Illegal but essential charcoal business decimating forests in Zimbabwe

By Jeffrey Moyo

HARARE, Zimbabwe (AA) – With bags full of charcoal, a group of people sit by the traffic lights at a busy intersection in Zimbabwe’s capital Harare.

Among them is 27-year-old Tanga Chivhuno, who is keeping a close eye on everyone in the passing cars, rushing to them the instant they show any interest in his wares, or going up to their rolled-up windows to persuade them to buy his charcoal.

His colleagues also do the same, scrambling for customers every now and then.

Yet nobody questions them about where they are getting the charcoal, especially since it is illegal to produce or sell charcoal in Zimbabwe because the trade has become an existential threat to the country’s forests.

According to the Forestry Commission, Zimbabwe is losing around 262,000 (over 647,400 acres) of forests every year, with charcoal production being among the myriad of reasons.

“Charcoal production has emerged as a growing threat to forests in Zimbabwe,” Lewis Radzire, operations director at the Forestry Commission, told Anadolu.

“The business has been booming as a result of urbanization and increased cost of electricity in the country,” he said, adding that most people who are in the business are looking for “a source of living.”

That is what Chivhuno says as well, stressing that he is well aware of the threat to Zimbabwe’s forests, but he has “no other way to survive.”

He has been a charcoal dealer for nearly a decade, never holding a formal job since he finished high school. The business has become a way of life for him, helping him feed his wife and three children.

“I go with my friends to farms outside Harare, where we cut down trees, process the charcoal and bring it back here,” he said.

The law and its enforcers should be a deterrent in all of this, given that anyone found selling charcoal or firewood can be fined up to around $60 or face a one-year jail sentence.

The reality, though, is quite different.

“We bribe the police, often just a few (Zimbabwean) dollars. They let us go because they too are hungry,” said Chivhuno.

- Sustenance vs environment

The lax energy infrastructure of Zimbabwe means that charcoal remains a key source of energy in both urban and rural areas.

Power cuts are a persistent pain, sometimes running for 19 hours a day, with the crisis worsening since the ouster of former President Robert Mugabe in a 2017 military coup.

For those at the receiving end, charcoal has become the answer.

“What will we do if there are no charcoal vendors? There is usually no electricity, and we also need the charcoal for cooking,” said Miranda Chagwiza, a resident of Westlea, a suburb west of Harare.

But it is Zimbabwe’s forests that are paying the price, being decimated by people in need of sustenance and fuel.

Charcoal dealers like Chivhuno admit that replanting trees is not something they have been doing, increasing the toll that the “black gold” business is taking on the environment.

An additional problem is that most of the trees falling prey to the charcoal business “take a long time to reach maturity,” Radzire, the Forest Commission official, explained.

“What is so disturbing is the conversion factor – for every six kilograms of wood cleared, only one kilogram of charcoal is produced,” he said.

“That is without taking into account the wastage, which is quite a lot because the rudimentary methods that these people are using to make charcoal.”

That is a big reason why this charcoal business is so taxing for the forests and also fuels land degradation, he added.