Prospects and pitfalls along Sahel's anti-desertification Great Green Wall

Former goat-herder Samba Ba proudly points to a row of metre-high acacia trees growing amid the fine
grasses that are the only other vegetation in this part of northern Senegal's arid savannah. "Planting trees is a blessing - trees mean life. We call this the Nile River of the Sahel."

Ba hopes that in time the trees will bear black fruits that can be used as goat-feed. He and his fellow villagers are also planting the Sahel acacia, which produces a gum with medicinal properties, the tamarind, which has edible bitter-sweet fruit, and the desert date or "sump" tree, which bears small fruits whose oil can be used in cooking. These are all thorny trees with small leaves, the only kind that can survive in the arid conditions.

Sedentary and semi-nomadic Fulani herdsmen are planting five hectares of vegetable and fruit crops and approximately 1,000 trees as part of the Great Green Wall project ("La Grande Muraille Verte"), an ambitious pan-African environmental programme designed to combat desertification along the southern edge of the Sahara and provide nomadic populations with extra livelihoods while enhancing their food security.

The scheme falls within the framework of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, which aims to decrease poverty and improve food sources, and is being supported by the Global Environment Facility (GEF). Donors have pledged US$3 billion to the 11 participating countries: Burkina Faso, Chad, Djibouti, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Sudan.

The governments of these 11 Sahelian states intend that 20 years from now, a giant hedge, 15km wide and 7,000km long, spreading across two million hectares, will help slow the advancing desert and impede the hot winds that increase erosion.

"The wall is just the final result. What we're looking for... is to protect and improve the eco-systems of these Sahel regions, and [through this] to improve the diets, health, lifestyle and environment of the Savannah people," said Matar Cissé, director general of the national agency implementing the project, in the Senegalese capital, Dakar.

Chronic drought has made it increasingly difficult for Fulani nomads to make a traditional living as pastoralists. Ba, 42, a Fulani who has settled in the village of Mbar Toubab, 100km south of where the Sahara desert starts in neighbouring Mauritania, says herdsmen would consider settling in such villages if they could earn a living by growing and selling fruit and vegetables.


Cissé said, "We are, we hope, developing a system that will help these people help themselves to stay in one place, create jobs and raise their own incomes. For the nomadic peoples, this could fundamentally change the way they live."


Villagers are taught how to plant market gardens and use drip irrigation by connecting a small elevated water tank to perforated pipes that deliver small amounts of water to each plant. "We travel great distances in search of pasture and water. If this project is successful... this area won't be hopeless any more," Ba said. "To have water and food to feed ourselves and our animals on our doorstep can only be beneficial."

A Niger government study found that pastoralists with small herds had lost 90 percent of their livestock in successive droughts.

So far, the 133 women participating in the scheme in Mbar Toubab have produced lettuce, tomatoes, onions, potatoes, okra, aubergines, watermelons, carrots, cabbages and turnips. Their mango and orange trees have yet to bear fruit, said Kumba Ka, President of the Gardening association, who walks six km every day to work in her garden

Many villagers thought something like this would never be possible. "We're growing so many different types of vegetables that normally only grow where water is deep," Ka said.

Such a project must be based on market research that identifies who will be able to buy the vegetables, where, and at what prices, if it is to support livelihoods and food security, said Peter Gubbels, West Africa coordinator of NGO Groundswell International and author of the Sahel Working Group's recent report, Escaping the Hunger Cycle: Pathways to Resilience in the Sahel.

The Great Green Wall could play an important role in environmental management and supporting nomadic livelihoods, but it must not be seen as "the solution" to food security, Gubbels said. The project risks being too ambitious by taking on desertification as well as food security, which are separate issues, requiring separate solutions.


Food insecurity in the Sahel is largely due to a growing gap between rich and poor, with an "underclass of the bottom 30 percent" living in chronic poverty, he said. Solutions include subsidized prices, social protection schemes, and disaster reduction, among many others.

Desertification is what forces people to migrate. "In the popular imagination desertification is about billowing sand dunes advancing at a rate of two kilometres a year, but... [it] is the overuse of natural resources, over-grazing, intensive farming and the subsequent erosion of land-pockets that become completely denuded and then join together," Gubbels said.

Tree-planting projects to combat desertification work best when the trees are owned by the farmers themselves, said Chris Reij, coordinator of the African Regreening Initiative.

Gubbels noted that "Usually only 20 percent of newly planted trees will survive... so there is a high risk to tree-planting... unless we mobilize millions of [farmers] to invest in trees as well as manage them themselves, the battle against desertification cannot be won."

The most innovative projects to improve the lives and livelihoods of pastoralists are being developed by the pastoralists themselves, with the help of NGOs, said Reij. In Niger they have established settlement sites where they plant trees and market gardens alongside health and education services. Pastoralists then migrate from these points.

Rather than using such schemes to encourage the nomads to settle - which often leads to tension with sedentary communities - a combination of mobility and agriculture is the most risk-averse survival strategy. "[Partial] mobility...is a much better and less risky strategy than staying in one place... [which] leads to over-grazing," and if the area does not get much rainfall that year, "you are much more vulnerable," Gubbels pointed out.


In a worst-case scenario, "[Without] sufficient technical guidance and support... [for the Great Green Wall], in a few years you'll see a broken-down tractor, a scattering of a few small trees in the village plantation, a few families benefiting from the market gardening, and little positive overall change, with the poorest families as chronically vulnerable as before," Gubbels said.

However, if the ambitious project is seen as a framework for funding and a platform for sharing information across the 11 Sahelian states, he said, it could positively impact the lives and livelihoods of pastoralists.


IRIN

Livestock management is key to less desertification

by Jean Ekeroth

Livestock is the only management tool available to stop the increasing desertification associated with climate change, according to a grazing management pioneer.

Allan Savory of the Savory Institute and Africa Centre for Holistic Management (ACHM)said even though his assessment was unpopular and contradicted conventionally accepted scientific knowledge, history showed human management of livestock was at fault.

Savory said deserts were advancing faster as agricultural practices produced more eroding-soil than food, with conservative estimates at around four tonnes of eroding soil per human every year.

"It's not a case of adapting to climate change, we need to address it," he said.

Savory's ideas started forming during his time as a game ranger, when he noticed the African savannah could support extremely large herds of herbivores year after year without degradation. By contrast, land destocked according to accepted optimum grazing management practice and allowed to return to wilderness was becoming increasingly desertified.

