Zimbabwe tobacco revival causes forests to go up in smoke

 

(Bloomberg) HARARE, Zimbabwe - Jeremiah Sarudza stands outside his mud and thatch hut and watches his wife and children prepare a tobacco field surrounded by tree stumps.
The 32-year-old, like most of Zimbabwe's tobacco farmers, relies on wood to cure tobacco, a practice that's stripping the gently rolling hills and granite outcrops of the country's northern region of their woodlands.
While production of the crop in Zimbabwe, which once rivaled the United States as the source of the world's best quality tobacco, is recovering from its collapse following the seizure of white-owned commercial farms by President Robert Mugabe's government. The revival is coming at a cost to the environment. Continued