About Charcoal

Today I bought a bag of charcoal – an unremarkable act.

No, not for a barbeque: actually I’m not into barbeques – why cook and burn meat when inside there is a perfectly good electric cooker, out of the weather? Anyway, I’ve had my fill of cooking over fires, but to be honest, my favourite Tanzanian dish is nyama choma – ‘burnt meat’, actually nicely cooked over charcoal.

My purchase of charcoal is for an experiment I want to do using it as a deodoriser – just something I want to try.

The small bag was cheap enough at $10 for five kilogrammes, but I nearly didn’t buy it!

I wanted pure charcoal and apparently some has additives to make it burn better – I wonder what the carcinogenic properties lurk there – so I read the label, just to make sure.

The bloody stuff was manufactured in South Africa using indigenous wood from Namibia!

That’s why I had reservations about buying it.

It is fair to say most people wouldn’t be on my wavelength and would rightly think me nutty for my reticence.

I spent seven years in Tanzania encouraging rural landowners to plant trees because wood in the country is being utilized seven times faster than it is growing. We planted targeted species, but in the worst areas anything that was green, able to survive and could generate shade was a good species.

Of the timber species, more were being taken from the rainforest illegally than legally, but indiscriminate logging is not the main cause of vegetation loss, it is cooking fires.

At places like Makumira kids were sent out looking for fallen branches, especially on Sunday afternoons and they would try to collect enough for a week’s cooking – sometimes they were successful sometimes not so.

While a few used kerosene burners, which were slow and the fuel more difficult to procure, the next cheapest option after firewood was charcoal.

Towns like Arusha with a population approaching 500 000, require huge amounts of charcoal.

Rule of thumb is: to manufacture one bag of charcoal, two bags of wood are needed.

A little village populated mainly by young men will spring up in a patch of savannah, and they cut the trees to burn/make charcoal. The cutover area becomes an ever increasing circle of depleted land that remains so for a very long time and is prone to erosion.

Don’t get me wrong, while I do not like to see any trees felled, the young men are gainfully employed and serving a desperate need.

In the meantime, the savannah is being depleted – all that is needed is a programme to revegetate the areas - nature needs a helping hand but it’s not forthcoming.

The blurb on the bag I bought (enough for perhaps four Tanzanian meals) intimates that the process is sustainable because they are utilizing invasive species. I found the reasoning behind the venture explained on a government website, so I researched these invasive species, some of which I’m familiar with.

I have never been to Namibia but what they say challenges my experience and my inherent attitudes.

The Kalahari looms large and the Namibian government do not want it to encroach further, which is praiseworthy but perhaps an outcome difficult to achieve.

The invasive species are taking over ‘production land’ - probably meaning ‘grazing’, and they are ‘sucking the moisture from the land’. But surely, dehydration of grass-supporting soil is more likely because of the sun and the wind; shrubs and trees tend to afford some protection – and are dormant when it’s dry.

It’s the first time I’ve heard that an invasion of shrubs/trees contributes to desertification.

Livestock tend to contribute to desertification by eating germinating shrub/tree seedlings.

Down the track there may be regret that the trees and shrubs have been removed, mirroring the removal of wildling species in Central Otago, NZ. Simply, the ecology is altered because trees provide habitat for birds, and they bring other plant species – the trees might be removed but the seed in the soil can remain viable for years. There is the also question of habitat loss – tipping the balance.

On the other hand it is a good thing that Namibian youth are gainfully employed, generating income.

I found it incredible, bizarre (and not very green) that New Zealand barbeques are being fired by wood all the way from Namibia.

But here’s another:

A recent hepatitis A outbreak in Australia has been traced to faecal matter (from a process worker’s poor hygiene) on frozen berries grown in Chile and processed in China. The processed berries were forwarded throughout Australia.

Ok, it’s a global economy, but if freight is so cheap, how come it costs a fortune when we post gifts to our grandkids in the UK?

By the way, my feet don’t stink.