KAKAMEGA, Kenya — Tropical rainforest once extended east from the Congo Basin into what is now western Kenya. That’s almost all gone now, though there are still plenty of trees to be seen around Turbo township, in Kakamega county. The township is on the edge of the Nzoia Forest Reserve, 5,000 hectares (about 12,400 acres) of monoculture blocks of alien eucalyptus and pine trees.

For the past 20 years, as Kenya has wrestled with how to slow and reverse rapid loss of tree cover, the narrower question of how to manage the country’s many timber plantations has played out around a system known as the Plantation Establishment and Livelihood Improvement Scheme, or PELIS. The scheme has been praised and damned, seen by some as an efficient and cost-effective way to expand tree cover while contributing to local incomes and community investment in protecting forests; and roundly criticized by others for encouraging corruption, enabling encroachment of farms onto forested land, and reducing biodiversity even where it succeeds

Introduced in 2007, PELIS is a successor to the shamba system, which offered Kenyans living near timber plantations small plots of land to farm in parts of the forest reserves that needed to be replanted after trees had been harvested or damaged by fire. The farmers were meant to plant tree seedlings amid crops they grew for their own use, tend the saplings until they were tall enough to form a canopy, and then vacate the farms, leaving the trees to reach maturity.

But this system lacked a clear governance framework and led to widespread abuse by Kenya Forest Service (KFS) officers and well-connected political figures who helped themselves to large areas of land — sometimes compelling local farmers who’d been allocated a plot to provide free labor on land that corrupt officials had claimed for themselves.

In many cases, shamba system farmers remained on the plantations long after they should have made way for the trees to grow. Environmentalists, recalling that these timber plantations had once been tropical rainforest bursting with indigenous plant and animal species, further criticized the system for growing alien tree species. Fast-growing eucalyptus (Eucalyptus globulus and E. saligna), weeping pine (Pinus patula) and Mexican cypress (Cupressus lusitanica) are valuable commercially, but provide only limited habitat for native wildlife while reducing the landscape’s ability to retain water.

PELIS moved to address accountability for land use and allocation by making it the responsibility of local community forest associations, or CFAs, registered in accordance with Kenya’s 2005 Forest Act. Under PELIS, the local CFA ensures that only the prescribed amount of land is allocated to eligible members of communities adjacent to plantations, and sees that the farmers follow the agreed sequence: in the first year, CFA members grow crops; in the second, they plant seedlings that they will care for over the next two years alongside their seasonal farming, after which they have to leave the area for the trees to grow.

The KFS has also published comprehensive operational guidelines for its field officers.

“The PELIS scheme [meets the] twin objectives of increasing plantation forest cover and improving the livelihood of rural communities living adjacent to forests,” said Anthony Musyoka, the deputy chief conservator of forest plantations in Kenya. He said the system has improved tree seedling survival rates to 75-80%, compared to just 40% for areas replanted by other means.

“Through the PELIS system, there has been an improvement in the socioeconomic well-being of rural communities demonstrated by poverty and conflict reductions,” he told Mongabay.

Other observers have also pointed to places where PELIS has produced the desired results. A WWF forest landscape restoration project called BENGO teamed up with the KFS in 2021 to implement PELIS in a gazetted timber reserve in the Aberdare Range, a region plagued by fires, livestock grazing and low survival rates of replanted trees — indigenous Juniperus procera, in the case of the South Kinangop area.

According to a brief by WWF, PELIS provided a vital framework in which to build trust between community members, the local CFA and the forest service to work together to reduce damage to the timber plantation and better manage newly planted trees. WWF said the scheme’s success in any landscape rests on clearly communicating the terms of the exchange — temporary access to land in return for general protection of the plantation and helping to restore tree cover — so that all activity in the forest aligns with the program’s goals.

But just five years after its introduction, PELIS was suspended in most plantations in response to civil society concerns that farmers, particularly in western Kenya, were not adhering to the rules, and planting crops like maize, which overshadowed young tree seedlings, lowering their chances of survival. (The scheme was allowed to continue in potato-growing areas such as the Central Highlands and the North Rift, where the Kenya Forest Research Institute documented survival rates of 75% for trees intercropped with potatoes.)

