It is only fitting that on a day like today, when the world over is celebrating International Day of Forests, I am reminded of my childhood on my father’s plantation. Pa Jibunoh’s plantation is located in Akwukwu Igbo. Akwukwu was once a part of Western Nigeria, before it became a part of Midwest, then Bendel, and now Delta State. As a young boy, I remember moments when I would walk from my house to the plantation giddy with excitement with a skip to my walk as I knew that I might have the pleasure of enjoying some of the produce of the plantation during harvest season. The opposite was the case during the planting season. My father’s plantation was about two and a half square miles. I know it is very old as it has been in my family for many generations but the exact age of the plantation is a difficult one to ascertain mainly. I doubt even my father knew which of his parents or grandparents started it. Many of the cash corps on the farm are hundreds of years old. It was known as Ani Cocoa, meaning, the land of Cocoa, and, due to its pristine location, my father’s plantation was surrounded by big forests known as Ani Enyi, ‘land of the elephants.’
It was the practice that the bigger the family in those days, the bigger the plantation, but I remember that my father’s plantation was the biggest even though he officially had a small family. Aside from cocoa, my father’s plantation also had mangoes, apples, kolanuts, grapes, rubber, oranges, udala and ube. Some of these fruits were not planted by my father nor I but had been there long before it became his plantation, which indicated that they might have been planted by his parents, my grandparents or even by those before them. We were taught how not to throw away seeds; so, if we ate the oranges or the grapes, we had a way of disposing of the seeds in the farm that wold ensure that they brought forth more fruits. We distributed the seeds in a well-spaced manner so they would replace those we had taken. That was how the plantation expanded and flourished for many generations. I do believe there was another reason for the growth of the plantation, biodiversity aided by migration. Generation after generation benefitted from this plantation.
I recently returned to my father’s plantation and walked around to see that the mangoes, udala (also known as agbalumo or cherry), ube (also known as pear) and more no longer bore any fruits. I asked the farmers managing the plantation why this was so and they all gave varied responses loss of nutrient in the soil, lack of biodiversity or is it just their time?
The state of my father’s plantation was a clear sign to me that we are quickly losing nature’s support. The fruit trees that we had to manually plant still existed but the ones that have been fruiting nonstop in the plantation for hundreds of years are no more. We still have the birds that congregate early in the morning and at different times during the day to sing their songs but the bush animals have more or less gone hiding due to their threatened existence. A delicacy in the soups eaten in many homes is something called bush meat. Animals used for this purpose are now an endangered species.
As a boy, we set traps around the plantation to catch them not caring about the role they may be playing in the plantation. In fact, we believed that we were doing nature a service as we had been told that if the various animals were not caught and eaten, they would reproduce in large numbers overpopulating the bushes, overrunning the farms and destroying valuable crops making them a threat to our food security. Becoming an environmentalist over 40 years ago and studying the effect some of these animals have on our biodiversity and inter-border migration, I have had to change my position and now campaign against the catching and killing of animals for food. I have also dedicated a huge part of my life advocating better forest management practices. I have raised the alarm over our disappearing forests and biodiversity. I have, through the vehicle of my environmental non-profit, shown that we can reverse the problem at this time before further irreversible damage is done.
During my growing up years, only 10 per cent of high school graduates migrated to urban centres, 5 per cent continued to the university and colleges, there were only UI, two colleges: Zaria and Yaba. Outside that, we had Fourah Bay in Freetown and Legon in Accra. The number of colleges within and outside Nigeria has certainly grown exponentially attracting more rural settlers. Today, 80 per cent of those that graduate in the rural areas migrate to the urban centres, leaving the rural areas unattended to and also leaving the plantations unattended to.
Thinking back, my plantation life and experiences have stayed with me forever and enabled me to discover my love for open spaces like the forest and the desert. It has also enabled me to spot how many areas are gradually changing from the rich natural farmlands that they use to be to depleted forests. Farmlands because these forests, totally not man-made or owned by any one individual were full of food and cash crops that serviced many people in the villages. The forests thrive due to migration and biodiversity.
However, many of these natural forests are no more in my hometown. They have been sacrificed at the altar of development. An article by environmental journalist, Josh Clark, describes it in an interesting manner. He said that humans have come a long way in gaining our independence from the whims of Mother Nature. We’ve learned how to build shelters and clothe ourselves. Through agriculture and irrigation we can control our own food supply. We’ve built schools, hospitals, computers, automobiles, airplanes and space shuttles. All these, however, we have done for a price. The price is that a bunch of plants, animals and simple organisms have died out. But so what?
Here’s the problem with the loss of biodiversity: The Earth functions like an incredibly complex machine, and there doesn’t appear to be any unnecessary parts. Each species, from the lowliest microbe to humans, plays a part in keeping the planet running smoothly. In this sense, each part is related. If a lot of those parts suddenly vanish, then the machine that is Earth can’t function properly.
With the rate at which certain fruits and animals that were once commonly found all across the country are gradually becoming scarce, we must agree that Nature isn’t functioning the way she used to and we, humans are to blame.
Nigeria is well endowed with forest resources but the excessive exploitation of these forest resources has become a huge source of concern and threat of economic, social and environmental importance. The forest, apart from providing a large proportion of the global supply of timber and fuel, also provides a wide range of non-wood products and environmental functions. These products include bush meat, medicine, watershed protection, stabilisation of the hydrological regime and carbon sequestration. Forests regulate global climate and act as major agents of carbon exchange in the atmosphere.
It has been reported that Nigeria loses 4 per cent of its forest cover each year, making it one of the highest in the world, where forest loss alone is responsible for about 20 per cent of greenhouse gas emissions, especially carbon, which is a prime contributor to global warming and climate change.
In the last decade or thereabouts, experts have cried out about rising global temperatures, and the alteration of local climatic conditions, which have led to heat-related fatalities, as well as spread of infectious diseases, malnutrition, disruption of farming season, dehydration, damage to public health infrastructure, migration of both man and animals, and also destruction of properties. We can no longer remain ignorant of the resultant effects of our many anthropogenic activities to the environment.
The most important thing about global warming is this: Whether humans are responsible for the bulk of climate change is going to be left to the scientists, but it is all of our responsibility to leave this planet in better shape for the future generations than we found it. We need to remember nature was there before the inhabitants, ensuring that we had the three most important components of life, the air that we breathe, the water that we drink and for some live in and the food that we eat. As we celebrate the International Day of Forests today with the theme ‘Forest and Education,’ let us educate ourselves with the fact that if all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the rich state of equilibrium that existed 10,000 years ago but if insects were to vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos.