A Northwoods Almanac for March 4 – 17, 2022

 A Northwoods Almanac for March 4 – 17, 2022   

 

March Madness 

            Our northern winter slowly wanes in March, often with so many blusters and bluffs that one can easily be driven into the dreaded state of cabin fever. The sun may be higher and the days longer, but spring usually advances at a snail’s pace. The month can feel like it will never give way to warmth. 

            So, I thought I’d write a column to raise our collective spirits. It’s about three women in Mozambique, Africa, who are farmers and also heroines. My wife Mary has been working on an international exhibit about women and water, and she’s woven a portrait of these women as part of it. Here’s their story:

            

Mozambique and Gorongosa National Park

            Stories of water don’t just have to be about a river or lake or ocean. How about the stories of water giving life to family farms? 

            Mary’s portrait illustrates three women, Vaida Furanguene, Fatianca Paulino, and Querida Baringuinha, who during a civil war in Mozambique carryied water at night up a mountainside in Gorongosa National Park to water newly planted coffee plants. 

Vaida Furanguene, Fatianca Paulino, and Querida Baringuinha

Mary Burns' weaving of the women

            To understand their story, we have to step back.

            Gorongosa National Park was once touted as one of Africa’s most spectacular national parks, with massive herds of wildlife roaming its Rift Valley grasslands and woodlands. One of the most biodiverse places on Earth, Edward O. Wilson claimed that Gorongosa was “ecologically the most diverse park in the world.” 

            Gorongosa was established in 1921 as a hunting reserve for the ruling Portuguese. It was established by removing the people who once had shared the landscape with wildlife. 

            By 1960, when first designated a national park, Gorongosa was still a popular holiday destination for the wealthy. Black Mozambicans were not welcome, unless they worked there or were given a special invitation. 

            Then the Marxist Front for the Liberation of Mozambique drove the Portuguese from Mozambique in 1975, and a brutal single-party socialist government was established. Villagers were forced to relocate into towns or communes. Dissidents were placed in “re-education camps” or convicted in show trials, and many were executed. Within two years, these oppressive measures inspired the formation of the Mozambique Resistance Movement (RENAMO), supported by the governments of South Africa and Rhodesia.

            The conflict that erupted turned into one of the longest, most brutal, and destructive civil wars in recent decades. Over the course of 15 years (1977–1992), more than 1 million people were killed in the fighting, thousands were tortured, and 5 million were driven from their homes.             RENAMO established its headquarters near Gorongosa, which, situated near the geographic center of the country, offered a strategic location, plus refuge and food for the rebels. 

            During the war, wildlife populations declined by 90–99%, and continued to decline thereafter partially as a result of post-war poverty. Hungry people needed food, and groups needing cash saw elephant ivory, zebra pelts and others as potential sources of money from the illegal wildlife trade.

            A ceasefire halted the war in 1992, but poaching continued, and people in surrounding communities set traps for whatever edible animals remained. 

            By 1995, the park itself was a dangerous place, not because of the large animals that had been nearly exterminated, but because of landmines.  

            By the turn of the century, Gorongosa National Park had been wrecked. 

            Aerial wildlife counts noted a near-total collapse of wildlife. From 1972 to 2001, cape buffaloes declined from 13,000 to 15. Wildebeest fell from 6,400 to 1. Hippos from 3,500 to 44. Zebras from 3,300 to 12. Hyenas, black and white rhinos, and wild dogs all fell to 0. And elephants and lions were reduced by 80 to 90%.

            Wildlife recovery began in 2008, coinciding with a public and private co-management agreement called the Gorongosa Restoration Project (GRP), a joint partnership between the government of Mozambique and the Carr Foundation, which to this day is still supported by American philanthropist Greg Carr and the government. 

            At the time, the glory of Gorongosa, however, was a forgotten memory. Mozambicans told Carr, “Don’t bother. There’s nothing there anymore.” 

            Carr and the GRP team, however, had a different perspective. They knew the one species that was most important to the recovery of the park and its ecosystems – Homo sapiens. The human population surrounding the park was about 250,000, and most subsisted on less than one dollar per day. To be successful in the long run, Gorongosa would have to prove to be more valuable as an intact preserve than as farmland, timberland, and hunting land. For any conservation area to survive, embracing the communities that live around the park and ensuring they benefit from the park is critical. When the GRP team was asked by the local community, “Are you here to plant trees or help people?” The answer was “both.” 

            It was clear that Gorongosa had to become a “human rights park,” too, which meant generating tangible benefits for the local people via health care, education, agronomy, and economic development, as well as protecting its landscape, its waters, and its biological diversity. The goal was to turn what was a battlefield into a “Park of Peace.”

            The people living on the mountain were no stranger to hardship. They were doing their best to survive in the face of conflict using traditional methods of farming maize and other low-value crops. This meant they frequently needed new fertile ground and would move up the mountain and cut down the forests. 

            Recovery was therefore slow. Park warden Pedro Muagura, who grew up in the area, remembers in the years following the war, “You used to walk for a day and see perhaps just one warthog.” 