The prevailing academic view was that resting rangeland was the best practice but Savory concluded that areas of occasional heavy impact grazing that mimicked natural grazing patterns actually improved vegetation growth...

full article...Farmonline

Fighting desertification: The great green wall of the Sahara

The rainy season has started in the rest of the country, but in Widou, in the heart of the Ferlo region in northern Senegal, the first raindrops won't fall until the end of July. In these tough times between harvests, most of the flocks have migrated to the south in hopes of grazing. There, on the brown and parched land, all that is left is a pitiful-looking green carpet burned by the sun and trampled by animals.

Just 100 meters away, an open-air lab is writing a new page of the region's history. In the tree nursery built by the Water and Forests Department, men are working, hose in hand. The women, bent over rows of small plastic containers, plant seedlings that will have to be ready for when the first rain arrives. This year, they need 390,000 of them.

Widou is one of the first communities selected by the Senegalese government to start the Great Green Wall project, a pan-African initiative launched in 2007 by the African Union. The goal is to create a wall of trees — 15 km wide and 7,600 km long — from Dakar to Djibouti to help slow desertification. Eleven countries are participating, but Senegal, where 535 km of the wall are planned, is the first country where the project is starting to take shape.

Colonel Matar Cisse, an environmental engineer, is wearing army fatigues and a cap. "The Great Green Wall is a crazy project!" he admits. But he quickly brushes away the idea that this project is about building an impenetrable wall. "It wouldn't make any sense," he says. "It's better to see it as us trying to make the forest denser wherever possible, to develop water retention, create natural reserves for the fauna, which has almost completely disappeared." For Cisse, the wall image works because it shows that they've "decided to colonize the desert instead of being at its mercy."

Cisse is also the head of the Great Green Wall National Agency and, as such, is in charge of turning this dream into reality. "We will succeed. We have the best scientists, and we have some experience," he says with a wide grin. Since 2008, reforestation has gained 5,000 hectares per year. "That's a first," says his colleague Pape Sarr, in charge of technical operations.

With time, agronomists, botanists and soil specialists have improved their work. First, they had to select the right species to plant. Seven were selected not only according to how they would adapt to the roughness of the terrain, but also for what they could give to the neighboring populations: the Acacia senegal for its gum arabic, the Balanite tree for its berries and oil, the Zyzyphus for its fruit. "We must plant trees people won't want to cut down," says Aliou Guisse, plant-ecology professor at the Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar.

The distance between trees was increased to limit competition between plants. "The soil is extremely depleted: in order for reforestation to be viable, it must be reconstituted with a higher concentration of bacteria. It's one of the main constraints of this project. We will have to wait seven or eight years to see if [our efforts have] worked," warns René Bally, research director at the French National Center for Scientific Research.

Reforested parcels of land — from 500 to 2,000 hectares in area — will be surrounded by a fence for five years. Cattle farmers will be able to get special authorized access. "First, I remind them of the rules — no machetes and no matches — then I give them a permit that allows them to cut the grass for their flocks or sell it," explains Omar Faye, who is charged with regulating access to land on the project.

The Great Green Wall is certainly a technical challenge. But it is also an ethical one. "If we can't convince the people that this project will give them a better life, we will fail," warns Guisse.

Employing only about 30 technicians, the Great Green Wall agency doesn't have the means to have a strong presence in the field, meaning it will soon be up to the people themselves to look after the project. In Windou, residents have a proven penchant for that kind of responsibility, with a successful 7-hectare vegetable-garden project just outside the town. There, 300 women produce tomatoes, salad, melons and potatoes. They quickly learned how to sow, replant, fertilize with manure, and harvest. "Last year, these women made more than €1,500 from the part of the harvest they sold on the market," says Momar Mbaye Ba, who's in charge of the project.

"In about three years we'll be autonomous," says Fatou Aidara, president of the Garden Commission. She's lived there forever, witnessed the great droughts of the '70s and '80s that killed people and animals. She also saw hopes crushed by several development projects designed by international-cooperation groups. She wants to believe that this time, promises will be kept.

Time

Senegal farmers fight desertification with trees

by George Fominyen

Dame Diop looks at the green leaves of trees growing on the sandy Sahelian soil of his Senegal village, Khatre Sy, and says...“The trees had disappeared because of many droughts and also because people were cutting them for firewood and for fodder for livestock,” he added. “We felt we would not survive if this desertification continued so we decided to act.”

The people...decided to pool their farmlands together and zone off sections to allow trees – mainly varieties of the African acacia – to regenerate. They used some of the regeneration sites as farmlands where they planted crops – groundnuts, millet and sorghum.

During the rainy season, crops are planted and can get nitrogen from falling leaves as the trees enter dormancy, while the tree’s bare branches don’t block sunlight. The trees also produce seed pods which are used as fodder for livestock.

The result of the initiative is growing hectares of parkland – agro-forests – which some researchers see as vital in providing a barrier against desertification in the semi-arid Sahel region which runs south of the Sahara desert.

full article...Alertnet

Shrinking Lake Chad turning farmland into desert

by Isha Sesay

From droughts causing bad harvests, to floods destroying farms and homes, life in Africa's Sahel belt can be a constant struggle.

The arid belt of land stretches from Senegal in the west, all the way across the continent to Ethiopia in the east. With the Sahara to the north, and the savannah to the south, it's a region that experiences extreme dry and wet seasons.

In the middle of it all is Lake Chad, the most reliable resource in this region of shifting extremes. More than 20 million people depend on the freshwater lake for their survival. But it's been shrinking over the past 50 years and satellite images show it is now just a twentieth of its former size.

Huge expanses of water are now nothing more than a series of ponds and islands, and the once-fertile land that surrounds the lake is now dusty and barren.

"If there are solutions we must find them," said Farid Dembell, from the Society for the Development of Lake Region. "The lake is in the process of disappearing and the lake feeds many people, not just here but in other countries like Nigeria, Cameroon and Niger," he continued. "They are all people who live on Lake Chad."

The way of life in this area stretches back centuries and many earn a living fishing in the lake.

Locals report that they are catching less fish and the ones that they do catch are smaller than they used to be.

A declining stock could have devastating consequences far beyond the water's edge, says Yakowra Mallom, from UNICEF.

"At the start we didn't know anything about the problem of malnutrition," she said. "But now the figures are enormous. The children are all malnourished. There are no more fish. There's no more milk, no maize, no vegetables or cereal."

