Typical of rural areas, land tenure is bestowed by tribal authorities, and smallholders work within a range of ancient practices. Coinciding with the recent World Forestry Congress in Durban, an FSC Smallholder Support Program team visited pilot projects being run to find ways to have these plantations FSC certified.
Development forester Gilbert Plant chuckles when he tells you his surname. His existence is all about trees, African landscapes and the people who live there.
Plant was born in Kenya, came to South Africa aged 20, and has worked in forestry for half a century.
These days, you’ll find him in Ozwathini, a village in the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands. But here, the people call him umlungu amahlathi (the white man of the forest). The chief gave him a name too: mababela (he burns all around) because the first thing he did was show people how to control fire.
He is the man on the ground for Project Ozwathini, a pilot initiated by Forestry South Africa with NCT Forest Co-operative to determine a set of standards for smallholder certification on traditional land. It is funded by the FSC Smallholder Fund and the Critical Ecosystems Partnership Fund.
The project takes a landscape approach that focuses on scale, intensity and risk to design a system that is compliant with traditional communal settings.
The idea is to certify the landscape as a whole, recognising an array of land uses. It has implications across the globe in areas where land access is by communal agreement.
The project area covers 7 000ha, with about 700ha under plantations. Here, people grow trees on small plots. They sell their timber to NCT and also use it for building and cooking. They grow their own food and keep livestock. In between are grasslands and natural forests.
“This is a mosaic of land uses and land types,” Craig Norris, Manager of NCT’s Forestry Technology Services Department, says. “In many ways, this ‘untidy’ landscape is more sustainable than the monoculture terrains of some neighbouring areas. Yet it can’t be certified now.”
Steve Germishuizen, coordinating the project for NCT, calls Ozwathini “a model for sustainability.”
Here, people live on the land and depend entirely on it. And they take care of it. “People know which tree will dry up the spring they’ve been dependent on for generations,” Plant says.
The road to Ozwathini takes you through sugarcane fields and large plantations. As the escarpment peaks, the village emerges from the mist.
Bongani Phama, a leader in the pilot group, waits on a roadside. The mist means he can’t show off his stand. But he can talk about it. He does so over the whistling of a thousand frogs, “a sign of a healthy ecosystem,” Plant points out.
Phama is part of the Hlanganani (“Unite”) Growers’ Association, whose 100 or so members are set on being pioneers for FSC certification of smallholders on traditional land. Certification, he says, would “help us so much” in increasing incomes and doing things better. “The major thing is the requirements for certification. That’s what we are trying to work out now.”
In South Africa, 80 per cent of plantations are FSC certified. None of them are small operations.
“People start off disadvantaged, and then encounter a complex system that excludes them from markets because they don’t meet all the requirements tailored to First World operations and practices,” Norris says.
“We are concerned that certification could unintentionally become a trade barrier for small operations … It requires a new way of thinking.”