Fueling war: a political-ecology of poverty and deforestation in Sudan

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Book chapter

Title:	Fueling war: a political-ecology of poverty and deforestation in Sudan
Author:	Katz, Cindi
Book title:	Producing nature and poverty in Africa
Year:	2000
Pages:	321-339
Language:	English
Geographic term:	Sudan
Subjects:	civil wars environment charcoal deforestation
Abstract:	This chapter focuses on an aspect of environmental degradation in Sudan that has a peculiar relationship with the ongoing civil war. The author examines two sites, a village on the Dinder River in northern Sudan, where she has done fieldwork since 1980, and a town on the White Nile in the Upper Nile Province of southern Sudan. The connections between these distant sites are political, economic and environmental. Unravelling them reveals the northern government's hand in the felling of old growth and other forests around the White Nile village and a sinister dovetailing between these practices and more local interests elsewhere, including the village on the Dinder and other villages like it and Sudan's growing urban centres. Woodcutting for charcoal production has become a key means for the State to secure revenues; one of the only reliable sources of dry season income for the marginalized rural population of central Sudan; and a hedge against the import of costly cooking fuel for those in the towns. Bibliogr., notes, ref.