The environmental question of how the scheme works, even when running as intended, returned to the fore when Kenyan President William Ruto lifted the suspension in late 2022, saying PELIS could contribute to a national initiative aiming to plant 15 billion trees by 2032.

Ruto’s initiative, which aims to achieve 30% tree cover in a decade, doesn’t distinguish between the restoration of diverse, natural forests and the expansion of other forms of tree cover.

The lifting of the ban recalls a historical milestone in the management of forests in Kenya, said Dominic Walubengo, a Kenyan expert in forest governance and management: the completion of the railway linking the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa to the town of Kisumu on Lake Victoria in 1901.

“The steam engines required a lot of firewood to run, leading to destruction of indigenous forest cover,” Walubengo said. “In 1910, the [British] colonial government passed a law that gave the Kenya Railway ownership of at least 5 kilometers [3 miles] of land on the either side of the railway line, where indigenous trees were felled and replaced with fast-growing exotic species such as Eucalyptus globulus and Eucalyptus saligna.”

The people who lived in the forests that were suddenly reserved for the railway were hounded out at gunpoint. In 1942, the colonial government went further, declaring that all forests and timber plantations belonged to the state, effectively making it a criminal offense for Africans to access or use any forest product. After the Second World War, British veterans were invited to settle on large swaths of forested land; most of these settlers cut down the indigenous trees for valuable timber for export, and replaced them with either fast-growing exotic trees or seasonal crops, mainly maize and wheat.

This declaration, which was inherited by the postcolonial government, has remained a thorn in the flesh of Indigenous communities whose lives, livelihoods and cultures depended on forests, like the Ogiek of the Mau and Mount Elgon forests.

The colonial-era forest department had meanwhile introduced other fast-growing timber species, notably weeping pine and Mexican cypress, which, alongside eucalyptus, are still the main species planted by today’s Kenya Forest Service.

“That was the genesis of planted forests in Kenya,” said Walubengo, whose Ph.D. explored the history of forestry in Kenya.

According to the Clearing House Mechanism (CHM), a government information exchange platform of the Convention on Biological Diversity, around 4.5 million hectares (11 million acres), or 7.8% of Kenya’s land area, is covered by trees. This includes both natural and planted forests like commercial timber plantations. Indigenous closed-canopy forests cover about 1.24 million hectares (3.1 million acres); public commercial plantations make up around 152,000 hectares (375,600 acres).

According to Musyoka, the KFS deputy chief conservator of forest plantations, 85 forest stations across the country are implementing PELIS on a total area of 6,224 hectares (15,380 acres), and this is expected to increase in the coming years.

“In just two years, over 8,000 hectares [about 20,000 acres] of plantation has been established through PELIS, consequently helping KFS reduce planting backlogs as well as reestablish commercial plantations in clear felled areas,” Musyoka said.

After gaining independence from the U.K. in 1963, the Kenyan government retained control of all forested land, but soon found the management of plantations had become a burden. Its response was to introduce the shamba system, which aimed to lower the cost of replanting recently harvested or otherwise damaged areas of timber plantations by enlisting nearby communities to do this in exchange for temporary access to land to grow crops.

“I was one of the first beneficiaries of this nonresident cultivation system,” Walubengo said.

He went on to become a prominent figure in the politics of forest management in Kenya, including drafting the 2005 Forest Act. Walubengo is also the architect of the shamba system’s replacement, PELIS.

Wilfred Mulindi chairs the Nzoia community forest association, which brings together 965 farmers from communities around the plantation. He said the PELIS program is a very important resource for the entire community.

“We understand the importance of biodiversity, but with PELIS, members are able to earn livelihoods, which gives them a reason to always protect the plantation against illegal logging and wildfires among other challenges,” he told Mongabay.

The reserve is currently managed by the Kakamega branch of the KFS in collaboration with the local CFA. A network of roads crisscrosses the plantation through neat rows of trees and occasional agricultural plots in certain blocks. Most wildlife adaptable enough to make a home amid the exotic tree species, and large enough to be noticed, are hounded out of this once-thriving ecosystem; Nzoia today is a commercial landscape.

