“Kenya is destroying itself,” Julius Kipng’etich, director of the Kenya Wildlife Service, told The Observer. “The population has reached an unsustainable level. We are killing ourselves by slowly destroying the forests and settling there.” Drought, poverty, and population growth have led large numbers of the rural poor to encroach on protected forests in search of arable land, reports The Observer, jeopardizing Kenya’s food and water security and hydroelectric energy production. The government’s inability to manage land tenure has further exacerbated the situation.

In response to these developments, a local conservation group called Rhino Ark has erected a 250-mile electric fence (see photo slideshow) around the Aberdare mountain range north of Nairobi. When members began the project in 1989, they were attempting to protect the area’s rhinoceroses. However, their efforts eventually grew into a broader campaign to safeguard the Aberdares’ critical water and forest resources.

Proponents of the Aberdare fence—including Nobel Peace Prize-winning environmentalist Wangari Maathai—contend that it serves multiple purposes. First, it discourages settlers from grazing livestock in the forest or felling trees to make way for crop cultivation. Other regions of the country—notably the Mau Forest Complex, the water source for millions of people in Kenya, northern Uganda, and southern Sudan—have suffered severe deforestation and degradation, with serious consequences for human and ecological health. Forests provide a wide spectrum of essential ecosystem services, such as regulating the water cycle, filtering groundwater, and sequestering atmospheric carbon.

The fence also mitigates human-wildlife conflict, argue its supporters. According to a recent 60 Minutes report, some Maasai herdsmen have resorted to poisoning lions and other predators to protect their livestock. Farmers have targeted elephants and other animals that trample crops to safeguard their livelihoods. As a result, wildlife populations—the lifeblood of the Kenyan tourism industry—have been devastated. A study published in the Journal of Zoology found precipitous declines in wildlife at Maasai Mara, one of Kenya’s most renowned national parks. Robin Reid, a co-author of the paper, explains, “There appears to be a ‘tipping point’ of human populations above which former co-existence between Maasai and wildlife begins to break down.”

Following Aberdare’s example, the Kenyan government is considering building thousands of miles of fencing around similarly vulnerable forests and parks. Yet fences may soon prove inadequate. The country’s population has grown from 10 million to 36 million over the past 45 years, and it could exceed 65 million by 2050, given that the decline in its fertility rate has stalled. In addition, its GDP per capita has steadily decreased, leaving more than 55 percent of citizens below the official poverty line.

With more people clamoring for more resources, a sustainable future will depend on robust community conservation programs and land-rights reform. Successful models of community conservation in East Africa include the Lion Guardians and Il Ngwesi Group Ranch, as well as other efforts discussed at the Wilson Center last year. A 2008 report from the Rights and Resources Initiative argues that authorities should shift away from traditional forms of conservation, which focus on excluding people from protected areas, in favor of approaches that empower local communities to care for and benefit from the land through customary tenure or individual property rights.

Finally, Nairobi should craft national forest management practices with an eye toward ongoing international climate negotiations. Policymakers are poised to include provisions for compensating developing countries for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in the next international climate treaty, to be concluded in Copenhagen this December. Kenya could benefit substantially if the government takes appropriate action.

Photo: A giraffe in Maasai Mara, where their population has declined 95 percent over the last 15 years. Courtesy Flickr user angela7dreams.

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The world is experiencing a grain rush. With increasing frequency, wealthy, food-importing, and water-scarce countries—particularly the Arab Gulf states and the rich countries of East Asia—are investing in farmland overseas to meet their food-security needs. Similarly, the private sector is pursuing farmland deals abroad, with many investors perceiving land as a safe investment in an otherwise-shaky financial climate.

In Conservation magazine, David Malakoff examines how cellulosic ethanol may threaten biodiversity around the world.

A Comprehensive Approach to Congo’s Conflict Minerals, a report by the Enough Project, argues that ending resource-related violence in the DRC will require:

A landlocked, impoverished, densely populated country, Rwanda faces steep challenges in the quest to improve the quality of life of its people, who are mostly small-scale farmers. One solution promoted by the Sustaining Partnerships to enhance Rural Enterprise and Agribusiness Development (SPREAD) project, which I visited last month with the leaders of the East Africa Population-Health-Environment (PHE) Network, is helping farmers produce higher-quality crops, which can be sold for premium prices on international markets. In this way, farmers can increase their income by producing better crops, rather than producing more—since in Rwanda, there isn’t any more land to go around.

Coffee is Rwanda’s primary export, so SPREAD focuses its efforts there, although it also targets other high-value crops like chili peppers. SPREAD helps organize farmers into cooperatives with their own bylaws and elected leaders; for instance, the highly successful Maraba cooperative includes 1,400 farmers and their families. Agricultural extension agents show farmers techniques for raising the quality of their coffee. One innovation SPREAD has introduced is coffee bikes, which are specially designed eight-speed mountain bikes that can carry up to 300 kg of coffee cherries. SPREAD found that coffee transported to processing stations on the bikes scored 3.5 SCAA quality points higher than coffee transported by foot or truck, due to shorter average times between harvesting and processing.

