Trees and Honey

Very few days go by in this job wthout learning something new and interesting. A few years ago, when I was working for CDC, I learnt a lot about the cultivation and export of fresh vegetables. Subsequently, my colleagues found my extensive knowledge of vegetables a source of great amusement, though I could never see the joke.....

Over the past two months, two more areas have caught my interest and attention. Trees and honey. Trees - and more specifically the lack of them - is a fairly obvious one. Here are a few facts: East Africa's trees produce about 80% of the population's energy requirements (who ever said biofuels were something new?); population growth - and land pressure - is rising at about 4% per annum. To put this in context, that means the population of Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania will double within 20 years! Forest cover is diminishing: in Kenya, forests now cover less than 2% of the area. Tanzania and Uganda are slightly better, but the trend is sharply down... Timber prices are increasing all the time....

Now, I knew all this before. What I didn't know, until attending an excellent presentation by Eric Bettelheim of Sustainable Forestry Management last week in Kigali, was that Africa had been unable to benefit from the official market in carbon trading established under the Kyoto Protocol a few years ago. If, therefore, a government or a private individual or business plants trees in Africa, s/he is ineligible for carbon credits - which are available to European and North American growers! The result - deforestation continues apace in the developing world but afforestation is on the increase in Europe and the USA. And I thought it was a global problem....... Fortunately, however, the business case for planting forests in East Africa is becoming very persuasive, even without the carrot of carbon trading opportunities, and, if Mr Bettelheim gets his way, the economics may look even better in the near future. Buy land and plant some trees - in today's fragile economic environment, that advice could be a great long term pension investment, besides doing something small to save the planet.

And if you plant some trees, why not invest in some beehives? The bees do all the work and you collect the income. Furthermore, the global honey price is increasing, due mostly to the impact of bee disease in USA & Europe and the consequent reduction in bee colonies. Beeswax, propolis and royal jelly, alongside the honey, and cross-pollination for your tree crops to boot.

If you want to learn some more, visit http://www.sfm.bm/. Think about it.