Coffee and conservation
CHRISTOPHER TORCHIA
At this mountain — where farmers are being encouraged to grow coffee in the shade of hardwood trees, both to improve their own lot and to restore the forest — there is a point beyond which visitors are told not to go.
The problem: base camps of Mozambique’s main opposition force sit on the cloud-shrouded mountain, aredoubt that was the scene of military incursions and civilian flight in the past few years. There were times when managers of the coffee-and-conservation project couldn’t go anywhere near the mountain because of the conflict, or had to walk up because the opposition had blocked the road with logs to prevent the military bringing up equipment.
With a lull in tension, they are pushing ahead with plans to plant more coffee and trees on a mountain that captures rainfall and supplies the rivers sustaining people and wildlife living around its base.
It is among the more complex conservation efforts in southern Africa, a bid to convince farmers to abandon old-slash-and-burn methods of farming and commit to the longer-term yield of coffee on the same plots, while maintaining government support for a project in an area that harbours an opposition militia. The threat of drought and climate change also loom over a project driven by the idea that human development and ecological restoration must work in concert if there is any hope for both to succeed.
“We’ve had huge troubles working here,” said Quentin Haarhoff, a veteran farmer of coffee around Africa.
Haarhoff acts for a non-profit group founded by American philanthropist Greg Carr that is collaborating with Mozambique’s government to rehabilitate Gorongosa National Park, a rich ecosystem where animals are recovering after war and poaching. To do that, the thinking goes, the poor people around the park’s edges must become stakeholders in their natural heritage.
Scientists settled on coffee as an alternative tool in a broader restoration plan for the mountain because the 90 hardwood trees planted for every hectare of coffee provide shade that the crop needs to thrive. A sustainable mosaic of cultivation and natural forest is envisioned, and farmers are encouraged to cultivate bananas, pineapples and other crops amid coffee plantations, providing fertilizer for the coffee from falling foliage.
“The bulk of the nutrition of the coffee plant comes from a very, very shallow layer of soil, which we never want to disturb,” said Haarhoff, a white farmer from Zimbabwe who lost his coffee plantation during often violent land seizures there nearly two decades ago.
“What we’re doing essentially here by growing these other crops is restoring the natural hydrology of the soil here. It’s turning into a sponge.”
“Now things are easier and calmer. We can cultivate,” said Randinho Faduco, a coffee farmer who is benefiting from a truce between the Renamo (Mozambican National Resistance) opposition group and the ruling Frelimo (Mozambique Liberation Front) party.