Fuelwood—Is the Future Going Up in Smoke?
By Awake! correspondent in Nigeria
THE sun descends and reddens the African sky. Sampa cooks rice for her husband and their children. She dips water from a pail and pours it into a smoke-blackened aluminum pot. Beneath the pot crackles a small fire, fueled by three thick sticks.
Heaped nearby is more wood. Sampa buys it from the men who truck it from the mountains. The wood is essential. Without wood there can be no fire. Without fire you can’t cook rice.
Sampa’s eldest son says: “When we don’t have wood, we don’t eat.” He gestures toward the homes of the rich on the hill. “In those houses, there is electricity. There are stoves that work with electricity and other stoves that work with gas.” He turns to the fire, shrugs, and says: “We use wood.”
In this, Sampa’s family has plenty of company. Out of every 4 people in the developing world, 3 depend on wood as their only source of fuel for cooking and heating. But there is a desperate shortage of wood.
According to FAO (UN Food and Agriculture Organization), the extent of the fuelwood crisis is truly staggering. About one billion people in developing countries are facing fuelwood shortages. If present trends continue, this number could easily double by the end of the century. A representative of FAO stated: “It is of little value to provide food for the hungry of the world if they lack the means by which to cook it.”
Why a Shortage?
From earliest times, mankind has used wood for fuel. The reason? Wood is so convenient. You don’t need expensive equipment or sophisticated technology to gather it. Unless it is overexploited, the supply can be sustained by the growth of new trees. Cooking and heating with wood doesn’t call for stoves and heaters. And ideally, wood is free and as available as the nearest tree. It has only been within the past two hundred years that the world’s richer nations have switched to other fuels, such as gas, coal, and oil. The rest have stayed with wood.
Some experts say that the core of the problem today is dramatic population growth. As people increase in number, forests are cleared to expand settlements, extend agriculture, and provide timber for industry as well as for fuel. Rapid deforestation occurs in the development of almost every country. North America and Europe went through such a phase.
But today’s population is growing at an alarming rate. Already, there are some five and a half billion people on this planet. In developing nations, populations double every 20 to 30 years. As the number of people increases, so does the demand for wood. It is as if the population has become a giant, forest-eating beast with an insatiable appetite, a beast that grows bigger and hungrier every day. The supply of fuelwood is thus eaten up before it can be replaced. According to FAO, over a hundred million people in 26 countries are already unable to obtain enough fuelwood to care for even their most basic needs.
Yet, not all who live in lands of acute scarcity are affected equally. Those who can afford to do so merely switch to other fuels, such as kerosene or bottled gas. The fuelwood crisis is a crisis of the poor, who are growing in number.
The Impact on People
In recent years the cost of wood has doubled, tripled, and in some places quadrupled. Today, prices continue to rise as areas around cities are stripped bare. Many cities in Asia and Africa are now surrounded by areas of almost total deforestation. Some cities must bring in wood from distances of over a hundred miles [160 km].
Increasing prices add to the burden of those already desperately poor. Studies have shown that in parts of Central America and West Africa, working-class families pay as much as 30 percent of their total income for fuelwood. Everything else—food, clothing, housing, transportation, education—must be eked out of what is left. For them the saying is true that “what goes under the pot costs more than what goes into the pot.”
How do they manage? Where wood is scarce or expensive, people cut back on the number of hot meals they eat. They buy cheap foods or less food, resulting in a less balanced diet. They also cook their food less. Germs and parasites aren’t killed, and fewer nutrients are absorbed by the body. They fail to boil their drinking water. They scavenge for anything that will burn.
Millions of people have turned to low quality fuels, such as straw, stalks, or dry animal dung. Where wood is expensive and dung is not, it seems economically sensible to put dung on the fire rather than in the field. Often there is little choice. But the cost is that the soil is denied valuable organic materials. In time the soil loses fertility and dries out.
Although those living in rural areas usually do not have to pay for their wood, its scarcity adds greatly to the time spent gathering it. In parts of South America, women spend 10 percent of their day collecting wood. In some African lands, one full day’s collecting provides only three days’ supply. Sometimes families designate one child to work full-time scavenging for fuel.
All too often, the rural environment is sacrificed to meet the demands of the city. Wood is cut and sold much faster than it grows. So supplies dwindle, and families either move to the cities or spend more time collecting wood for themselves.
Thus, millions of people spend more time and money to meet their basic need for fuel. The alternatives? For the poor it means eating less, being cold, and living without light at night.
What Is Being Done
Some years ago the seriousness of the fuelwood crisis began to receive international attention. The World Bank and other agencies poured money into forestry projects. Though not all these projects were successful, much was learned. Experience showed that the solution to the fuelwood crisis was not simply a matter of planting more trees. One problem was that planners sometimes failed to consider the feelings of local people. Thus, in one West African country, villagers destroyed seedlings because they had been planted on traditional grazing grounds.
Another difficulty was that reforestation is a long-term affair. It may take up to 25 years before trees are able to produce fuelwood on a self-sustaining basis. This means a delay between investment and profit. It also means that planting does nothing to satisfy present demand.
Reforestation projects are under way in many countries. But will they satisfy future demands? Forestry experts say no. Trees are being cut down much faster than they are being replaced. A Worldwatch Institute researcher writes: “Unfortunately, the political will and commitment of resources needed to break the cycle fostered by deforestation is lacking in much of the tropical Third World. At present, only one acre of trees is planted for every ten acres cleared. The gap is greatest by far in Africa, where the ratio of tree clearing to planting is twenty-nine to one. Meeting the Third World’s projected fuelwood needs by [the year] 2000 would require a thirteenfold increase in the current rate of tree planting for nonindustrial uses.”
Future Prospects
Today many sincere people are actively involved in trying to solve the problem of fuelwood shortage. Yet, their projections for the future are often pessimistic. Earthscan researchers write in their book Fuelwood—The Energy Crisis That Won’t Go Away: “All such measures together [to combat the fuelwood crisis] cannot fully ease the burdens that fuel scarcity and rising wood prices will impose on the poor.” FAO’s teaching manual The Fuelwood Crisis and Population—Africa states: “Any initiative will have little chance of success until population growth is contained.” The same publication shows, however, that the population will continue to grow “because tomorrow’s parents are more numerous than today’s parents. Tomorrow’s parents are already born.”
In contrast with such gloomy forecasts, Bible prophecy clearly shows that Almighty God purposes nothing less than a complete restoration of Paradise to this earth. (Luke 23:43) The complex problems concerning fuelwood, population, and poverty are not beyond his ability to solve.—Isaiah 65:17-25.
Is the future going up in smoke? Not at all! Soon will be fulfilled the prophecy concerning our loving Creator: “You are opening your hand and satisfying the desire of every living thing.”—Psalm 145:16.
[Blurb on page 14]
‘It is of little value to provide food if they lack the means by which to cook it’