Afghanistan's Forests A Casualty Of Timber Smuggling
Despite Afghanistan's fierce winter, it's rare to find a house with insulation or a modern heating system. So Afghans rely on bukharis, stoves that look like an oil drum with a big rusty pipe growing out of the top that bends off into a hole in the wall.
That fact keeps the hundreds of wood vendors around Kabul quite happy. This winter, NPR staff fed several tons of firewood into their bukhari — and that's just one house in a city of about 5 million people.
"Three, four decades ago, 50 percent of the total land was covered by forest," says Wali Modaqiq, deputy director of Afghanistan's environmental protection agency.
He says that today forests cover only about 2 percent of Afghanistan. He says years of war and drought have felled more trees than wood stoves, which generally burn scrap wood. The big killer of trees, though, is economics.
"There is a huge demand for Afghan timber in the international market," Modaqiq says.
Commercial timber harvesting is illegal in Afghanistan — which leaves a massive smuggling industry to satisfy international demand. The remaining forest is in places like Kunar province bordering Pakistan, which is the main outlet for Afghan timber now.
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