Reforestation in Tea Areas
Tea Land Adaptation Project (Malawi)
MALAWI
Tomorrow, around 40 million trees will disappear from our planet. And the day after that. Many of these are in tea growing areas. Greenpop plants trees. It is a small volunteer-dependent organization based in Capetown, South Africa. Greenpop’s work is centered on educating and mobilizing local rural communities to hand plant seedlings.
One of its closely watched initiatives is in Malawi’s tea gardens. Malawi is one of the three largest producers of tea in Africa and grows 10% of its total. It is a desperately poor country where 62% of the population fall below the World Bank extreme poverty line measure of $1.25 a day. Tea farming is the largest formal sector employer, comprising 50,000 workers and 14,000 smallholders.
This core source of livelihood is under threat from climate change accelerated by the deforestation that reduces biodiversity, erodes soil, and removes shade. Malawi has lost around 20% of its forest areas in just two decades.
Greenpop aims to help in restoring Malawi’s degraded forest land, through its Tea Land Adaptation Project (TLAP), a joint initiative with a range of funding and support organizations, including UTZ and Rainforest Alliance. It reflects lessons from other Greenpop projects in Southern Africa over a seven-year period. The main ones are that policy and external direction expertise are not enough. The priority must be coalition-based and heavily focused on behavior change. One dominant emphasis in its program design is “sensitizing” gender awareness and strengthening the role of women in the decision process.
There are six planned outputs from the project which is in its early stages:
- Mapping and selecting the multiple stakeholders and institutions key to successful implementation.
- Community-based training on development resources and building local and district action groups
- Identifying and mobilizing capacity needs
- Training pilot communities
- Disseminating best practice cases and lessons for action
Greenpop is a small player in a diverse and expanding new “reforestation economy.” This includes tech-focused firms like BioCarbon Engineering: that uses drones to fire seeds into the ground in satellite-mapped target areas at a rate of 400,000 a day, 150 times faster than hand planting. (Greenpop cites as a major success 8,500 trees a month and a total of 50,000 in a South Africa project.)
EcoPlanet Bamboo converts land to alternate timber and fiber sources to supply the tree-devouring paper-creating industries. Many grower associations and government agencies are launching very large-scale initiatives that reflect the urgency and size of the problem.
Greenpop’s bottom-up, localized strategy may be a model for tea farm reforestation and restoration, with tea’s plethora of small operations in remote regions and tight communities. Or it may be too small, too complex and too ambitious to meet the multiplicity of challenges. Let’s hope it is a success that complements the top-down, scale-intensive initiatives.