Local communities say the changing weather is the biggest reason for the shrinking of the lakes shores. The necessary irrigation of farming land has also been a factor.

But some people are making efforts to save their livelihoods.

A small local group is trying to save the surrounding land by planting trees in the villages that have been worst affected by desertification. If they cannot bring back the lake, they hope there will at least be workable land.

Saleh Sagoubi heads up the Tree Planting Association, a volunteer organization that has around 50 young members.

"I was born here and I grew up here," he said. "I want the lake to come back, not just for me, but for the children of the future."

Sagoubi blames climate change for turning much of the once-fertile land of the Sahel into desert. His group is trying to hold back the Sahara with a "great green wall" of drought-resistant trees.

"To stop the Sahara we must make lots of effort day and night -- we must work," he said.

"The desert will be stopped one day by trees; they are our weapons of mass destruction."

CNN

Climate extremes make survival in the Sahel harder all the time

In some ways Alhaji Bunu Fodio is lucky: at least his house is still standing. Most of Kagara, his dusty village in Nigeria’s far north, was smashed to smithereens during this year’s rainy season when an unexpected deluge burst a nearby dam. Floods destroyed homes and farms in at least a dozen nearby villages. Mr Fodio lost his entire harvest of maize and sorghum.

Kagara lies on the edge of the Sahel, an arid belt of land on the Sahara desert’s southern fringe that spans Africa from Senegal in the west to parts of Ethiopia in the east, and is constantly battling the elements. During the Sahel’s nine-month dry season, roughly from October to June, the subsistence farmers who make up most of its inhabitants eagerly await the rain. Temperatures can touch 50 degrees Celsius. Many go hungry towards the end of these dry months, known as the “lean season.” The United Nations Children’s Fund, better known as UNICEF, says that malnutrition kills 225,000 children a year in five Sahelian countries alone (Burkina Faso, Chad, Mali, Mauritania and Niger).

But now the rains have started bringing problems too. Farmers and aid workers say rainfall has been more erratic and stormy for at least the past five years, though it is unclear whether any areas are getting more water overall. Kagara is just one pocket of woe; an hour’s drive north, this year’s floods left over 50,000 people homeless in the desert country of Niger. Ruined harvests caused crippling food shortages that put more than half of the population at risk of going hungry in the spring. Countries across the Sahelian belt have suffered similar deluges. The number of those who routinely lose crops, cattle or houses in such floods has been rising steadily since 2005.

So the Sahel’s inhabitants are increasingly facing a cycle of extreme dry and wet spells, raising doubts as to whether the region is really habitable at all. Each season seems to exacerbate the problems of the next. When torrential rains destroy crops, Sahelians are even likelier to suffer from food shortages in the following dry months. “This next season will be very worrying,” says Carlos Muñoz, an adviser in west Africa for Oxfam, one of several aid agencies in the area.

The rest of the world spends vast sums sustaining life in the Sahel. The UN’s World Food Programme, which is funded largely by governments of rich countries, has asked its backers for $300m-plus to spend on emergency aid this year. The European Union has spent €74m ($98m) providing food vouchers and arranging cash-for-work schemes, among other things. Other groups forked out for tents and cholera treatment during the floods. Such handouts helped ensure that Niger’s food shortages did not cause a full-blown famine earlier this year.

Mr Muñoz acknowledges that repeated bouts of emergency action are no way to tackle a recurring problem. But donors are more willing to stump up cash for dramatic emergencies than for prevention, where success is harder to measure. “This is more expensive but more sexy,” he says. “Donors like to see impact.”

The biggest fear is that climate change will make survival for the people of the Sahel impossible. Scientists disagree on whether the belt will get drier or wetter in coming decades, but either is generally bleak. Some predict 25% less rain a year by 2100. Others predict a 25% increase that, if the rain came in isolated bursts, would mean more of those destructive floods.

In any case, Petra Tschakert, an expert in climate-change adaptation in west Africa at Pennsylvania State University, says the main concern is the ever more unpredictable and violent rainfall, not the amount. “Farmers can adapt to trends. They cannot adapt to extreme weather,” she says. One of the few areas of scientific consensus is that Sahel temperatures are rising and will rise further in the coming years. This can disrupt rainfall patterns and provoke storms, as warmer air is capable of holding more moisture. Some farmers in northern Nigeria are already noticing such changes. “We had to plant four times last year,” says a villager in Kagara, who lost of a third of his maize crop through false starts. “Each time the rain had started but then it suddenly stopped.”

Some longer-term solutions are being tried out. Mali’s government has made big efforts to irrigate farmland, largely thanks to loans from outfits such as the African Development Bank. A project near its Bani river began in February. Farmers in several countries are planting “short-cycle” crops, such as a kind of maize that can be harvested in three months instead of the more usual five.

The nascent weather-insurance industry offers hope too. Both farmers and aid agencies can buy this insurance, which uses complex indices to track climatic patterns and predict crop yields. Insurance companies can resell some of the risk in capital markets using “weather derivatives” and “catastrophe bonds”. This, it is claimed, is working well in India.

A snag, however, is that the data for such indices are lacking in much of the poor and remote Sahel, though fledgling schemes have been tried in Ethiopia since 2006. Some Sahelian governments charge outside bodies for gathering the data. Mannava Sivakumar at the World Meteorological Organisation, another UN body, says many of the Sahel’s weather stations report to the outfit’s central hub half as often as they should—or not at all. “How can a doctor help you if he cannot take your temperature?” he asks.

Some Sahel-watchers say the inhabitants must seek alternatives to reliance on cattle or crops: easier said than done. “In most cases, there is food available but people cannot afford it,” says Sibiri Jean Zoundi, an agricultural economist at the Sahel and West Africa Club, a coalition of the region’s governments and foreign-aid groups started by the rich-country OECD. Imported food is almost always available after failed harvests, but it is costly. Crippling poverty means that some families go hungry even after good harvests. Moreover, the Sahel’s population is growing at 2.6%, more than twice the global rate, outpacing economic growth. The size of plots is ever diminishing. More people are being forced to settle in flood-prone areas.

Back in Kagara, Mr Fodio is wondering how to feed his two wives and ten children in the coming months. “We are looking to the donors,” he says, sporting the fez-style cap worn by Nigeria’s mostly Muslim northerners. “And, of course, we are looking to Allah.”

