Nairobi - The recent announcement by Environment minister David Mwiraria that the Government was considering re-introducing the shamba system in forests, has re-ignited fresh debate on the emotive land issue.

Among the leading anti-shamba system voices is Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai.
 
But proponents of the system argue that it is the only way that the State can ease pressure on its forests, which are already on rapid decline.

Almost 80 per cent of the country's land falls within the arid and semi-arid category, leaving only 20 per cent for agriculture, forests and nature reserves.

The FAO Forest Resources Assessment of 1990 classified Kenya among the countries with very low forest cover, of less than two per cent of the total land area. The minister's announcement may have been overshadowed by the election mood, but one can safely bet that it will generate enough heat when collective consciousness of the public is restored after elections.

Shamba (Kiswahili word for farm) system is a form of farming where the landless are encouraged to cultivate crops on previously cleared forest land on condition they tend their crops alongside tree seedlings.

After three years of cultivation, the trees should be big enough to discourage crop production. At this point, the farmer moves out of the plot, but is eligible for another forest plot to be cleared as the cultivated land becomes part of forest reserve. The shamba system was inherited from the resident-shamba system introduced by the colonial government almost 90 years ago.

This entailed inviting landless families to the forests where villages were built and members of the forest dwellers, who did not work for the Forestry Department, were allowed to clear and cultivate plots in portions of the primeval forests.

The Forestry Department would after a few years establish seedling plantations that were taken care of by the forest dwellers alongside their crops. The Government, therefore, obtained free labour on its plantations, while the forest dwellers were able to grow food for subsistence.

The forest dwellers were not allowed to grow cash crops or keep cattle or goats to avoid the destruction of the young plantations. Each family was allowed a maximum of 15 sheep and chicken.

By 1988, when the Government evicted the forest dwellers, there were schools, health centres and shopping centres within the forest stations. In fact, there were chiefs and their assistants in every location.

The villagers had clean treated tap water and the workers were provided with decent shingles-roof houses. Families that kept sheep were allocated their own section of the village where they built mud-wall huts thatched with grass.

The Government realised it had no labour for its plantations after the 1988 evictions and introduced what was referred to as the non-resident shamba system, where the landless were allowed to cultivate plots in the forests but leave the forests before dusk.

The beneficiaries soon discovered that this system was not viable because their crops would be wiped out by wild animals at night.

The shamba system failed in some places because the Forestry Department had no staff to supervise the protection of the young plantations after retrenching most of the forest guards and phasing out the cadre of staff referred to during the colonial era as patrol men.

Raising the red flag

Patrol men were basically forest guards assistants and their work was to visit individual plot owners and assess the rate of seedlings survival.

By the late 1980s, conservationists had started raising the red flag on the system's failure as signs that the scheme was being mismanaged and abused begun to emerge.

For instance, the conservationists were concerned that some of the farmers were renting out plots to third parties to ensure their continued presence on forest lands.

Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) was the first government organisation to criticise the system following its restoration by Presidential Decree in 1993 with claims that 19 per cent of natural forests had been encroached upon by the shamba system.

For instance, KWS argued that the shamba owners had secretly extended their boundaries to the Naro Moru Gate of Mt Kenya National Park, and that the remaining forests were being subjected to extreme pressure from squatters, who were felling more trees, and burning indigenous forest areas for cultivation.

Later, KWS was to expose an even more flagrant abuse of the system when its surveys indicated that 143 plantations, of approximately 200 hectares along Ruguti and Thuchi rivers, had been planted with the lucrative, but illegal marijuana instead of trees.

The public outcry at the discovery only strengthened the voices that had all along opposed the system.

In 2004, the Government decided to stop the system and gave all the cultivators notice to vacate the forests by March the same year.

Inevitably, the decision negatively affected most of the forest users who were cut from their source of livelihood.

Three years down the line, the challenge on how to balance the economic needs of the society with protection of the forest's micro-climate, water catchment, bio-diversity and soil stability remains a major challenge to the Kenya Forestry Services and a subject of heated public debate.

While admitting past failure of the system, Mr Richard Muir, the chairman of Friends of Mau Watershed, says the shamba system per se was not a bad idea and would succeed if the Forestry Department played its role adequately.

"Yes, the shamba system had a built-in defect in that the cultivators were allowed to reside in the forests and so eventually acquired squatter rights," he told the Nation.

Massive encroachment

In most parts of the Mau forest, this system led to an influx of tenants and workers and encouraged massive squatter encroachment. These effects were most acute in Eastern Mau forest and on the eastern and south-western fringes of the south-western Mau forest.

Unregulated and poorly supervised by the Forestry Department, the shamba system only served to encourage the domestication of the natural forests.

By 1993, there were 11,400 households living within two kilometres of the forest boundary, maintaining a population density of about 200 persons per square kilometre.

Mr Lumumba Odenda, the coordinator of Kenya Land Alliance sees in the system a ploy by politicians to cover up the fact that Kenya does not have a clearly defined or codified national land policy.

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