ON THE NATIONAL CHARCOAL STRATEGY

In 2017, Malawi launched the National Charcoal Strategy(NCS) to deal with the worsening problem of deforestation. This strategy is particularly important to Malawi, a country where the rate of forest loss is alarmingly ranked the highest in Southern Africa.

The NCS complements a number of existing national conservation policy documents, some of which include the National Forest Landscape Restoration (NFLR) strategy, the Forestry Policy (2016), the Forestry Act (1997), the Energy Policy (2003), the draft National Energy Policy (2016), the Energy Act (2004), and the Climate Change Policy (2016). As a nation, we surely have a rich policy and regulatory framework for the management of our natural resources.

The fact that predation on our natural resources, forests, in particular, has thrived under the watch of such a rich regulatory environment exposes serious shortcomings in the overall national conservation strategy. We witnessed the mowing down of the Chikangawa Plantation under a very explicit regulatory framework guiding procedure for sustainable harvesting of trees in the forest. By comparison, however, in some other sectors, Malawi has produced internationally recognized achievements by successfully implementing locally developed policies and regulatory guidelines. This signifies that there is great potential within us as a nation.

As we aspire to make gains with the NCS, some serious reforms are needed in its implementation approach. We have to derail from the path that made some of the previous and existing policies and regulations fail to prevent the current status of things. This strategy spells out an excellent vision that, if well executed, will lead to the neutralization of the threat that charcoal poses to the nation. If we fail to decisively deal with the charcoal problem now as has been the case in the past decade, Malawi will be heading for an environmental catastrophe that will be even more difficult and expensive to reverse.

Involvement of the grass-root rural people is one aspect that needs to be seriously reflected upon. These are the people who matter most because they live side by side with the forests the NCS seeks to protect. This aspect has not been fully addressed by some of the policy and regulatory documents in the past. It is very common for some of these documents to reach the point of expiry without the majority of Malawians knowing their contents. This creates a gap that limits public participation during the implementation of the stipulates of such documents. For instance, how readily available are these conservation regulatory documents at local or district level? Even if they can be available, are they in a form that can be easily digested by the local user who we expect to participate fully in the documents’ implementation? If the answer is NO, then there is some issue we need to resolve. The public cannot participate voluntarily if they are not well-informed. The militarized forest conservation approach we have resorted to is a clear sign of national underperformance on the conservation front. Besides being unsustainable, the effectiveness of this approach has been doubted by many on the grounds that it does not guarantee full respect for human rights. Successful conservation hinges upon both long-term interventions as well as voluntary community participation.

With this in mind, the authorities need to find means of getting the vision stipulated in the NCS down to the grass-root populace. All critical stakeholders in the charcoal value chain such as charcoal makers, sellers, consumers, and transporters need to know and be reached with information. This could be achieved, for example, through reproductions of the NCS in form of translations, artistic visualizations, media commentaries, multilingual portable pocketbooks, digital representations, and indeed any form that could help the people who are far from the “offices” access government’s fresh commitments on dealing with the charcoal problem. The school system is also a vital avenue for information dissemination. This, as we can see, calls for wider participation of linguists, artists, publishers, media personnel, teachers, designers and many other stakeholders who, on the surface, may look peripheral and insignificant to national conservation programming.  But as has been seen, their significance in localizing the original copy of the NCS for it to reach the wider society cannot be overemphasized.