Their "prison" is Chitengo camp, headquarters of Gorongosa National Park in central Mozambique. It might once have been one of the glories of Africa, but 16 years of civil war murdered it and 600,000 people. Fighting ended in 1992, but the echoes linger. There was never a golden goose to kill, but villagers knew the ancient ways. By hunting and gathering only what they needed, they were masters of "sustainability" long before the rest of us knew what the word meant. War changed all that. Slash-and-burn made firewood for refugees and small fortunes for illegal logging gangs. Shooting the animals provided meat for the rebel and government armies. Elephants in Gorongosa declined from 4,500 to 200, hippos from 4,000 to 62, lions from 300 to 25.
Twelve years on, the logging gangs are still busy, and so are the poachers. A tiled bathroom in an old safari lodge contains a frightening arsenal of confiscated weaponry — machetes, knives, bows and arrows tipped with hammered barbed wire; buffalo-size snares; gin traps powered by car springs. Many of the 80 park rangers who are supposed to be working for Gorongosa's future are also busy in the illegal "bush-meat" trade. The thinking is brutally simple: when you live this close to the margins, today is all that matters. Tomorrow is for someone else.
A little over 20 kilometres from Chitengo is the village of N'hambita. This is Africa as Stanley and Livingstone would have recognised it, the Africa of mud huts and smouldering fires, tribal chiefs, ancestor-worship and witch doctors. The villagers build nothing that cannot be held together with twisted bark, and eat little that does not come from their own clearings (mashambas), the river or the forest. Their
regular meal is maize porridge, beefed up with fish, vegetables, baboon or cane rat. Sometimes it comes down even to mice or crickets.
Food deficiencies cause a quarter of the illnesses they suffer, and malaria accounts for most of the rest. Mere survival into adulthood is a triumph. Nationally, average life expectancy is 41 and under 3% of the population is over 65.
It doesn't look like anyone's idea of pioneering agriculture. The cultivated clearings are what you'd expect — sorghum, maize and cashew sprout from a weedy undergrowth. Down by the river there are bananas and a bit of rice. And yet, if you look carefully, there are surprises. In another clearing, potted tree saplings are lined up by the hundred, as neat as a home-counties garden centre, watered by pump from the river. In another, tidy rows of young vegetables are being trickle-hosed into plumpness. In yet another, carpenters using modern hand tools are making beehives. Anyone with an eye for Africa would ask: what's going on here?
The answer isn't straightforward. Unremarkably in a country dependent on aid, the N'hambita community project receives funding from the European Union — e1.5m over five years. But this is only part of the story. To fill in the detail, we must visit a very different kind of clearing, 4,000 miles away in central London. Berkeley Square is not everyone's idea of a charitable hub, but it is here, nevertheless, in Mayfair's most exclusive, blue-blood nightclub, Annabel's, that N'hambita finds its twin. Robin Birley, son of the club's founder, Mark, has a fascination with Africa that began with his youthful admiration for the late John Aspinall, a family friend whose addiction to risk was exceeded only by his passion for dangerous animals. The bond was sealed with Birley's own blood at the age of 12, when one of Aspinall's tigers seized him by the head and nearly killed him.
Inevitably the idea is controversial. Birley has set up a private company, Envirotrade, to deal in carbon credits. Put at its simplest, it works like this: under the Kyoto protocol, 39 developed countries must reduce their output of greenhouse gases, most importantly carbon dioxide, which is released into the atmosphere by combustion and removed from it by trees which fix — or, in the jargon, "sequester" — it from the air. One of the several ways in which the industrial nations can meet their targets is by applying Kyoto's so-called Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which lets them offset some of their carbon output by buying "credits" from developing countries that are planting trees. That's the theory. It's why the villagers of N'hambita are so energetically surrounding their mashambas with new saplings. It's why researchers from the Institute of Atmospheric and Environmental Science at the University of Edinburgh are such regular visitors, measuring the height and girth of the trees, calculating biomass, growth rates and the absorption of carbon. Their conclusion is unequivocal. New planting at N'hambita will lock away 90 tonnes of carbon dioxide per hectare — a contribution to the global environment for which, according to Kyoto, they are entitled to be rewarded.
But there is a snag. "The problem with CDMs," says Robin Birley, "is that they have to be approved by a board that meets once a month. Not one single forestry project, anywhere in the world, has been approved in the last two or three years. It's just impossible to cross all the hurdles."
For now, purchasers of N'hambita's carbon credits will gain no value from them, so buyers must be driven by philanthropy. Fortunately, there are enough of them to keep the project rolling. Future Forests has bought in. So has the Rolling Stone Ronnie Wood. Shell in Holland is inviting employees to buy credits to offset the emissions from their cars, and others may follow.
No revolution is being inflicted upon the people of N'hambita. Their ancestral lifestyle remains intact. They live within, and are sustained by, the forest, without machinery, novel crops or artificial fertilisers. They own the land and everything that grows on it (Envirotrade merely brokers the carbon). Sixty per cent of the income from carbon-trading passes directly to the 64 farmers in the scheme, with 20% each going to local administration and Envirotrade. With the project operationally still less than a year old, more than 1,000 people are already benefiting from it, and it is scheduled to grow in the short term at the rate of at least 100 new farmers a year. Thanks to the European money and other charitable aid, a new school is on the way, a health centre is on the horizon and a marketable surplus of produce is no longer an impossible dream. All they need are some donkeys to take it to the road.
The elders are squatting on a patch of beaten earth. Some look hardly more than boys; only one looks genuinely elderly. They stand and clap their hands as I am introduced. I ask one owner, 52-year-old Francisco Samijo, how he cultivates his land. Through the interpreter he replies: "With a plough." When I ask to see it, he runs off and returns with a hoe. Using this, and a bladed tool like a mattock, it takes him 15 days to prepare the ground for planting. Like his neighbours, he now grows sorghum intermixed with pigeon peas — a crop that is just about as close as N'hambita gets to high technology. Pigeon peas are nitrogen-fixing plants that enrich the soil, and their leaves make a natural compost to be dug into the earth or laid in planting holes. We shake hands and move on, prodded by Envirotrade's local project manager, Piet van Zyl, a barrel-chested former South African army officer with twirly whiskers, who looks as if he has just walked out of a first-world-war army-recruitment poster.
He won't rest until he has marched us around every pigeon pea, every papaya, mulberry, mango and row of carrots in the village. He wants to be sure we've understood. Better use of existing mashambas, and reafforestation of old ones, means a total end to slash-and-burn. Nothing will be wasted. The river bank will be reinforced with new planting, terraces stiffened with "vegetable grass" against erosion. Villagers will grow their own vegetables and fruit; in time they will apply for a logging licence and produce sustainable timber.
