Stumps and farms replace once dense canopy of trees in key water tower

At Kabaru, part of the 213,082 hectare Mount Kenya Forest Reserve, thousands of tree stumps dot the ground.

The land previously covered by dense canopy of trees now lies bare, exposed and crying out to the skies for redemption.

These are the ugly images which were partly the genesis of the drive to stop commercial logging after pictures of the forest were shared.

Peter King’ori, a concerned forest user, told Sunday Standard that growing up in Kabaru, it was impossible to see Mt Kenya from inside the forest.

“But over the past three years the reintroduction of commercial logging has led to clearance of the forest at an alarming rate,” Kingori said while standing on a cleared section of the forest.

From the stumps left behind, it is easy to tell immature trees that had not met the requisite 30-year maturity were felled.

Harvest immature trees

The Kenya Forest Service (KFS) explained that, once in a while, they allow licensed millers into the plantations to harvest immature trees so that they can meet the optimum number required per hectare of forest.

According to KFS, this commercial thinning - the process in which weak and undersized trees are cut - give space for others to grow to the required size. However, there is concern this process is abused if the sights at Kabaru are anything to go by.

“You cannot call this thinning. They have cleared the entire plantation. This needs to stop or we won’t have any forest in coming years,” King’ori says, gesturing angrily. It is easy to be deceived that the forest is thriving but if you venture further into the forest, beyond the edges, the scenery changes.

Here, logging goes on unchecked, aided by the elaborate cover of trees that give the impression that all is rosy.

Conservationists such as Anne Wanjuhi and Muchiri Mwangi insist that illegal logging persists — for instance, some 173 red cedar trees have been destroyed in Kabaru forest station and Gathiuru II.

But their biggest gripe is that the rate at which trees are felled does not match the afforestation efforts.

A report by the duo on the destruction of Aberdare and Mt Kenya Forests lays bare the poor reforestation. “In the Aberdares, illegally cleared forests such as the 850 Hectares of Tanyai Forest have never been replanted,” said Wanjuhi.

KFS concedes that once a plantation is cleared, the land takes a year to recover.

The harvested areas are divided into plots and allocated to members of the community forest association (CFA) who manage the land for a year until it is ready for trees to be replanted.

“During this period, the land is ploughed in preparation for planting food crops under the Plantation Establishment and Livelihood Improvement Scheme (PELIS) programme,” KFS Director Emilio Mugo. However, this is not done the proper way.

The Standard team observed that there were sections of the forest that had stayed for up to three years without reforestation.

Under-staffing

The logging is a lucrative venture as a single tree fetches as much as Sh21,000 and Kabaru alone fetched the loggers Sh37 million last financial year against a target of Sh40 million.

At least two thousand trees have been felled in Kabaru since June last year, but the number could be a gross underestimation.

When we visited the forest at the height of the commercial felling last month, roaring power saws and heavy machinery such as cranes and tractors loading logs on lorries were at work.

Although all that has gone silent in the wake of the recent moratorium on commercial logging, it remains to be seen whether this will be sustained.

With 12 forest rangers stationed at the 13,349 hectare Kabaru plantation, the challenge of under-staffing is all too obvious and the Environment CS Keriako Tobiko admitted as much.

The forest is divided into eight blocks which should each be manned by two rangers. To plug the deficit, the parastatal relies mostly on CFA scouts.