IT is encouraging to learn that government, through the Ministry of Green Economy and Environment, is targeting about one million hectares of land for forestry plantations along the TAZARA Corridor. The idea has an economic logic: plantations can create cargo for the railway, feed wood-processing industries, generate jobs and involve local growers through out-grower schemes. But in our view, Zambia should look beyond the TAZARA Corridor and turn this into a much bigger national reforestation programme. The objective should not be only to create cargo for trains. It should be to recover forests that Zambia has steadily lost over decades. In Zambia today, there are places where forests have disappeared so completely that only the names associated with those forests...