It is hard not to feel great sympathy for the Kenyan farmers who have hacked themselves a living from the Mau forest. In the coming days the authorities will start evicting some 20,000 families from the area, only 2,000 of whom have proper title to the land they have won back from the forest.
The problem is that in the last 15 years, these land-hungry people have felled some 100,000 hectares of a forest that is Kenya's main store of fresh water. Their activities have thus exacerbated the effects of the drought currently being experienced in lowland regions. From an ecological point of view, what these farmers have done has been a disaster. Ironically, the new farmland they create is of diminishing value. As has happened in countries such as Brazil and Nepal, at first the rich soil that used to lie beneath the trees is excellent for producing crops.
However, without the forest above and the mists and rains that it generates, soil quality quickly deteriorates, giving decreasing crop yields. The solution, typically in the vast wastes of the Brazilian Amazon rain forest, is for the farmers to slash and burn yet more forest areas and the whole degenerative cycle starts again, while the ecological impact is increased.
Professional environmentalists have a strong argument to stop the untrammeled exploitation of forest areas that are quite rightly characterized as the lungs of the globe. The arguable benefits that it brings to poor subsistence farmers who have no other opportunity to acquire land are greatly outweighed by the catastrophic effects of reduced rainfall and river flows, as is being seen now not just in Kenya but throughout East Africa.
Nevertheless it is wrong to ignore the plight of the sodbusters who sought only to eke some sort of a living for themselves and their families. The Kenyan authorities are promising to compensate all those farmers with proper title deeds to their land but nothing will be done for the great majority who has been squatting illegally. The question needs to be asked who in authority decided in the first place to start granting ownership of parcels of such important forest water catchments as the Mau forest. It is clear that once the first legal settlers moved in and started cutting down trees to make farmland, thousands of other families were prepared to take the risk of also settling there without any rights. This demonstrates in what desperate straits many of them found themselves in a country where unemployment is high and corruption rife.
It, therefore, seems right that all of the 20,000 families should be given some compensation or as the government in Nairobi has promised the “legals”, alternative farmland. And the burden of providing this recompense should not fall exclusively on the Kenyan taxpayer. The international environmental industry is so good at warning about what many countries are doing wrong. It should back its censorious campaign with funds to help families like those in the Mau forest make a new start somewhere else.
