Lovely and lissome, the masuku tree rises maybe 35 feet at maturity, its wood the hue of a rare steak, its branches dotted with sweet golfball-size fruits that ferment into a tasty wine.
Working just after sunrise atop a small mountain not far from here, Injes Juma and his nine friends needed less than five minutes to sever a masuku at its base and send it crashing to the ground.
Another five minutes of furious hacking with axes and machetes reduced the tree to a stack of five-foot logs, ready to be carried down the steep grade to the highway below.
Mr. Juma and his friends are loggers, members of a vast fraternity that has illegally laid waste to half this nation, mostly in the last 15 years, all to hawk firewood and charcoal at roadside stands.
Because of them, experts say, Malawi loses nearly 200 square miles of its forests annually, a deforestation rate of 2.8 percent that the Southern Africa Development Community says is one of the highest in sub-Saharan Africa.
The cutting blights a pastoral, sometimes breathtaking landscape. It dries up streams, pollutes the air, lowers the water table, erodes the soil and silts rivers so badly that, officials here say, hydroelectric plants are blacked out by the gunk.
It is hard to think of many other things that Mr. Juma and his fellow loggers could do that would damage the nation more.
The problem is that it is hard to think of many other ways that Mr. Juma and his fellow loggers could make a living, period.
"The problem is that we have nothing else to do," said Mr. Juma, a wiry 33-year-old with a neon green shirt tied around his bare waist, standing over the remains of the chopped-up masuku. "We have no money to raise our families. We have nowhere to run, nothing else to do. So we have to cut the trees to feed our families."
In few places do the dictates of modern environmentalism butt so painfully against economic reality as they do here in Malawi.
Two-thirds of the nation's 12 million people earn less than a dollar a day, according to the United Nations Human Development report. Nine-tenths of those two-thirds live in rural areas where both jobs and the odds of escaping poverty are nonexistent.
For hundreds of thousands of those rural dwellers, sales of firewood and charcoal provide virtually their only income.
Wood and charcoal are the preferred cooking and heating fuels in Malawi, even in the poorer parts of cities, and the demand is huge: the World Bank estimated in 2001 that charcoal consumption alone was twice what the nation's woodlands could sustain without further deforestation. Indeed, loggers illegally clear 100 square miles of forest each year just to meet the demand for charcoal, the government says.
Yet the income - less than $8 million a year nationwide, by official estimates - is pitifully meager, as Mr. Juma's band of loggers can testify.
A single masuku tree, felled and cut into logs and branches, brings about 2,000 kwacha, or about $15 at current exchange rates, when all has been sold. A bundle of three or four branches sold by the roadside brings about 15 cents; a thick five-foot section of trunk, up to $1.50.
Mr. Juma and his fellow loggers say they cut about 15 trees a year, the most the group can sell in a region where dozens of wood vendors line the main street of every town. That provides an income, on average, of about $20 a month.
That $20 must support the 10 men, their 8 wives and 16 children - 34 people in all. Whatever else they have comes from casual labor as gardeners, for about 40 cents a day, or from the vegetable plots outside their one-room huts, just off the main road linking Blantyre and Lilongwe, Malawi's two main cities.
"Sometimes we just do without food because the money doesn't last a month," said Kabaitha Langwan, a gray-stubbled, 52-year-old logger clad in a red T-shirt bearing the words "surf extreme." "We lack money even for soap and bathing."
"It's a lot of hard work for very little money," said one forester, an expert who is working under a foreign government grant to reduce illegal logging. "Nobody does it by choice. But they have very few options."
In theory, at least, Malawi's impoverished millions could benefit by saving the woods instead of clearing them.
Some studies indicate that the income from forest beehives and their honey can exceed the profit from firewood sales. Practitioners of traditional medicine scrupulously tend their patches of wood to maintain supplies of forest mushrooms and exotic plants used in home remedies.
More than that, simple math shows that Malawians could cook their food far more cheaply using electricity - if it were available - than by buying and burning wood or charcoal.
But only 2 percent of Malawians are hooked to the electrical grid, and for the rest, merely the cost of plugging in - buying a meter, and buying a stove with which to cook - makes electricity a pipe dream. Only so many beehives can fit into a forest. And all the arguments about the long-term benefits of woodlands pale beside the relentless need to find the next day's meal.
And so along the main road, almost all the hills have been shaved of their leafy canopies of trees, leaving behind a rocky bristle of scrub and dirt. Plumes of smoke curl skyward from behind the peaks, the signatures of charcoal makers at work.
More than a fifth of Malawi's forests vanished between 1990 and 2000 alone, the World Bank says, and 23 species of trees are considered to be endangered.
In many places, the biggest patches of untouched woods are the ones that protect community graveyards.
Michael Pathungo, the assistant forestry officer in Malawi's southern region, said the nation's heavily populated southern half has now lost up to four-fifths of its tree cover.
"The rate of cutting is dwindling," he said, grasping for a shred of good news, "because there are no more forests."The New York Times