Across Kenya, there are 233 registered CFAs participating in PELIS. Musyoka said 200,000 households are working on a total area of 6,000 hectares (nearly 15,000 acres).

If questions of governance and corruption have been resolved, the question of continuing the project begun with the colonial-era railway — replanting exotic species where diverse indigenous forests once stood — has not. As head of the Forest Action Network (FAN), Walubengo teamed up with Nobel Peace laureate Wangari Maathai, the founder of the Green Belt Movement, to challenge abuses of the shamba system as well as the biodiversity impacts of its prescribed planting of exotic species.

Walubengo acknowledged that PELIS is aimed at replanting fast-growing exotics to produce timber, which upon maturity is sold to companies that must obtain a license from the KFS director’s office to harvest timber in designated forests.

A joint WWF and KFS project in South Kinangop, to restore 22,000 hectares (54,400 acres) that had been affected by illegal logging, encroachment and wildfires, successfully planted species such as cypress, pine and eucalyptus. The project also attempted to mix in the indigenous African juniper, but the species didn’t perform as expected.

Nzoia, where Mulindi’s CFA is contentedly growing maize and beans around young pine and cypress seedlings, was a natural forest in the precolonial era, covered with indigenous species similar to what remains in the nearby Kakamega Forest. Kakamega has been affected by encroachments, including in 1985, when several households were moved from their ancestral land in Vihiga county to Kakamega to make way for the construction of new county headquarters.

Cases of illegal logging of indigenous trees have also been reported, yet the forest retains many of the characteristics from 100 years ago: a variety of tree species producing a multilayered canopy and a dense understory of shrubs, climbers and grasses. The remnant forest is home to unique birds such as Ansorge’s greenbul (Eurillas ansorgei), the blue-headed bee-eater (Merops muelleri), Chapin’s flycatcher (Fraseria lendu) and Turner’s eremomela (Eremomela turneri).

Thirty-six kilometers (22 miles) north, there’s little of this biodiversity in the orderly lines of planted timber at Nzoia, and no understory to speak of, other than farmers’ crops in sections being replanted by PELIS.

Even when it was riddled with corruption, many communities living near timber reserves where it operated welcomed the access to land it provided. Among the exceptions were forest-dwelling communities like the Sengwer and the Ogiek, whose view of PELIS is less than enthusiastic.

“As an Indigenous community, we only believe in regeneration of forests, so that the biodiversity is conserved as much as possible, and not growing of trees that do not allow anything else to grow under the canopy,” said Peter Kitelo, a member of the Ogiek community in Chepkitale, Mt. Elgon Forest, and head of the Chepkitale Indigenous Peoples Development Program.

He said that despite claims of success for PELIS, in many cases what’s unfolding on the ground bears little resemblance to the theory. He told Mongabay that PELIS farmers on plantations near Mt. Elgon Forest have openly expanded their plots beyond their half hectare (1-acre) limits, encroaching on the natural forest with the “blessings” of forest officers.

“We have seen in places like Chesokwo Forest within Mt. Elgon, where people encroached on the natural forest, degrading hundreds of hectares, and later the KFS used the destruction as an excuse to convert the area that thrived as a natural ecosystem into a plantation where PELIS is now practiced,” Kitelo told Mongabay.

Kitelo said the answer to restoring damaged natural forests is often simply to leave them alone. He pointed out that forested land typically has many seeds in the ground. Left undisturbed, diverse grasses, shrubs and trees will naturally recover, restoring a canopy and understory that can support biodiversity and livelihoods like beekeeping, hunting and gathering.

“You cannot compare annual income that a community can make from bees kept on one acre piece of land in an indigenous forest, to returns on maize grown on a similar plot in a timber plantation that has replaced what should be a thriving natural forest,” he said.

“To address challenges facing our forests, it is imperative to draw on Indigenous knowledge of communities who have interacted with forests throughout their lives,” Kitelo added. “Relying on theoretical solutions like PELIS is like treating buffaloes in their natural habitat the same way you would treat domesticated cattle — it simply can’t work.”

Banner image : Joseph Lijodi, a tree nursery owner, with one of his Prunus african seedlings. Image by Isaiah Esipisu for Mongabay.

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