DURING the '60s and '70s, firewood prices in India shot up dramatically following the gross neglect of the needs of people from forests. The ratio of firewood to food grain prices doubled between 1975 and 1985, says firewood expert N C Saxena. The disastrously short-term but attractive economics of this increase was inducement enough to millions of poor tribals to mow down firewood and hawk it in the towns.

Saxena, however, finds that the farm forestry programmes launched during the late '70s and early '80s -- much maligned for infesting the country with the monoculture of eucalyptus plantations -- helped to stem the rapidly increasing fuelwood prices. Eucalyptus plantations boomed in the monetised parts of Gujarat, Haryana, Punjab and western Uttar Pradesh. Because papermills were permitted the cheap import of paper pulp from Canada and other countries. there was a glut in eucalyptus wood, and firewood prices were arrested.

In many other parts of India, casuarina played a similar role to eucalyptus. And in still other parts, it was an exotic tree -- Prosopis juliflora -- that spread without prodding across the degraded rural lands and provided a major source of firewood. The result was that firewood prices behaved very differently in the late '80s than they did in the period 1975-85.

But with the collapse of eucalyptus-based farm forestry in many parts of India, it would be interesting to know what the latest trends in firewood prices are.