerable. Because of this, we will not elaborate further, to say that it is a subject under consideration amongst many research institutions, and might benefit from discussion in southern Africa. Woodland conservation and management. Optimizing land use in the drylands of southern Africa. There are very considerable questions about whether miombo and other types of woodlands in southern Africa should be retained in the face of very heavy pressures for agricultural land throughout the region. Under the most intensive uses, especially in drier zones, woodland management holds potential for generating good returns compared with other land uses. Pressures for land, and the need to optimize the use of a diminishing resource, are precisely why woodlands in drier areas are so productive. This is arguably less the case in higher potential zones. The use of woodland areas for wildlife management in a way which returns substantial levels of income to people living in customary lands has been attempted with some success in several regions of Southern Africa. Institutional mechanisms for devolving control over migrant natural resources such as wildlife to local communities are the subject of ongoing research. This type of land-use is only possible where alternative woodland uses do not compete with wildlife. There are considerable questions about whether this is widely the case in the more heavily settled parts of the region. Research must more carefully consider the options to rural families and communities in the absence of woodland cover, however sparse. It has been argued that woodlands need to be conserved and managed partly because of the large number of low-cost inputs which they provide to farming systems (Bradley and McNamara 1993). In the absence of these inputs, capital intensive alternatives (chemical fertilizers, cooking paraffin, alternative construction materials, and so on) would have to be provided in order to maintain agricultural productivity and rural livelihoods. There is clearly scope for macroeconomic research which considers these issues. Scope for research This section has argued that sustained support for policy, legislative, and macroeconomic research could usefully build on the existing body of research in these areas and would contribute to improving the environment for woodland management in southern Africa. Research which would complement the existing body of work could be undertaken in a number of key and related areas, particularly:
|