The Economist

Libya taps 'fossil water' to irrigate desert farms

by Sarah A. Topol

In the middle of the Libyan Desert’s scorched yellow sands, rows of green grapes dangle off vines; almond trees blossom in neat lines, and pear tree orchards stretch into the distance.


Libya is one of the driest countries on Earth, bereft of rivers, lakes, and rain. But here the desert is blooming.

In the Middle East and North Africa, the quest to turn thousands of miles of desert into arable land has taken a backseat to containing an impending water shortage. While many countries in the region bicker over water rights, Libya has taken it upon itself to change its topography – turning sand into soil.


The Great Man-Made River, which is leader Muammar Qaddafi's ambitious answer to the country’s water problems, irrigates Libya’s large desert farms. The 2,333-mile network of pipes ferry water from four major underground aquifers in southern Libya to the northern population centers. Wells punctuate the water’s path, allowing farmers to utilize the water network in their fields.

The Libyan government says the 26-year project has cost $19.58 billion. Nearing completion, the Great Man-Made River is the largest irrigation project in the world and the government says it intends to use it to develop 160,000 hectares (395,000 acres) of farmland. It is also the cheapest available option to irrigate fields in the water-scarce country, which has an average annual rainfall of about one inch.

“Rainfall is just concentrated in 5 percent of the [country’s] area, so more or less, 95 percent or 90 percent of our land is desert,” says Abdul Magid al-Kaot, minister of agriculture, during a PowerPoint presentation that accompanied a recent several-hour government tour of the project and farms outside the capital of Tripoli. “Water is more precious for us than oil. ... Water here in Libya, it’s life.”


Just as Libya mines the desert for crude; they are doing the same for ‘fossil water’ – ice age water preserved in the porous holes of the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer. The massive aquifer stretches under Libya, Egypt, Chad, and Sudan. It includes four freshwater basins inside Libya that contain approximately 10,000 to 12,000 cubic kilometers (480 cubic miles) of ancient water buried as deep as 600 meters (2,000 feet) below the surface of the desert, reporters were told during the government presentation.


Libya moves the precious resource from the ground to five giant above-ground reservoirs through pre-stressed concrete pipes, weighing 75-86 tons, that run 20 feet underground. Cranes weighing 450 tons operated on specially constructed roads to install the mammoth cylinders.


Other countries also drill for underground water, but none do so as intensely as Libya. The country is pulling up 2.5 million cubic meters per day, with the expectation of eventually pumping 6.5 million. Experts liken the project to moving 2.5 million Volkswagen Beetles more than 2000 miles every day – one car weighs roughly the same as a cubic meter of water, which is 2200 pounds.

New drip irrigation techniques are being used to ensure water does not go to waste. More than 70 percent of the water is intended for subsided domestic agriculture, with the rest for citizen consumption. None is reserved for heavy industry, according to the government.


Although it is cheaper for Libya to pump the underground water than use desalination or import the substance, experts are wary of Libya’s decision to irrigate large scale farms with fossil water.

“For Libya this is pretty expensive water. It’s not as expensive as desalinated water, but to irrigate with it is probably not cost effective at the purest sense,” says Aaron Wolf, professor and chair of the department of Geosciences at Oregon State University. “If the farmer had to pay the full cost of pumping and shipping the water to them, they wouldn’t break even on their agriculture, that’s why other countries aren’t doing it.”

The Libyan government heavily subsidizes the water for farmers who pay about $0.62 for one cubic meter; slightly less than half the price citizens pay to drink it.

“This is basically a wonder of the world, because it’s exactly like the pyramids – it’s huge and massive and probably not cost effective,” says Mr. Wolf.

The Libyan government says reserves will last the country 4,625 years according to current rates of demand. But independent estimates indicate that the aquifer could be depleted in as soon as 60 to 100 years, says Stephen Longhorn, a professor of geography at the University of Victoria in Canada

“The main concerns with any non-renewable resource are the depletion rate and the dependency that is built up by using the resource,” he wrote in an e-mail to the Monitor.

“The knock on these projects is that once the water runs out, there is a dependency that can only be met in the future by desalination or importing water," Mr. Longhorn continues. Projects like this create "a legacy that may have short term gains but ultimately makes the country or region very vulnerable in the future.”

For now, as giant sprinklers mist a 100,000 olive tree nursery in a greenhouse surrounded by sand on the outskirts of Tripoli, Libyan fields are flourishing.

Christian Science Monitor 

How livestock might revitalize degraded agricultural lands

by Darious Dixon

Allan Savory's project, titled "Operation Hope," is an ongoing effort to reverse the desertification that is spreading across the world's savannas and grasslands like a disease. It is rapidly changing farmland into deserts.

What makes the effort unusual for Savory, a biologist, is his use of what he called "the most universally condemned tool in the world" -- livestock. Farming is perhaps the oldest means by which humans have affected the world's climate.

The destruction of healthy soil by compaction, overgrazing and toxic levels of manure that poison the earth and emit climate-warming methane are some of the reasons raising livestock has traditionally been discouraged as an environmentally conscious farming technique.

But Savory was not impressed by environmentalists' arguments, nor by the efforts of commercial seed companies to engineer genetically modified crops to be drought-resistant. "Any scientist can grow green plants with technology," he said. What was unsustainable was "to be growing more green plants on soil that is failing us."

The technique Savory devised does not simply rotate the herds from one nearby plot of land to another but couples their migration with military precision.

Key to the procedure, he said, was to protect the animals from predators at night while continuing to move the herd during the day, as if they were being followed by lions and other stalkers. By doing so, his herding teams can recreate some of the environmental patterns that existed before human communities domesticated the animals and concentrated their distribution.

The technique calls for controlling the herd's movements with great timing. Savory adapted his techniques of command and control from the British Army. All of this, he said, was to ensure that the animals be "in the right place at the right time, for the right reasons and the right behavior," so that they do not overwhelm the vegetation.

In the beginning, the damage was small

It may sound like a nutty idea to some, but Savory's before-and-after results presented graphic proof that it can work. Last week, Savory and a sister organization based in his native Zimbabwe, the Africa Centre for Holistic Management, were awarded the $100,000 Buckminster Fuller Challenge prize for their creative techniques in sustainable agriculture. The prize was announced by the Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI) at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

At the beginning of human experiments with agriculture, the effects of changing the patterns of nomadic traditions and thus altering the landscape to suit the farmer's specific purpose were negligible for small communities.

