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.

Visiting Rwanda

Or, more accurately, Kigali for the Commonwealth Business Council Investment Forum for East Africa.

My first encounter with Rwanda was in 1994, when I was working for the International Red Cross Federation's regional delegation in Nairobi. As an accountant, my job for a short period was to deliver huge sums of cash to the relief effort in Goma and Bukavu, just across the Congo border. The weekly consignments averaged about $500,000 in cash - mixed denominations, 1999 series or later. By keeping the process low-profile, I managed to avoid becoming a target myself, but it was an uncomfortable, but very necessary task. At the time the banking system in Eastern Congo (Zaire) had broken down completely, so cash was the only means of financing the massive relief operation.

Since then, I have been back on a number of occasions, always with delight at the visible and tangible progress since the dark days of 1994. Most memorably, I made a trip in 2002 to Ruhengeri to visit mountain gorillas. I had tagged a day visit on the end of a business trip to Kigali and as a result was extremely badly equipped for the short hike up the mountain to the forest. It had rained the night before, as we left early in the morning, the valleys were cloud-filled but the hills clear. The image of the deep green "mille collines" floating in a sea of white clouds in the early morning sunlight is unforgettable, yet it pales by comparison with the sight of a family group of 15-20 mountain gorillas.

Kigali is clean, orderly and functional but, in comparison with the hustle and bustle of other East African commercial centres, strangely devoid of apparent colour and energy. There is a reserve and a sense of watchfulness which leaves the visitor with a sense of remoteness....

As for the conference, well, I was very interested in about 20% of the agenda. Protocols observed, there were some very interesting discussions on the future of agriculture and forestry in Africa (both of which are close to my heart) and, as is always the case, a good opportunity to meet a range of useful contacts. Sadly, the session on financial inclusion - the delivery of appropriate financial services to the unbanked majority - was disappointingly bland. The simple fact is that banks in East Africa are extremely profitable and simply do not need to invest in delivering banking services into rural areas. Furthermore, they are far too costly - tending, as everywhere else in the world - to grow fat on the huge and indefensible spreads between customer deposit interest rates and borrowing rates.... Am I alone in thinking that there is something fundamentally wrong when bankers are the highest paid segment of the workforce?

I hope I will be back in Rwanda soon. And I hope, next time, that I will be able to see something more than a hotel, a taxi, a conference centre and an airport. On the flight back this morning, I realised that I had in all honesty had no contact with Rwanda... again. East Africans, international delegates, foreign-owned and managed organisations, but nothing that brought me any closer to a relationship or an understanding of Rwanda. The remoteness remains.