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Shea trees provide nutrition, income and ecosystem services in 21 countries from South Sudan to Senegal.
Arriving in Nairobi on 2 March, Gerima Mustapha, 47, emerged out of the driving rain at the entrance to the headquarters of World Agroforestry, a Ugandan flag on his back and a Kenyan shield in his hand.
None of us knew what to expect. We just knew that he had walked from his home in Northwest Uganda and was deeply concerned about the fate of a tree that is endemic to the Sudanian Savanna zone. The tree is called ‘shea’ in East Africa, ‘karité’ in West Africa and Vitellaria paradoxa by scientists and foresters.
But as he came into view, we knew we had met a phenomenon.
‘Wow!’ said Musonda Mumba, head of Terrestrial Ecosystems at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). ‘I don’t think we pay enough attention to our grassroots activists.’
Telling us that his long walk was his way of raising the alarm, Gerima said, ‘In my culture, we yell when something is wrong. But instead I started walking. I use the open air to teach people.’
Recalling the moment he decided to act, he said, ‘I returned home after many years and saw sacks along the road that had never been there before. People said, “They have started to cut shea for charcoal”. I got a very big prick in my heart.’
He resigned from teaching and has been without salary since.
‘My point is that I am worried about extinction because of indiscriminate cutting of trees for charcoal. I am walking the talk as I am walking,’ he said.
Over the week, the Ugandan ‘environmental walker’ won hearts and minds as he spread the word about shea, which is not a tree that occurs naturally in Kenya.
He appeared in Uhuru Park to commemorate the Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai, at the offices of her Greenbelt Movement, at World Agroforestry, and at UNEP.
Everywhere, he showed the tree products that had sustained him on his 30–40 km a day for 20 days’ trek: shea oil to add to beans, the pulp of tamarind, and the vitamin-C-rich fruit of Balinites aegyptiaca.
He said the latter two ‘are also being cut for charcoal, another thing that has taxed my heart’.
At World Agroforestry, Gerima planted a well-chosen indigenous fruit tree, Syzygium guineensis. Kenyan researcher Sammy Carsan, whose unit has worked since the 1990s to sustain shea populations, applauded what he is doing.
‘The course you are on is very important,’ said Carsan. ‘Shea trees are being depleted.’
‘Shea is very difficult to raise because it invests in a long root,’ explained Carsan. ‘And its juvenile period is up to 15 years. What we do is reduce the flowering and fruit set times by grafting scions from mother trees with superior fruit on to root stock from local trees that are well adapted. We can get fruit in just 2–3 years. It is the perfect tree to bring on farms.’
At UNEP, Mustapha explained to a packed room that the shea tree produces a nutritious fruit and that the ‘butter’ from its kernel is the main cooking oil as well as skin emollient across northern Uganda. It has a growing market in OECD countries for ‘personal care’.
‘Usually people want sponsorship,’ noted Frank Turyatunga, Deputy Director of UNEP’s Africa Regional Office. ‘But you are walking out of conviction. You have used your body out of your attachment to the shea resource. It shows us that an individual can create change.’
The senior UN official then made three further points. First, shea is a wood and grassland species, which are ecosystems that have been considered less significant than forests and wetlands.
‘Forests and wetland are recognized as worthy of protection,’ said Turyatunga. ‘We say, “Don’t go there!” But on woodlands and rangelands, anything goes. That needs to change.’
His second point was that the need for energy is driving the loss of shea.
‘We are all frightened to address the drivers. We pepper around energy-saving stoves. But how do we sustain the source? Our populations are growing at three percent and the biomass resource is dwindling. This is the true situation and we have to be bold enough to say it.’
Finally, Turyatunga said, ‘Restoration in Africa will be driven by the bottom line, by landscape-connected enterprises. We need to see how to restore ecosystems with these important species and use them to create jobs at the same time.’
‘People protect when they see value,’ said Mohamed Atani, UNEP Africa’s communications chief.
He cited the protection in Morocco of ‘argan’ (Argania spinosa), a woodland tree around which a strong oil value chain has emerged.
The fundamental crisis for shea is that a single tree can provide fruit, oil and ecosystem services, such as better soil, for hundreds of years. But charcoal dealers can out-compete this by buying acres of trees for USD 70–85 per acre. This amounts to just USD 20–30 cents per tree: a desperate underestimation of their true worth but a useful lump sum for the seller in the short term.
