In Zimbabwe and many parts of southern Africa, communities use soil from anthills and termite mounds to make bricks to build homes. To make these bricks, they clear out vegetation around the mounds, break them up, and use the soil to mold bricks that are then baked in place in makeshift kilns fired by wood from nearby trees. This old practice, which has ramped up in recent decades due to urban development, has been taking a big toll on local environments.

The Zimbabwean Environmental Management Agency (EMA) now lists farm brick production as one of the major drivers of deforestation in the country, along with tobacco curing and logging for firewood. National and local agencies are trying to phase out the production and use of these bricks but that has been an uphill task.

In Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, for instance, red farm bricks made from demolishing anthills are illegal. However, as a housing boom transforms the city, lax law enforcement means anthills continue to be under severe pressure, especially from cartels seeking to make quick money by selling cheaply-produced farm bricks.

“It’s an environmental nightmare,” says Nicholas Mabogo, a geography teacher and environment activist in Harare. The further destruction of anthills threatens to bring the city’s natural ecosystem to its knees in the coming decades, he says.

Red farm bricks are banned because making them lays waste natural anthills and the soil ecosystem, especially in dense locations like cities where humans, animals, and plant species live in close proximity, says environmental scientist Shamiso Mupara. “Ants are decomposers. They feed on and thus recycle organic waste, insects or other decomposing animals,” explains Mupara, who is the founder of Tree Buddie Zimbabwe, a nonprofit that seeks to create sustainable communities through social entrepreneurship, especially by establishing nurseries and planting native trees. “If you destroy their habitat, acidity increases on everything from topsoil to fresh water reserves. The science is clear.”

Mabogo, the geography expert, adds that the continued, illegal manufacture of farm bricks will wipe out what’s left of natural anthills in the city, accelerate the loss of topsoil quality across the city, and make it difficult to practice sustainable urban agriculture. The deforestation caused by the brick-making process will also to worsen flooding during the rainy season.

Additionally, the huge pits left behind when the mounds are excavated collect water when it rains and become breeding grounds for mosquitoes that carry malaria and dengue viruses. Animals, and sometimes even humans, have drowned in these pits.

“It’s myopic — the deliberate destruction of anthills to cash in on farm bricks coupled with burning of wetlands will make Harare city an ecological wasteland unable to regulate plant and animal biodiversity,” says the concerned geography teacher.

Harare is designed to carry about one million people, but to the city is currently home to around 1.6 million according to multiple statistics databases that are poorly integrated. In 2021, authorities vowed to build 220,000 new houses by 2025 in order to meet this growing population’s housing demand.

“Anthills preservation is hardly in the mind of policy makers,” Mabogo adds.

Soil from anthills and termite mounds is also used for various other purposes, including as a natural fertilizer spread over fields, for plastering houses, and making earthen pots and pans. Additionally, the insects provide local communities with nutritious, protein dense foods: termites and ants have been a part of the diet of many African cultures for centuries. The farm brick industry is impacting these uses as well.

Phineas Moyo, 31, who owns one of the hundreds of informal (now illegal) farm brick companies populating Harare, says the practice continues because it’s a “lucrative” business bringing in about $30 per 1,000 bricks. Thus, farm bricks are cheaper to make and thus sell faster than the more expensive industrial bricks, he adds.

“$1 billion coming into Zimbabwe from Zimbabwe immigrants living in the US and Europe and sparking a frenzied housing construction market . Many realtors, brick companies are cutting corners to dig anthills, and mold red farm bricks for profit,” he says.

In Zimbabwe, police and the Environmental Management Agency officials often arrest red farm brick makers and levy fines of up to $1,000. However, “it’s a piecemeal effort. There’s too much money at play and bribes are the order of the day,” Mabogo says.

Zimbabwe police did not answer requests for comment on allegations that their officers take bribes to allow farm brick operations continue, though police spokesperson, Paul Nyathi, recently said the force had “zero tolerance” policy on bribe taking.

The commercial exploitation of Zimbabwe’s urban anthills come on top of the widespread destruction of Harare’s wetlands or vleis — low-lying, marshy wet grasslands within and around the city that get covered with water during the rainy season — which are a primary source of the city’s water.

Between 2008 and 2019, Zimbabwe’s capital lost 784 hectares of wetlands to structural development, representing a loss of almost half of the city’s total wetland hectare, Climate Justice Central revealed in 2021. Harare’s chronic water shortage is being made worse by the destruction of its wetlands.

“It’s all connected –—wetland ruin attacking the city’s water, animal and forest ecosystems, and merging with the wave of anthill digging and destruction,” says Tapiwa Nhachi, a former research scientist with the Centre for Natural Resources Governance in Harare.

These is still time to stop the damage farmbricks do on urban anthills and ecosystems in Zimbabwe, says Nhachi. The solutions are multi-faceted and include, strictly policing commercial homebuilders to comply with proper industrial bricks rules, encouraging alternative building components like fabricated steel which can cut the need for soil-based bricks, and starting a municipal reforestation drive to repopulates farm bricks sites with new vegetation cover to ensure ecosystems recovery.

Unless these measures are put in place across Zimbabwe, the country, where 42 percent of arable land has already turned semi-arid, is set to see 10 percent more land turn into semi-desert land in 15 years, predicts Mabogo.