KAKAMEGA, Kenya — A Monday morning finds 50 members of the Nzoia Community Forest Association trekking through rain-drenched thickets in the 5,300 hectare (13,000 acre ) Nzoia Forest Plantation. They are returning to an area designated as Compartment One, the 42 hectares (103 acres) deep inside the plantation. Two weeks ago, they planted maize here. Today, their aim is to plant the first of 84,000 seedlings of Mexican cypress (Cupressus lusitanica) between the regular lines of their crop, which they will nurture and protect over the next three or four years as carefully as the grain they will grow around the young trees.

The farmers are working under a government-sponsored arrangement known as the Plantation Establishment and Livelihood Improvement Scheme (PELIS), explains forester Jackton Hadulo, who is responsible for managing the Nzoia plantation. “We are collaborating with members of the community who live around the forest plantation by allowing them to cultivate the land and plant their food crop in straight lines, after which we also work with them to plant tree seedlings in between the lines.”

Under the PELIS scheme, the Kenya Forest Service (KFS) enlists communities living near its tree plantations to grow crops in bare areas — denuded by timber harvesting or wild fire — to support restoration. The farmers – organised in community forest associations (CFA) – plant and take care of growing saplings while they’re at their most vulnerable; in exchange, they gain temporary access to the land to grow crops such as maize and potatoes for themselves.

Contributing to food security

Janet Ayiti, a resident of Makutano village and a member of the Nzoia CFA, says she has been farming in the plantation for the past 12 years. Income from her plot has enabled this single parent to open a small grocery shop which helps her support her five children. “I only own an eighth of an acre of land in Makutano — which is too little space for a house and to grow food,” said the mother of five.

“Every growing season, I harvest between 20 and 25 90-kilo bags of maize from the plantation – enough to feed my family.” She said she also sells any surplus to raise money to pay important bills.

According to Dominic Walubengo, who directs the Forest Action Network (FAN) and co-chairs the National Environment Civil Society Alliance of Kenya (NECSA Kenya), farming in the Kenya Forest Service’s timber plantations has long played a key role in Kenya’s food system.

He notes that there are booming food markets in many areas where PELIS – and the preceding shamba system – are implemented. “Soko Mjinga market in Lari, along Nairobi – Nakuru highway exists because of non-resident farming in Kinale forest plantation in Kiambu County. Molo Irish potato and vegetable market in Nakuru County thrives on food produced from Molo Forest plantation. The same can be said about Muhoroni market and many others across the country,” he said.

“The government has banned and unbanned the shamba system a number of times, and each time a ban is effected, there has always been a sharp reduction in food supply in major towns, and as a way of survival,” he told Mongabay. “People have always sneaked back to the forests to silently cultivate despite the ban.”

Reforms to curb abuses

PELIS is the successor to the widely-criticised “shamba system”, which lacked local management structures and enforcement, leading to farmers overstaying on land in plantations, and corrupt forest officers allocating large pieces of land to themselves and to friends and relatives – the system limits land allocation to just one acre for each participant.

Introduced in 2007, PELIS relies on the leaders of community forest associations to vet participants to ensure they are genuinely eligible members of communities: this includes confirming a candidate lives within three kilometers of a plantation, is willing to volunteer time to patrolling and fire suppression, and is actually in need of land to plant.

“The CFA vetting has brought in a level of transparency and accountability,” said Wilfred Mulindi, the chairman of Nzoia CFA, which brings together 965 farmers from communities around the Nzoia plantation. “After every season of planting, we audit each plot allocated to individual farmers, and those whose tree survival is visibly less are disqualified for three seasons,” he told Mongabay.

“When we use communities to cultivate the land and to take care of the tree seedlings alongside their crop, we always end up with up to 70% or more survival rate of the trees, and at a much reduced cost,” said Kennedy Ombati, a conservation expert from the KFS office in Kakamega County.

According to Anthony Musyoka, Deputy Chief Conservator of Forest Plantations in Kenya, PELIS currently provides the most effective method for plantation restoration. The the survival rate for trees planted by members of the livelihood scheme is 75-80%, compared to around 40% for trees KFS plants by other means. “Also over 8,000 hectares [22,000 acres] of plantation has been established through PELIS [across the country] in the last two years. This has helped Kenya Forest Service reduce planting backlogs as well as reestablish commercial plantations in clear felled areas,” he told Mongabay.

The 2005 Forest Act which established CFAs also allows the associations to bid on contracts to assist the forestry service with tasks like thinning young trees to increase yield and quality and harvesting timber when the trees are mature.

According to KFS’s Musyoka, there are 233 registered CFAs participating in PELIS across the country; 200,000 households growing crops on a total area of more than 6,000 hectares (15,000 acres) across the country. “It is s practiced in seven out of the 10 Regional Forest Conservation Areas (RFCAs) of Central Highlands, North Rift, Mau, Eastern, Western, Nyanza and Nairobi.”

Mulindi says the members of the Nzoia CFA are involved in more than just farming. “We have those who are purely interested in honey production, others in herbal gathering, fish farming, establishment of tree seedling nurseries, among other activities,” he told Mongabay.

Challenges remain

At least one environment champion believes that despite the changes, PELIS remains a threat to biodiversity.

“I firmly support the PELIS system because apart from helping in restoration of forest plantations, it is a source of livelihoods to thousands of households across the country,” Theresa Aoko, the National Coordinator of the Kenya Forest Working Group (KFWG), says.

“But the way it is done, where farmers concentrate on mono-cropping, it means that they will tend to use synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides, which is a real threat to forest biodiversity.”

While the trees planted under PELIS are themselves monocultures of fast-growing exotic species like Mexican pine and eucalyptus, timber plantations do include patches of shrubland and indigenous wildlife. While biodiversity on the Nzoia plantation is far lower than that supported by a natural mix of indigenous trees , one finds stingless bees (vital pollinators and members of the Meliponini tribe of the Apidae family to which all bees belong), Chapin’s flycatcher (Fraseria lendu, listed by the IUCN as vulnerable due to loss of habitat), and the ever-adaptable vervet monkey (Chlorocebus pygerythrus).

Aoko wants KFS to train PELIS farmers to practice agroecology — shunning synthetic pesticides and fertilizer — as part of the scheme. “If agroecology was enforced as one of the rules governing PELIS implementation, and other rules followed strictly, then the system will do more good than harm to the forest ecosystem, and to community livelihoods,” she said.

Banner image: Food market, Nyamira County, Kenya, in 2012. Image by Martha Thompson/UUSC via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).

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