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By Richard Mahapatra As ecological degradation leads to the loss of livelihoods from agriculture and forests, some 11 million desperate people in India eke out a living collecting and selling fuelwood. It might be time to stop viewing the trade as a threat to our forests and to set about organising it and weaving it into our national forest policy instead
 "Agriculture will never be enough to survive," Basumati Tirkey, a 35-year-old resident of Bangamunda village, some 40 km from Rourkela, Orissa, remembers her mother saying when Orissa was in the grip of a severe drought. That was when young Basumati first entered the forest to collect fuelwood for sale. She didn't realise then that she would probably spend a lifetime collecting fuelwood. Now she walks nine kilometres every day, carrying a load of 35 kg of fuelwood, to earn Rs 15.
Basumati is just one of millions of rural women who eke out a living by selling and collecting fuelwood. "It is a free economy and the economy of India's poorest of the poor," says Pradyut Bhattacharya, a faculty member of the Indian Institute of Forest Management (IIFM), Bhopal, who has extensively studied India's wood energy sector. The business of fuelwood, primarily conducted by villagers in and around forests, has an annual turnover of US$ 16.54 billion, according to estimates of the Ministry of Environment and Forests' (MoEF) National Forestry Action Programme -- nearly one-fourth of India's foreign exchange reserves. The FAO estimates it to be around US$ 60 billion, considering that by 2000 AD India will require an estimated 250 million tonnes of wood fuel from all sources, and assuming that the prevailing price for fuelwood is Rs 1,000/tonne . For long, people like Basumati have served as midwives of this trade. According to a study by the IIFM in 1987, about 70% of women are engaged in `headloading' in villages in and around forests. Researchers V L Goel Jyoti Mishra and H M Behl of the National Botanical Research Institute in Lucknow estimate that, in an average village in a semi-arid region, a woman walks more than 1,000 km a year to collect firewood alone . Regarded 'illegal' and 'a threat to the environment', the fuelwood trade can safely be called the richest non-timber forestry activity. All that is required to run this business is the need to survive when pushed to the wall, and, of course, the forests. There is a popular saying that once you are involved in headloading you become a nomad with a home. And you are harassed by everyone from forest guards to train conductors. This trade's multi-billion-dollar tag doesn't impress the headloaders as nearly two-thirds of the money goes towards bribes and commissions to middlemen. The forestry action plan, quoting extensively from Forest Survey of India statistics, puts the total requirement of fuelwood in the country at 201 million tonnes . Of this, roughly 103 million tonnes comes from forest areas (including plantations). This constitutes nearly 51% of the total requirement. The rest -- 98 million tonnes -- comes from the farm forestry sector, including common lands. Considering the 103 million tonnes originating from forests alone, and assuming a person collects 25 kg of fuelwood a day, it can be said that India's fuelwood sector employs 11.28 million people, making it the largest employer in India's energy sector. In 1984-85, the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), in its Second Citizen's Report, estimated that 3-4 million people were engaged in the business. This estimate was based on the total amount of fuelwood consumed in urban areas, and the assumption that 50% of fuelwood was supplied by the forest departments. Recent estimates by different organisations indicate that less than 10% of the total fuelwood consumption comes from recorded sources, and that 90% is brought by head-load, cycle-load, etc. Despite fuel alternatives such as kerosene and liquefied petroleum gas (LPG), fuelwood remains the most preferred energy source of rural areas and a sizeable part of energy resources in urban areas. The demand is increasing every year. The fuelwood trade is no longer about filling the huge gap between demand and supply of fuelwood, as was believed decades ago. Today, it is a survival option forced on the country's poor. It has become the new expression of ecological degradation in villages, which base their economy primarily on biomass. More and more people are finding fuelwood collection their last livelihood option, as they lose their incomes from agriculture and forests. Fuelwood collection becomes the best choice: all that is needed is the physical labour to transport the wood from the forests to the market. Fuelwood collection could become a legitimate forestry activity and contribute substantially to the rural economy. But first it has to be recognised as a means of livelihood. For this, the forest bureaucracy has to change its ill-informed opinion that the activity poses a threat to forests. Most fuelwood consists of dried twigs and branches, not illegally felled trees. Experiences in social forestry, a four-decades-old initiative to generate fuelwood outside the forest, show that a change in attitude towards the fuelwood sector is what is called for. In 1999, at a national workshop on the fuelwood scenario in India, organised in Bhopal by the IIFM, the country's top forestry and energy policy-makers suggested ways to organise the rural energy sector and to make it the means to overall rural development. "It is a pure rural development subject," says Deep Narayan Pandey, faculty member of the IIFM. Experts suggest that the fuelwood sector should be organised along the lines of the dairy sector. Being unorganised and predominantly women-managed, institutions should be developed within villages to provide a means for marketing at the grassroots level. These bodies could act as channels to the market and prevent the need for every woman to go to the marketplace herself. Such institutions could also conduct other women-related developmental programmes aimed at generating additional income. Once these institutions are in place, work on the regulation of fuelwood supply can begin so that the product gets to the market. The supply should be adjusted in such a way that fuelwood produced in one area can be diverted to areas where the demand is high but supply low. This was the method that forest departments used to adopt earlier to sell fuelwood in their depots. There are still provisions for retaining patches of forests as woodlots for villages (interestingly, this is included in the archaic Indian Forest Act of 1927). The development of woodlots, usually near the village boundary, could help in procuring fuel near the village. This would cut down on labour and time spent in collecting fuelwood. Since a substantial portion of the total consumption of fuelwood is reportedly extracted from forests (over 65%), the development of village woodlots and farm forestry practices should be encouraged to reduce the pressure on natural forests. The Bhopal workshop made an observation: "Since the growing of trees is environmentally tenable and a traditional activity of the rural people, the demand for fuelwood should not be managed by curbing the trade but by developing the resource." "I don't find any problem in encouraging fuelwood collection and its use. It will enhance the rural economy if done properly," says Bhattacharya. By curbing fuelwood extraction we would incur heavy indirect loss, as people reject forest conservation. It's better to recognise it as a sustainable village economy. Poverty alleviation programmes, ideally, should include the fuelwood component. This will help shift the status of headloading from a crisis-driven occupation to an organised one. We can envisage a time when the present subsidies on household commercial fuels, such as kerosene and LPG, will be gradually withdrawn. This will suddenly increase the demand for fuelwood. If we don't have an organised demand and supply mechanism for fuelwood in place, people may be forced to cut down forests. Long-term policies should be framed keeping such factors in mind. The fuelwood trade must find a place in our national forest policy and in other related policies. (Richard Mahapatra is a Special Correspondent with Down to Earth, a journal on ecology published by the Delhi-based Centre for Science and Environment. He has been writing on development issues for the last seven years.) InfoChange News & Features, June 2003
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