But as the world prepares to welcome its 9 billionth person by 2050, new methods of cultivating crops without ecological hazard are increasingly difficult and problematic. Choosing the wrong agricultural technique can have major consequences on global climate and human society.

"Twenty civilizations have failed due to environmental degradation," explained Savory, who is president and co-founder of the Savory Institute. He said the degradation in almost all of the cases was due to poor agricultural management, calling it "a 10,000-year-old problem."

It is no longer small. Thirty-eight percent of the world's land area is in danger of becoming desert, according to a paper published in the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment this February and announced on NASA's Earth Observatory website. Much of the loss to desertification has been due to overuse or poor farming techniques, which eventually lead to Dust Bowl-like conditions causing droughts, erosion, conflict and human migration.

The loss of soil to desert sands not only renders most of the land unusable for agriculture, it also takes away a critical tool for absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Soil is classified by the U.S. Geological Survey as "the most stable long-term surface reservoir for carbon." The U.N. Convention to Combat Desertification estimates that soil, as a sink for carbon dioxide, provides a larger reservoir than either vegetation or the atmosphere, calling its sequestration capabilities "unparalleled."

The Fuller prize, now in its third year, is intended to encourage "anticipatory" solutions to "humanity's most pressing problems." Submissions for the competition tackled most of the big-ticket issues, including energy and water consumption, poverty and climate change.

The six finalists each had an overview of their work presented in a short video, which is available on the BFI website. Projects ranged from an infrastructure model for diverting Chicago's rainwater into Lake Michigan to a solar panel installation training program for rural women in Africa. Along with verification, each project is graded on feasibility, ecological responsibility and ease of replication at different scales.

Allegra Fuller Snyder, daughter of the famous inventor and architect Richard Buckminster Fuller and co-founder of BFI, attended the ceremony to greet the finalists. She said that the challenge was an extension of her father's legacy, as his ideas were often considered unconventional for his time, as well.

Fuller is best known for his design of geodesic domes, familiar to any visitor of Disney's Epcot Center and every student of chemistry, who will know his name for the buckminsterfullerene, or buckyball, a spherical arrangement of 60 carbon atoms that resemble Fuller's domes. The challenge competition began on a five-year funding.

After the ceremony completed, Savory and his wife, Jody Butterfield, said similar desertification reversal efforts were taking place in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the northeastern United States.

Savory said their effort in Zimbabwe already receives some funding from the government, so the prize money will go toward improving the living conditions of the herders and laborers whose round-the-clock efforts make his system work.

Scientific American

Israel to help African farmers fight desert

by David Lewis

Having "conquered the desert" at home, Israel is ready to share technology and skills with African countries struggling to sustain agricultural output due to increasingly unreliable rains, an Israeli minister said.

Shalom Simhon, Israel's minister of agriculture and rural development, said sharing know-how, especially in irrigation and water management, was his focus on a tour of Senegal, Ivory Coast and Gabon. His trip comes as some 10 million people in West and Central Africa face food shortages due to failed rains.

"We are not arriving here in Africa to take resources from the African countries. We are coming here in order to give know-how and abilities to these countries to develop," Simhon said in Senegal.

"Israel is the only country in the world that has been able to conquer the desert. More than 50 percent of our exports are coming from semi-arid areas. This is our strength -- this we would like to bring here."

Simhon said Israel could help Senegal reduce dependence on imports, which currently account for around 80 percent of food needs. "Senegal's traditional agriculture is one crop a year. We know how to do three and four crops a year. We can teach that."

The minister would not give any figures on proposed Israeli aid to African farming or detail the role of Israeli companies in such programmes. Already Senegal hosts several Israeli-funded projects looking at using low-pressure drip irrigation to increase productivity.

Israeli farmers have been heavily involved in modern developments in irrigation, including drip irrigation systems and water recycling methods. Some experts believe these techniques could become invaluable in Africa's arid growing regions, which risk becoming increasingly vulnerable to climate change.

"One of the most important things is the water technology and usage. The world is drying up. There is less water, there is less rain days," Simhon said. "In Israel we are using recycled water, desalinated water, rain water, salty water, which almost anywhere in the world we will not have any use for but that we use to make the sweetest tomatoes," he added.

Simhon said advances in technology had allowed Israeli farmers to use 30 percent less water while almost doubling output over the last decade, leaving the country with a 150 percent food surplus.

"We have over-production in Israel. It would have been very easy for us just to load the boat or the airplane ... but we think we can do it differently," he said.

Reuters

'Great Green Wall' attempts to stop spread of Sahara Desert

by Christine Dell'Amore

China built its famous Great Wall to keep out marauders. Now, millennia later, a "Great Green Wall" may rise in Africa to deter another, equally relentless invader: sand.

The proposed wall of trees would stretch from Senegal to Djibouti as part of a plan to thwart the southward spread of the Sahara, Senegalese officials said last month at the UN's Copenhagen climate conference.

The trees are meant "to stop the advancement of the desert," Senegalese president and project leader Abdoulaye Wade said in Copenhagen.

In many central and West African countries surrounding the Sahara, climate change has slowed rainfall to a trickle, according to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Crops have died and soils have eroded—crippling local agriculture. If the trend continues, the UN forecasts that two-thirds of Africa's farmland may be swallowed by Saharan sands by 2025.

Trees are almost always formidable foes against encroaching deserts, said Patrick Gonzalez of the University of California, Berkeley's Center for Forestry. That's because stands of trees act as natural windbreaks against sandstorms, and their roots improve soil health—especially by preventing erosion.

But choosing the right tree species to populate the wall will be crucial to the project's success, Gonzalez said via email. Similar tree-planting efforts by outside agencies have failed, he said, in part because they planted foreign species that soon perished in the harsh desert.


Nigerian President Olusegun Obasanjo first proposed the idea of a desert-blocking wall in 2005, and it was approved by the African Union in 2007.
All 11 countries that would house the Great Green Wall have pledged to help fund the project.

But the wall has been slow to break ground: Of the 4,350 miles (7,000 kilometers) it needs to cover, only about 326 miles (525 kilometers) have been planted so far, all within Senegal. In Copenhagen, President Wade emphasized that he has made the wall a priority, and he has already asked scientists working on the project to choose species hardy enough to survive in arid conditions without maintenance.

