Nation merges coffee growing and conservation
MOUNT GORONGOSA, Mozambique — At Mount Gorongosa — 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, a redoubt 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 harbors 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 who doesn’t let hard realities sap his optimism.
Haarhoff acts for a nonprofit group founded by American philanthropist Greg Carr that is collaborating with Mozambique’s government to rehabilitate Gorongosa National Park, a rich ecosystem whose 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 rather than remain spectators to the occasional tourist influx, as was the case under the Portuguese colonial rulers who left in 1975.
Scientists settled on coffee as an alternative tool in a broader restoration plan for the mountain because the 90 hardwood trees planted for every 2.5 acres 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.
Designed to help hundreds of families on and around Mount Gorongosa, the coffee project is supported by Carr’s foundation, the Norwegian government and the Global Environment Facility, a group of 183 countries, international institutions and other entities.