Search

International audience; Kinshasa, the capital of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, has some 8 million inhabitants and is mainly surrounded by savanna and patches of degraded forest. Estimated fuelwood consumption is in the range of 3 to 6 million tones of fuelwood equivalent per year (representing 0.6 to 1.2 MT of charcoal per year if all the wood were charcoaled). The Mampu project was designed as the pilot phase of a reforestation project covering 100 000 hectares of sandy soil on the Bateke plateau and aiming to remedy wood and charcoal scarcities. Despite the conflicts, about 8000 hectares of Acacia auriculiformis were planted, mainly from 1987 to 1993. From about 1994, the Mampu plantation was divided into 25 hectare plots for 320 farming families. Cultivation mainly follows the agroforestry pattern based on improved fallows, which draws on traditional slash-and-burn farming. Total charcoal production from the plantation varies from 8 000 to 12 000 tonnes per year, in addition to 10 000 T/year of cassava, 1 200 T/year of maize and 6 T/year of honey. The success of the project is an incentive to apply the model to the savanna lands on the Bateke plateaus, taking traditional land rights into consideration and continuing activities to diversify and process production locally. This will help to cover a larger share of urban needs for renewable energy while also creating rural employment. However, other agroforestry systems deserve to be tested or developed for different ecological and social or economic conditions across the country, such as management of the natural regrowth of local multiple-use species as applied with the traditional system of fallow enrichment (Nkunku) in the Lower Congo.