In Africa’s Vanishing Forests, the Benefits of Bamboo

March 13, 2012, www.opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com | In the district of Asosa, the land is thick with bamboo.   People plant it and manage the forests. They rely on its soil-grabbing roots to stabilize steep slopes and riverbanks, cutting erosion. They harvest it to burn for fuel, to make into charcoal sticks to sell to city dwellers and to build furniture.

Asosa is not in China, not even in Asia.    It is a district in the west of Ethiopia, on the Sudanese border.   To many people, bamboo means China.   But it’s not just panda food — mountain gorillas in Rwanda also live on bamboo.   About 4 percent of Africa’s forest cover is bamboo.

Soon it may be much more.  Bamboo may provide a solution to a very serious problem:  deforestation.  In sub-Saharan Africa, 70 percent of the people cook their meals over wood fires.  The very poorest cut down trees for cooking fuel; those slightly less poor buy charcoal  made from wood in those same forests.  Every year Africa loses forest cover equal to the size of Switzerland.  Terence Sunderland, a senior scientist at the Indonesia-based Center for International Forestry Research, said that in southern Africa, even trees that can be used for fine carving, such as ebony and rosewood, are being cut down and made into charcoal.

Robert Brothers shared a link.