by John Wilson*
Africa has a very wide range of environments but it is possible to cluster certain areas. I will then address the issue of the need to design sustainable agricultural strategies suited to each of those environments.
Starting in the south, there is the isolated Mediterranean climate of the Cape in South Africa. Then there is the one rainy season climate which covers most of South Africa, Lesotho, Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Mozambique, central and southern Tanzania and the south of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The amount of total rainfall varies in all these areas and can be very low and it can be quite high, but the common factor is that all of these places except for some high altitude areas, receive rain during one rainy season for about 4 -5 months each year. In the lingo of Holistic Management these areas are known as brittle.
Non-brittle areas include the tropical areas that are hot and generally with fairly good distribution of moisture during the year. These cover the east coast of Africa, central African countries such as DRC, much of Cameroon, and a lot of West Africa not too far from the coast.
Then there are the cooler and moist climates that one finds in the south of Kenya, parts of the north of Tanzania, the south of Uganda, and in Rwanda and Burundi. These are also non-brittle environments but cooler than the hot tropics.
Then, going north, one comes to the Sahel region which is huge and goes from the hot tropical areas of West Africa and the cooler tropical areas of east Africa until where the Sahara begins. Like in the case of southern Africa, these are brittle environments with a great variation in the amount of rainfall, but sharing the characteristic that the rain only falls in one rainy season.
This is a simplified overview of the climates of Africa.
In order to design sustainable strategies it is really important to understand the impact of approaches on the different environments. I would like to look a little more closely at brittle environments to illustrate this. To remind you, brittle environments are those that have one rainy season and a long dry spell. These are also sometimes called drylands.
Take the effect of ploughing in these environments, for example. If one ploughs land and leaves it uncovered and exposed to the long dry months of hot sun, you very quickly lose organic matter in the soil through oxidation.
In Zimbabwe research has shown that clay soils go from around 4% organic matter to less than one per cent in five years of annual ploughing. Sandy soils go from around 3% to less than one per cent in as little as three years. Ploughing is lethal in such environments, though it is very seductive because it brings good yields in the first few years. Thereafter it only brings good yields with large doses of fertiliser. There is some work now going on around zero tillage which we can build on, but which is still only reaching small numbers of farmers.
The bulk of many of these brittle areas are grazing areas which depend on livestock to be sustainable. Most of the total rain falls onto grazing areas, the rainfall that could keep feeding streams and rivers and the underground aquifers and thus be available to irrigate food production in the long dry season. This rainfall is now more and more running off and causing huge erosion and floods – Mozambique is a country that suffers almost every year from the flooding caused by run off in Malawi, Zimbabwe and South Africa.
Unfortunately there seems to be a lot of misunderstandings about these grasslands or grazing areas because of a prejudice against livestock. These areas depend on livestock to keep them healthy. For millions of years it was animals such as buffalo, wildebeest and zebra - the big herding animals. In most places it is now not possible to have these large herding animals. In the last couple of millenia or so people have replaced them with livestock, mostly cattle and goats.
The problem is not the cattle and goats, but the way we manage them. These single rainy season (i.e. brittle) environments produce huge volumes of carbon in the form of grass. For this grass to recycle it needs to go through animals. If it does not, it either oxidises and is lost to the air like the carbon in exposed soil mentioned earlier, or the grass is burnt, again losing the carbon to the air.
While many northern countries are contributing huge amounts of carbon to global warming from industrial activities, southern Africa is doing this through burning of grasslands each year. Go to Zambia, southern DRC and Tanzania and northern Mozambique during the months of August to October and you can’t see the ground if you are flying over them because of the thick smoke in the air; year in year out.
All that carbon is lost to the air instead of going into the soil via livestock where it would do immeasurable good. Sustainable management of resources in these vast areas will require having decent amounts of livestock well managed. There is lots of learning to do here and prejudices to be overcome. And there is very little work currently going on that I know of around finding sustainable ways of managing the vast grazing areas of Africa.
What are required are ways of thinking that enable practitioners to approach management of resources in a holistic way. This is where the potential of permaculture as a discipline and other approaches such as Holistic Management come in. They reflect a new paradigm. And in the case of much of Africa they provide a link with traditional practices of the past, ways of interacting and being with the world that themselves were/are holistic.
The dominant thinking in Europe and America is reductionist and short term and works very well in the development of technologies. It, however, is not effective when it comes to more complex, longer-term issues – dealing with the kinds of questions that need a holistic approach. It is in holistic thinking that Africa’s hope and potential lies, particularly where one is thinking in terms of sustainability.
As we move into this era of global warming where the danger signs are being recognised but where there is a dearth of “solutions,” I cannot overstate the potential of permaculture as a discipline, as a way of looking at and interacting with the world. Many of the solutions that are being put forward are still stuck in the old mechanistic paradigm. This is true of many of the “sustainable agriculture” approaches, for example. Permaculture provides a holistic way to approach sustainability.