            Then, in 2010, the highlands of Mount Gorongosa (about 3,000 feet) were added to the park. The mountain’s rainforest receives about 80 inches of rain per year that feeds the rivers winding through the area. Water from the mountain is the lifeblood of the Gorongosa ecosystem. 

            But across the lower elevations, local people continued cutting, burning, and farming. They had little choice – feeding one’s family will always take precedence over conservation.

            What to do? 

            Pedro Muagura had a radical idea: Why not grow coffee on mountainside plots that had already been deforested? It could be shade-grown, beneath replanted native trees, giving local people a bit of income as well as restoring the forest. 

            The problem was no one was growing coffee in Mozambique. As a member of the restoration team said, “Imagine trying to convince a group of poor farmers who don’t know you to plant a crop that they’ve never heard of, has no nutritional value, and takes three years to start producing. After sampling the crop, the farmers find it bitter and kind of burned. Adding to this challenge – this area is the heart of the rebel movement that has been fighting with the government for decades and fighting was still ongoing.”          

            Nevertheless, park staff, nearly all Mozambicans, taught farmers to care for the delicate coffee plants. In addition to 2,200 coffee plants, 90 hardwood rainforest trees were planted on each hectare that would eventually shade each orchard. To provide the farmers with a living while waiting on returns from the coffee plantation, they also provided seedlings of vegetables like carrots, kale, and peppers, and training in how to grow them.

            RENAMO, however, continued as a political and paramilitary organization, and its conflict with the government flared up again in 2013–2014, causing the temporary closure of the park and forcing GRP personnel off the mountain. 

            And here, finally, is where the three women you see in the portrait – Vaida Furanguene, Fatianca Paulino, and Querida Baringuinha, all farmers – come into the picture. The local farmers had embraced the coffee enterprise, but the new plants needed to be watered and the rebels held the top of Mount Gorongosa. No one felt safe going up there in the daylight. These woman carried water on their heads up the mountain in the dark of night for nearly a year to save the plants.

            And today, more than 600 local farmers are involved in the Gorongosa Project. The aim is to grow arabica coffee under shade trees in agroforestry systems through the park, simultaneously regenerating the rainforest and generating sustainable income for local agricultural communities. 

            The park currently has about 480 acres of farmland, which are reliably producing coffees. Another 240 acres will be planted every year for the next eight years, with the aim of hitting a total of 2,400 acres by the late 2020s. Over 500,000 coffee bushes have been planted among over 100,000 native rainforest trees. The hope is to restore nearly 20,000 acres of rainforest around and within the farmland, using coffee production as the catalyst for more regenerative opportunities on the mountain.

            Small farmers are also directly benefiting from new honey and cashew programs. Mozambique’s first organic cashew processing facilities is in the design phase and will employ 1,000 people, fundamentally transforming the opportunities available around Gorongosa.

             Perhaps most exciting biologically is that the coffee forests are bringing the biodiversity back. Ongoing research projects are proving that only a few years after establishment, these ‘agroforests’ shelter up to 80% of the biodiversity found in the rainforest. By 2018 when the last aerial wildlife survey was conducted, large herbivore populations had recovered by 95%. Gorongosa today is home to at least 100,000 animals.

            Illegal hunting and trapping remains an issue, though it’s been profoundly curtailed. Rangers have removed 27,000 snares and traps, and 260 new park rangers (249 men and 11 women) were trained, resulting in increased law enforcement capacity and a 72% decrease in wildlife poaching incidents. While the restoration was helped along by the reintroduction of some wildlife, 95% of Gorongosa’s restoration happened naturally. Nature, when allowed to heal itself, was able to do most of the work on her own. 

            Equally exciting is the work being done to educate girls. When you educate a girl, you not only get the biggest jump in the socioeconomic status of a community, but also the best chance for long-term success in nature conservation. Because when a girl gets a high school education, her chances of becoming pregnant in her youth drop drastically and her chances of employment skyrocket. 

            The GRP team knows that women are the fulcrum. If the human population in the buffer zone continues to grow unabated, by way of early marriage of girls and large families, no effort within the park boundaries will be sufficient to protect its landscape and fauna. Greg Carr notes, “If girls are in school and women have opportunities, then they will have two-child families . . This is where human development and conservation merge. Rights for women and children, poverty alleviation – is what Africa needs to save its national parks.” 

            So, buy a bag of coffee from Mozambique (go to https://ourgorongosa.com or locally). Fully 100 percent of the proceeds support the protection of the rainforest. By doing so, you will help preserve an African equivalent of Yellowstone National Park, but also support education for girls and save some of the most iconic wildlife species on the planet, a triple win. 

            The coffee project’s 10-year goal is to be the majority funder of Gorongosa National Park, using business as a sustainable finance mechanism for conservation and human development. They’ve launched online sales, with dreams of being in offices and on supermarket shelves across North America.

            You remember the three women at the beginning of this story? Part and parcel of all this was that they overcame fear during a civil war to water the first coffee plants. Who would have thought water heroes could be found in a coffee plantation, but indeed Vaida Furanguene, Fatianca Paulino, and Querida Baringuinha are just that.

 

Thought for the Week

            “I’d love to see others in my family grow coffee. It offers us a source of hope.” - Querida Baringuinha