Mustapha is only too aware: ‘Without giving more economic value to the tree, my walk will be useless. If our people do not have jobs, we will continue to continue to have those people who arrive in the night to cut.
According to research at World Agroforestry funded by the European Union, 70% of charcoal vendors in Nairobi claim to sell charcoal from Uganda (a consequence of Kenya’s charcoal ban). So, before returning home, Mustapha made one last stop to understand the pressures on the tree. He did not need to go far.
At three charcoal markets within striking distance of the World Agroforestry offices, he found what appeared to be the heavy and slow-burning charcoal of the shea tree, qualities which make it particularly sought after.
While the samples await confirmation at Kenya Forest Research Institute, two things are clear. Shea and other woodland and savannah tree species are profoundly threatened. Mustapha has sounded the alarm.
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Read more
URN. 2015. Gov’t ‘bans’ harvesting, trade of endangered shea nut trees. 13 Feb. The Observer, Uganda.
Boffa J-M. 2015. Opportunities and challenges in the improvement of the shea (Vitellaria paradoxa) resource and its management. ICRAF Occasional Paper 24. Nairobi, Kenya: World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF).
About the shea tree, Boffa (2015) writes:
Threats to shea parklands are linked to 1) increasing duration of cultivation periods and the decline and disuse of fallow (periods when the land is rested after a cultivation interval) because of land saturation and population pressure. Those fallow periods are when young trees are allowed to regenerate. The result is low regeneration, ageing tree populations and declining densities; 2) agricultural intensification (mechanization, use of inputs such as fertilizers and herbicides) and large-scale land investments for food and energy crops leads to the removal of trees in fields; 3) economically competing land and resource use, for instance, shea parklands converted to cashew and mango plantations or tree cutting for firewood and charcoal as happens in Uganda. Here, the major issue is lack of organized market outlets for farmers who don’t have sufficient incentives to keep shea trees for fruit and nut production. The stearin content of the nilotica subspecies that occurs in the eastern part of the shea range is lower than in the paradoxa subspecies found in West Africa. Stearin is the key ingredient that the confectionery industry (90% of the market compared to 10% for cosmetics) is interested in. Yet there are initiatives for the cosmetic markets in Uganda.
The majority of existing shea stands are self-sown and not planted. As the resource becomes degraded, farmers’ capacity to move to more systematic management and planting needs to be increased. Given that the species is only semi-domesticated (the result of farmers selecting preferred trees through traditional cycles of cultivation and fallow), the diversity of characteristics and performance varies widely from tree to tree, with a significant proportion of trees contributing little to multi-year nut production.
Agricultural and forestry development projects have done a lot of good work in a number of areas. However, little coordinated work has been done on improved germplasm development, which would be critical for intensifying management. Shea diversity parameters have been described but there has been little effort to develop collections and characterize germplasm for selection and use in future projects. In the Partnership for Building Resilient Ecosystems and Livelihoods to Climate Change and Disaster Risks, a project funded by the Swedish International Development Agency to build the capacity of researchers into resilience at Makere and Gulu universities in Uganda, existing ex situ on-farm tree populations that had been characterized were examined to source germplasm with passport data but the researchers found little to work with.
In order to address the fragmentation and short-term focus of activities, the researchers urged a coordinated research strategy providing a roadmap for the sustainable management and improvement of shea parklands for the next 15–20 years. To reduce duplication of effort and foster collaboration, they called for the establishment of a regional community of practice in the planning and implementation of research programs, the sharing of learning and knowledge, and the dissemination of research outcomes.
Also see;
Ugandan activist for shea tree finishes walk to Nairobi
Gerima Mustafa’s long walk for the shea tree
World Agroforestry (ICRAF) is a centre of scientific and development excellence that harnesses the benefits of trees for people and the environment. The knowledge produced by ICRAF enables governments, development agencies and farmers to utilize the power of trees to make farming and livelihoods more environmentally, socially and economically sustainable at multiple scales. ICRAF is one of the 15 members of the CGIAR, a global research partnership for a food-secure future. We thank all donors who support research in development through their contributions to the CGIAR Fund.