" If we do not protect our remaining forests, Kenya will become progressively thirstier, hungrier, uglier and poorer. The forest excisions are like an axe hanging over the future of our country. "

--Kenya Forests Working Group

Protect Forests and Indigenous Peoples / Kenya - Archived

Forests remain on less than two percent of Kenya’s land, under protected status as a national resource. In a country plagued by drought, the forests are critical for water conservation. They are also home to indigenous peoples that live by hunting game and gathering food plants, herbs, and honey within the forests.

In a bid for votes, the Kenyan government has rescinded protected status from 4 percent of the remaining forests, claiming that the territory is needed to open settlements for the country’s many landless people. Ironically and tragically, the indigenous Ogiek people will lose much of their traditional forest territory if this scheme goes forward. The major beneficiaries will be politically connected people and loggers as well as settlers from other regions of the country. Already three powerful logging companies – Pan African Paper Mills, Raiply Timber and Timsales Ltd – are clearing the newly opened forest tracts.

Hardest hit are the Mau and Mt. Kenya forests, known as two of the country’s five “water towers.” A coalition of environmental organizations called the Kenya Forests Working Group warns that cutting of the Mau Forest will significantly reduce the ability of the forest ecosystem to cope with drought. Although the logging will bring more land under cultivation, it will reduce the productivity of current farms and tea plantations. Microclimates critical to agriculture are already suffering negative effects from deforestation.

Forest destruction will be a major blow to Kenya's biological diversity, since forests harbor 50% of Kenya's plant species, 40% of mammal species, 35% of butterfly species and 30% of bird species - all on only two percent of the land mass.

Logging in the Mau Forest will have a devastating impact on water quality and level in Lake Nakuru, home to the world's largest concentration of flamingoes. Protected under international law (Ramsar Convention), Lake Nakuru may lose its economic value as Kenya's second most visited tourist site.

The survival of the Ogiek people depends on their continued access to the mountainous Mau Forests, where they have lived as hunters and gatherers from time immemorial. Governments since colonial times have tried to evict them from the forest, purportedly to protect the forest from negative impacts of Ogiek daily life. In fact, Ogiek have always managed the forest sustainably. Now the government itself is destroying the forest so that people of other ethnicities may settle there. Traditional Ogiek culture will not survive colonization. The pastoral Maasai, who pasture their animals in the Mau Forest during the dry seasons, will also be affected.

The Ogiek people and environmental organizations are challenging the forest destruction edict in the courts and seeking international citizen support. Already the conservation group Action for Endangered Species has withdrawn an environmental award that Kenya was to receive for its stand last year against resumption of the global trady in ivory.

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