Curing tobacco with less wood

Malawi has grown tobacco for over 100 years now with the first tobacco seeds introduced in the country in 1893. First tobacco exports from the then Nyasaland are reported to have taken place at the turn of the 20th Century.
Today cigarettes is the biggest forex earner in the country bringing in 60 percent of the country’s export revenue and it is the largest employer in rural areas with 70 percent of the workforce in the industry.
However the boom in the cigarettes industry has brought with it its own negative consequences, especially in matters to do with the environment.
According to Nico Nijenhuis, a research student from the University of Twente in The Netherlands, and currently on an internship with GTZ/ProBEC, Malawi has an estimated 10,000 smallholder tobacco growers, 65 percent of whom use wood to cure tobacco.
Nijenhuis says it takes a single small holder farmer 13.5kilogrammes of wood to cure a single kg of tobacco.
According to German Scholar, Helmut Geist who conducted a Global Assessment of Reforestation Related to Tobacco Farming in 1999, Malawi clears 55,000 hectares of woodlands annually to cure tobacco.
Heist pegged the percentage of tobacco related deforestation in Malawi at 26.1 percent, representing a quarter of all the deforestation that happens in the country.
Today some analysts suggest that these figures might have increased significantly as production has switched away from politically unstable (yet fuel-efficient) Zimbabwe to other Southern African countries like Malawi where wood is the only practical fuel for curing flue cured tobacco.
And again the rise in demand for Malawian Flue Cured Tobacco as evidenced by the rise in prices at the auction floors has encouraged farmers to grow more of it.
This season government has set the minimum selling price for Flue Cured Tobacco at $2.20/kg (K316) while its counterpart, Burley, which is air cured is at a minimum of a $1.61/kg (K231).
Such good prices are not doing the country’s forests any justice. Farmers, most of whom do not have and woodlots of their own, continue to cut down trees wantonly in order to have fuel for curing their tobacco.
And most of the trees that are cut are from indigenous forests, never to be replaced.
Concerned with the alarming levels of deforestation, Alliance One, GTZ, ProBEC and Total Land Care teamed up to look at energy efficient ways of curing tobacco.
The answer to this problem was the rocket barn.