Mpingo Fact Sheet

Mpingo Fact Sheet

Miombo* woodlands containing Mpingo and other species once covered vast areas of the African savannah from Ethiopia to South Africa.
Populations of Mpingo suitable for commercial harvesting are now found mainly in Mozambique and Tanzania.
Known locally in Tanzania in the KiSwahili language as the Mpingo tree.
International musical instrument trade brings in $1.5M to local Tanzanian economy (ca. 1992).
A thorny member of the rosewood family whose roots support a specialized bacteria which increases soil fertility.
Miombo woodlands including mpingo as one of its mixed species serve as a barrier to spreading desertification.
The leaves of mpingo serve as fodder for migrating wildlife.
Becoming increasingly known as “The Tree of Music” for its qualities as a material for woodwind instruments.
Premier wood in the world for Ornamental Turning.
Estimated 3 million trees exist today, according to "The Tree of Music" film.
One typical mill on the southern coast of Tanzania processes 600 trees per month.
60 years are required to produce commercially viable trees.
Of the current population, only about 20%, or 600,000 trees, are suitable for harvesting.
At the current extraction rate of 20-30,000 trees per year, the harvestable population diminishes at a rate of 5% per year.
Human-caused burning kills younger trees which are not yet resistant to the effects of fire and causes defects in growing trees.
Replanting and controlling fires are the first steps in replenishing the mpingo.

* "The Miombo Woodlands system is taken to include all those Southern and Central African ecosystems which occur under a hot, subhumid, seasonally-wet climate on soils derived from acid crystalline geologies. The components of this system include woodlands on well-drained soils, and hydromorphic grasslands (called dambos) in drainage lines. Miombo occupy about 5 million square km, and support about 100 million people with food, fuel, building materials, medicines and water." This definition is taken from the Miombo Network. In depth information about the Miombo ecosystem is available on the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme (IGBP) Report 41 page of the Miombo Network website.

** Source for most of the information on this page is the 1992 BBC Television Documentary "The Tree of Music" aired on US PBS television stations on the Nature series. All of the numbers for tree populations and use are estimates, as no firm inventories of Mpingo populations exist and the extraction rate is also uncertain because much illegal felling goes unreported in the local forestry statistics which are derived from the selling of licenses to cut mpingo, a protected species in Tanzania.

THE TREE

REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE MAPUTO CONFERENCE MPINGO CONSERVATION PROJECT

HOME WHAT WHERE WHY WHO HOW