SPREAD has provided the impetus for the construction of 120 coffee washing stations (CWS) during the past several years, and has also set up three CWS support centers, which assist with quality control. Washing coffee before and after fermentation is key to preserving its quality. SPREAD has made sure to incorporate a number of environmental initiatives into coffee growing and processing, including mulching coffee trees and digging trenches around them to prevent erosion on Rwanda’s steep hillsides; purchasing new water-efficient coffee-washing machines; filtering the CWS wastewater before releasing it into the river; and using vermiculture (worms) to process coffee pulp and mucilage into organic fertilizer. As SPREAD’s Jean Marie Irakabaho put it, growing coffee without caring for the land is like milking a cow without feeding it.

SPREAD has incorporated family planning (FP) and health initiatives into its agricultural work. The same coffee extension workers who teach farmers how to improve the quality of their coffee have been trained to deliver basic health and FP messages and products to them. Working closely with the district government and local health center, SPREAD staff focus primarily on improving maternal and child health; FP; HIV/AIDS prevention, testing, and treatment; and water, sanitation, and hygiene. A weekly radio program, “Imbere Heza” (“Bright Future”), integrates coffee-growing and health information.

SPREAD, which is funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and led by the Norman Borlaug Institute for International Agriculture at Texas A&M; University, knows it won’t be around forever, so it is striving to make its improvements to Rwandan livelihoods permanent. It created the Rwanda Small Holder Specialty Coffee Company (RWASHOSCCO), a cooperative-owned company that helps cooperatives market and export their coffee. Specialty Rwandan coffee can now be found in online stores like Land of a Thousand Hills Coffee and Allegro Coffee, as well as in cafes around the world. At the East Africa PHE Network workshop, our coffee breaks featured wonderful coffee from the Maraba cooperative. I encourage all coffee connoisseurs to taste for themselves the delicious results of sustained investment in the livelihoods, agriculture, environment, and health of Rwanda’s coffee farmers!

Rachel Weisshaar attended the meeting of the East Africa PHE Network in Kigali, Rwanda. See previous posts on the New Security Beat: “Rwanda: More Than Mountain Gorillas,” “East Africa PHE Network: Translating Strong Results Into Informed Policies,” and “East Africa Population-Health-Environment Conference Kicks Off in Kigali.”

Photo: Jean Marie Irakabaho (left), chief agronomist and coffee research coordinator at SPREAD, shows the beds where worms are being raised to digest coffee pulp and mucilage, while local children look on. Courtesy of Rachel Weisshaar.

In the annual threat assessment he presented last week to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, new Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair named the global economic crisis—not terrorism—the primary near-term threat to U.S. national security, prompting accusations of partisanship from the Washington Times. Yet as the U.S. Naval War College’s Derek Reveron notes, “the economic turmoil of the early 20th century fueled global instability and war,” and today’s economic collapse could strengthen extremists and deprive U.S. allies of the funds they need to deploy troops or increase foreign assistance to vulnerable regions.

Further down the list of potential catastrophes—after terrorism, cybersecurity, and the “arc of instability” that stretches from the Middle East to South Asia—the assessment tackles environmental security threats. The four-page section, which likely draws on sections of the recent National Intelligence Council report Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, summarizes the interrelated natural-resource and population challenges—including energy, food, water, demography, climate change, and global health—the U.S. intelligence community is tracking.

The world will face mounting resource scarcity, warns Blair. “Access to relatively secure and clean energy sources and management of chronic food and water shortages will assume increasing importance for a growing number of countries. Adding well over a billion people to the world’s population by 2025 will itself put pressure on these vital resources,” he writes.

Drawing on the conclusions of the 2008 National Intelligence Assessment on the impacts of global climate change to 2030, Blair portrays climate change as a variable that could place additional strain on already-stressed agricultural, energy, and water systems: “We assess climate change alone is unlikely to trigger state failure in any state out to 2030, but the impacts will worsen existing problems such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions.” Direct impacts to the United States include “warming temperatures, changes in precipitation patterns, and possible increases in the severity of storms in the Gulf, increased demand for energy resources, disruptions in US and Arctic infrastructure, and increases in immigration from resource-scarce regions of the world,” writes Blair.

Africa, as usual, is the last of the world’s regions to be analyzed in the assessment. Blair notes that “a shortage of skilled medical personnel, deteriorating health systems, and inadequate budgets to deal with diseases like HIV/AIDS, malaria, and tuberculosis” is threatening stability in sub-Saharan Africa, and explains that agriculture, which he rightly calls “the foundation of most African economies,” is not yet self-sufficient, although some countries have made significant improvements in infrastructure and technology. He highlights ongoing conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Sudan, and Somalia as the most serious security challenges in Africa. He fails to note, however, that all four have environmental/natural resource dimensions (see above links for details).

A study in Science warns that climate change “is likely to have more dramatic effects on global agriculture than previously predicted, leaving around half the world’s population facing serious food shortages,” reports SciDev.Net.

“Climate change of that scale [a 5° C increase] will cause enormous resource wars, over water, arable land, and massive population displacements. We’re not talking about ten thousand people. We’re not talking about ten million people, we’re talking about hundreds of millions to billions of people being flooded out, permanently,” said Steven Chu, President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for secretary of energy, at the National Clean Energy Summit this summer.

The Center for Global Development’s interactive 2008 Commitment to Development Index rates 22 wealthy countries on how much they help poor countries in seven areas: aid, trade, investment, migration, environment, security, and technology.