"One thing the president has insisted is … we have to begin the work now, right now," added Ndiawar Djeng, advisor to the Senegalese environment minister.
"If other international committees follow us, that's OK. If not, we have to do what we have to do," Djeng said."It's in the interest of our local people."


The lush channel through the desert would help farmers already displaced by drought—and may even stem the exodus of "environmental refugees," organizers say.

More than 70 percent of Africa's poor depends on farming, according to the IPCC. But drought, desertification, and other climate-related disasters are forcing many farmers to abandon their lands, spurring a heavier flow of immigrants out of central and North Africa.

The 9.3-mile-wide (15-kilometer-wide) wall of trees would improve the surrounding, now-degraded soils, allowing farmers to again grow crops and more easily raise livestock in the region.

Senegal also plans to dig rainwater reservoirs along its portion of the wall—virtual lifesavers in a region where rain falls only three months out of the year, supporters say.

"France is helping us by bringing its soldiers, who are working with us planting trees and building reservoirs," President Wade added.

The gigantic tree barrier would also trap some atmospheric carbon dioxide, a potent greenhouse gas, and produce a refuge for native animals and plants.
Some of the trees themselves may become valuable crops.

The native acacia senegal tree, which is to be a staple plant in the Great Green Wall, produces gum arabic, a main ingredient in consumer products such as cosmetics and soft drinks. Farmers could collect the sap and even sustainably harvest some of the wood to make tools or produce charcoal, Senegalese environment advisor Djeng said.


But Senegal may do more for farmers by simply supporting age-old solutions to desertification, UC Berkeley's Gonzalez noted. For example the ethnic groups of the Sahel—a swath of semi-arid savanna on the Sahara's southern border—have long been successful at reforesting their land using "natural regeneration."

In this method, farmers plant small native trees from seeds found in the region and raise the trees in agricultural fields protected from nibbling livestock, Gonzalez said. "The Great Green Wall is less feasible than supporting and reinforcing local farmers and the practice of natural regeneration," he said.

What's more, planting trees alone will not stop the Sahara's spread, according to Matt Brown, senior conservation advisor for the Nature Conservancy's Africa program. Instead, African governments need to find ways to protect existing vegetation and water sources from overuse, Brown said by email.
Overall, though, the Great Green Wall is an "extremely bold" undertaking, he said, and "sometimes thinking big is what is needed to draw attention to a problem."

National Geographic

Malians fight to slow advance of the desert

by Andrew Harding

Towards the end of an illustrious career in the Malian police force - during which he has battled locust swarms, chased drug traffickers and dabbled in some coup plotting - Col Tidiani Ascofare, bald, burly and unflappable, has taken on his most daunting opponent, the Sahara desert.

"Dig, dig," he boomed cheerfully at a crowd of several hundred villagers standing in the scorching sun in a dried-out river bed, some four hours' drive west of Timbuktu.

The narrow channel, overshadowed by a line of imposing yellow sand dunes, used to flow into Lake Faguibine, helping to carrying an annual flood surge from the mighty Niger River into an ecosystem that directly supported some 200,000 people, and produced food for Mali, Burkina Faso and Mauritania. It was the region's most fertile farmland.

"Inexorably, perhaps, the climate will deteriorate," said the colonel. "But we have proved we can delay the advance of the desert. In 2006, only 100 hectares of land around the lake was farmed. This year it will be more than 20,000 hectares."

Kouna Mohammed sat in a group, cheerfully sifting sorghum, as her sons brought in this year's crop from the green fields around them. Like many families, they had abandoned the lake years ago. Several relatives had died because of the drought. But the past two years have seen a dramatic improvement.

"Without water, there is no world," said a neighbour, Medel Al Houseini.

Recently, the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) agreed to help the Malian government, with a $15m (£9.2m) project for the Lake Faguibine system.

"That's peanuts in relation to the benefits that will accrue," said Unep's spokesman, Nick Nuttal. "What we're trying to demonstrate [ahead of the Copenhagen climate change summit] is that large-scale renovations of ecological infrastructure are possible."

Unep argues that countries like Mali, which are considered to be on the front lines of climate change, need help now to enable them to cope with much tougher conditions expected in the years ahead. Leading Unep's work on the ground, Birguy Diallo showed a group of villagers how to stabilise the dunes with twigs and saplings.

The UN is helping villagers to stabilise the dunes and keep back the desert


"We're here to win," she said. "The villagers are already seeing they can gain from this. "They're working for their own benefit, not for outsiders. They were born here, and live here. They are supposed to stay here."

But the lake's future is far from certain. Mali is poor, and its government riddled with corruption. Before Col Ascofare took the lead, similar projects appear to have achieved nothing. The colonel is clearly frustrated by the slow pace of change. With outside help and heavy equipment, he estimates that he could have achieved in six months what has now taken four years.

"Without foreign help, it's impossible," he said flatly. "The costs are enormous. We need lots of equipment and lots of technical education to fight against all this sand you see around us. We expect much from Copenhagen and the international community."

BBC

Seawater greenhouses to bring life to the Sahara desert

Photograph: Exploration Architecture

The Sahara Forest project will use seawater and solar power to grow food in greenhouses across the desert. The planned project would use solar power to evaporate salt water, generating cool air and pure water thereby allowing food to be grown

Vast greenhouses that use seawater to grow crops could be combined with solar power plants to provide food, fresh water and clean energy in deserts, under an ambitious proposal from a team of architects and engineers.

The Sahara Forest project would marry huge greenhouses with concentrated solar power (CSP), which uses mirrors to focus the sun's rays and generate heat and electricity. The installations would turn deserts into lush patches of vegetation, according to its designers, and without the need to dig wells for fresh water, which has depleted acquifers in many parts of the world.

Demonstration plants are already running in Tenerife, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.

Plants cannot grow in deserts because of the extreme temperatures and lack of nutrients and water. Charlie Paton, one of the Sahara Forest team and the inventor of the seawater greenhouse concept, said his technology was a proven way to transform arid environments.

"Plants need light for growth but they don't like heat beyond a certain point," said Paton. Above a particular temperature, the amount of water lost through the holes in its leaves, called stomata, gets so large that a plant will shut down photosynthesis and cannot grow.

The greenhouses work by using the solar farm to power seawater evaporators and then pump the damp, cool air through the greenhouse. This reduces the temperature by about 15C compared to that outside. At the other end of the greenhouse from the evaporators, the water vapour is condensed. Some of this fresh water is used to water the crops, while the rest can be used for the essential task of cleaning the solar mirrors.

