One of the most pressing problems confronting development planners in Africa is how to increase local supplies of fuelwood. As explained in a donorcommissioned report at the begining of the current decade:

1. Not nearly enough trees are being planted to meet future rural and urban needs: during the next 20 years, ‘annual fuelwood planting will need to increase by about 15 times over current levels’, and even this assumes optimistically that ‘up to a fourth of future fuelwood demand will be met by conservation or… alternative fuels’. In fact, negligible resources are being devoted to establishing new ‘plantations of any significant size’.2

Several years ago A. O. Hirschman wrote an article entitled ‘The Search for Paradigms as a Hindrance to Understanding’ in which he attempted to ‘delineate various areas in which an impatience for theoretical formulation leads to serious pitfalls’ He reviewed two books which used opposite ‘cognitive styles’ in seeking to elucidate Latin American political development. One author was eager to set forth a paradigm of Columbian politics, and to show that all events–past, present, and future–are explained by the model (which is reducible to 34 stated hypotheses); the other wrote a study of Emiliano Zapata and the Mexican Revolution in which he was extremely reluctant to explain, moralise, or draw conclusions, but whose book is such that ‘whoever reads through [it] will have gained immeasurably in his understanding not only of the Mexican Revolution, but of peasant revolutions everywhere’.