"So we've got conditions in the greenhouse of high humidity and lower temperature," said Paton. "The crops sitting in this slightly steamy, humid condition can grow fantastically well."

The designers said that virtually any vegetables could be grown in the greenhouses, depending on the conditions at which it is maintained. The demonstration plants already produce lettuces, peppers, cucumbers and tomatoes. The nutrients to grow the plants could come from local seaweed or even be extracted from the seawater itself.

Michael Pawlyn of Exploration Architecture, who worked on the Eden Project for seven years and is now part of the Sahara Forest team, said the seawater greenhouse and CSP provided substantial synergies for each other. "Both technologies work extremely well in hot, dry desert locations – CSP produces a lot of waste heat and we'd be able to use that to evaporate more seawater from the greenhouse," he said. "And CSP needs a supply of clean, demineralised water in order for the [electricity generating] turbines to function and to keep the mirrors at peak output. It just so happens the seawater greenhouse produces large quantities of this."

Paton said that the greenhouse produces more than five times the fresh water needed to water the plants inside so, in addition to producing water to clean the CSP mirrors, some of it can be released into the local environment. This can create a local microclimate just outside the greenhouses for hardier plants such as jatropha, an energy crop that can be turned into biofuel. The ability to create similar microclimates has already been proven in the demonstration greenhouses Paton has built.

The cost of the Sahara Forest project could be relatively low since both CSP and seawater greenhouses are proven technologies – the designers estimate that building 20 hectares of greenhouses combined with a 10MW CSP scheme would cost around €80m (£65m). Paton said groups in countries across the Middle East, including UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Qatar and Kuwait, have expressed interest in the possibility of funding demonstration projects.

He added that using seawater greenhouses could reverse the environmental damage done by the greenhouses already built in places such as Almeria in southern Spain. More than 40,000 hectares of greenhouses have been built in this desert region during the past 20 years to grow salad vegetables. "They take water out of the ground something like five times faster than it comes in, so the water table drops and becomes more saline. The whole of Spain is being sucked dry. If one were to convert them all to the seawater greenhouse concept, it would turn an unsustainable solution into a more sustainable one."

"In places like Oman, they've effectively sterilised large areas of land by using groundwater that's become increasingly saline," said Pawlyn. "The beauty of the Sahara Forest scheme is that you can reverse that process and turn barren land into biologically-productive land."

Neil Crumpton, an energy specialist at Friends of the Earth, said the potential of desert technologies was huge. "Concentrated solar power mirror arrays covering just one per cent of the Earth's deserts could supply a fifth of all current global energy consumption. And one million tonnes of sea water could be evaporated every day from just 20,000 hectares of greenhouses."

He added: "Governments around the world should invest serious money in these solar energy and water technologies and not be distracted by lobbyists promoting dangerous nuclear power or nuclear-powered desalination schemes."

The Guardian

Australian acacias being adapted to West Africa

With its gnarled limbs and jagged thorns the acacia is perhaps one of the most striking symbols of the African landscape. But acacias are not restricted to Africa. Worldwide, there are over 1200 species with the vast majority being native to Australia. Known also as wattle trees, the seeds of certain Australian acacias are tasty, nutritious and safe to consume, and are providing a valued food source in parts of West Africa.

The Sahelian region of West Africa is among the poorest and least food secure regions of the world. In Niger, the almost total destruction of trees and shrubs in the agricultural zone between the 1950s and 1980s resulted in recurring drought, strong winds, high temperatures, infertile soils and increased desertification. Combined with rapid population growth and poverty, these problems contributed to chronic hunger and periodic acute famine.

Whilst drought and crop failure is still a problem in Niger - the last severe famine was in 2005 - there are areas where farmers have been able to protect and regenerate degraded land and combat the effects of desertification. Building on twenty years of successful and sustainable agricultural approaches tried and tested by the Maradi Integrated Development Project (MIDP), farmers have been encouraged to take up an integrated agroforestry farming system. These involve a range of multi-purpose Australian acacias, other agroforestry trees, crop residue mulching and annual crops.

Through MIDP's work, millions of hectares of farmland in Niger have been transformed over the past two decades. Natural regeneration of trees by farmers has proved particularly successful. This system, known as Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) is based on the natural regeneration and management of tree stems from underground stumps. FMNR provides firewood, building timber, improves crop yields, increases biodiversity and provides valued income to farmers. With this system, trees are owned by farmers and seen as beneficial and it is one of the few sustainable and expanding agroforestry systems in the Sahel.

More than a decade of research, as part of MIDP's approach, has also involved the testing and domestication of edible Australian acacias, including Acacia colei, A. torulosa, A. tumida and A. elachantha. These perennial species grow rapidly, are well adapted to infertile soils and produce seeds that can be easily harvested and processed into nutritious human food.

As a result, a significant number of communities in the area are known to be regularly consuming acacia-based foods, particularly derived from A. colei. However, more sustainable adoption of acacias proved rather slow at first until MIDP alone, and then in collaboration with World Vision Niger, launched a more concerted approach to promoting the multiple benefits of acacias.

In continuing to explore the potential of Australian acacia species, MIDP staff have since developed the Farmer Managed Agroforesty Farming System (FMAFS), which is an alley cropping, agro-pastoral forestry system that incorporates FMNR of trees along with high seed and wood-producing acacias (particularly improved A. colei and A. torulosa). Whilst the FMAFS is introduced as a model, the approach is flexible to ensure that farmers can adapt it to meet their needs and local conditions.

The added attraction of acacias

Whilst very few A. colei trees were recorded to have been planted in the Maradi region during 1999-2003, a small market created by an Australian company, Kalkardi Pty Ltd., together with promotion by MIDP, led to a renewed interest in the species. During 2006-7, over 350 FMAFS were established in 33 villages, which has led to increased production of acacia seed. In 2004 Kalkardi purchased 1,640kg of seed which, by 2007, had risen to over 4,550kg. The price offered for seed (US$ 0.40 per kg) has stimulated interest in acacia planting and subsequent consumption of the seed.

From an informal survey conducted in 12 villages in three districts of the Maradi region in September 2007, it has been discovered that the demand for Acacia trees in MIDP and World Vision intervention villages exceeds supply, and that farmers were experimenting and innovating to find new uses for acacias not promoted by MIDP. These included using the seed pods as fertiliser side dressings, using water from soaking acacia bark to increase the strength of mud-plaster, and the medicinal use of acacia leaf juice to treat fever and stomach upsets.

Acacia foods, such as local dishes made with acacia flour, have become widely and enthusiastically accepted in the villages where A. colei is grown. The food is valued for its taste and, since acacia-based foods are more filling, consumption of staple grains is reduced, so that more is available for use at a later date or for sale.

MIDP's work is ongoing and trials to evaluate different types of A.torulosa, A. tumida and A.elachantha continue. The lessons learnt in Niger should enable multi-purpose acacias and adapted FMAFS to be adopted in regions with similar conditions and needs to Niger, particularly if markets for acacia seed and food products are developed.

The New Agriculturalist

Sahara turned desert over thousands of years

The once-green Sahara turned to desert over thousands of years rather than in an abrupt shift as previously believed, according to a study that may help understanding of future climate changes.

And there are now signs of a tiny shift back towards greener conditions in parts of the Sahara, apparently because of global warming, said the lead author of the report about the desert's history published in the journal Science.

The study of ancient pollen, spores and aquatic organisms in sediments in Lake Yoa in northern Chad showed the region gradually shifted from savannah 6,000 years ago towards the arid conditions that took over about 2,700 years ago.

The findings, about one of the biggest environmental shifts of the past 10,000 years, challenge past belief based on evidence in marine sediments that a far quicker change created the world's biggest hot desert.

"The hypothesis (of a sudden shift) was astonishing but it was still taken up," said Stefan Kropelin of the University of Cologne in Germany, lead author of the study with scientists in Belgium, Canada, the United States, Sweden and France.

The scientists, studying the remote 3.5 sq km Lake Yoa, found the region had once had grasses and scattered acacia trees, ferns and herbs. The salty lake is renewed by groundwater welling up from beneath the desert.

A gradual drying, blamed on shifts in monsoon rains linked to shifts in the power of the sun, meant large amounts of dust started blowing in the region about 4,300 years ago. The Sahara now covers an area the size of the United States.

Kropelin said that improved understanding of the formation of the Sahara might help climate modellers improve forecasts of what is in store from global warming, blamed by the U.N. Climate Panel on human emissions of greenhouse gases.

The panel says that some areas will be more vulnerable to drought, others to more storms or floods.

The Sahara got greener when temperatures rose around the end of the Ice Age about 12,000 years ago. Warmer air can absorb more moisture from the oceans and it fell as rain far inland.

"Today I think we have the same thing going on, a global warming," he said. And he said there were already greener signs in a huge area with almost no reliable weather records. "I see a clear trend to a new greening of the Sahara, a very slow one," he said, based on visits to some of the remotest and uninhabited parts of the desert over the past two decades. "You go to unoccupied areas over a long time and you know there was pure sand there without a single snake or scorpion. Now you see tens of kilometers covered by grass," he said.

In Darfur in Sudan, where U.N. officials say 300,000 people may have died in five years of revolt, slightly higher rainfall was more than offset by a rise in the human population to 7 million from 1 million half a century ago. People and their animals quickly eradicated any greenery.

Reuters

Biofuel benefits not as clear cut as first thought

By Peter Sain ley Berry*

When earlier this year the European Union confirmed its biofuel target, few foresaw by how much or how quickly the global outlook would change.

Although many of the factors that are contributing to today's wave of turbulence were already in place at the end of last year, their combined effects were not predicted: the global credit crunch, the rise in oil prices, and now the shortage - and rapidly soaring cost - of food.

When first formulated, the biofuel target (10 per cent of all road fuel by 2020) appeared eminently sensible. Europe, after all, had a thriving biofuel industry that offered significant potential for reducing greenhouse gases from oil powered transport. Beyond this, biofuels could be imported. The demand would stimulate similar industries around the world. New criteria would ensure that biofuel production was sustainable.

However, the law of unintended consequences has kicked into effect. In the rush to make our exhaust emissions greener, worldwide biofuel production has been over stimulated and with dire consequences.

Industrial conglomerates all over the world have not been slow to recognise there was money to be made from turning foodstuffs into alcohol, in growing oil crops rather than cereals and in ploughing up the world's forests and peat-bogs for biofuel plantations.

While the sustainability plan envisaged biofuel produced from the surpluses and waste that inevitably accompanies food production, the reality has been that conglomerates have found it more profitable to grow fuel than food. As a result, cheap biofuel is flooding into Europe, depressing indigenous European production and reducing agricultural output for human consumption.

The financial attraction of biofuel production has accelerated pressures on virgin forest. Legally or illegally, forest is being burnt to produce oil for Europe's cars. The carbon lost from the forest, from the burning of the trees and from the destruction of the carbon-rich organic matter in the soil, will not be recouped from a few years' production of biofuel; meanwhile biodiversity is lost and ecosystems destroyed.

For an emissions saving of 10 per cent, come 2020, the developed world will have been indirectly responsible for the destruction of another tenth of the world's forests. It would be more effective to reduce our road kilometres by 10 per cent instead.

Of course, our motives are faultless - to reduce, and finally to reverse, climate change. But climate change is already showing its effects. The UN's World Food Programme tells us that the single most important factor contributing to food insecurity is drought.

Failing harvests have halted the recent promising decline in the numbers of the world's hungry. Despite the rising affluence of some parts of China and India, the number of the malnourished has grown by almost 10 per cent in the last ten years, and now stand at more than 850 million, including over 200 million children.

Biofuel production is depriving the world of vital land to grow crops just at the time when climate change is inducing drought in large areas of Africa and Asia. As a result, world food prices have soared by 45 per cent in the last nine months, according to the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation.

We witness the effect every time we buy a bottle of milk or a loaf of bread. For most of us, such inflation is no more than a minor irritation, but for the world's poor, the current record food price hike is disastrous. Riots have broken out in several continents. Europe's development minister, Louis Michel, has warned of a humanitarian tsunami in Africa.

He has virtually doubled the cash from the European Development Fund available for food aid to Africa. It now stands at €1.2 billion. This, however, may be a fraction of what is needed. Without enough food, hungry Africans will be more and more inclined to attempt the crossing to a well-fed Europe.

Such food insecurity is exacerbated by the tendency of people to eat meat, rather than vegetables, as soon as they can afford to do so. As the poor get poorer, the rich become trenchermen. The steadily enlarging Asian middle class is increasingly eschewing its former vegetable diet and turning instead to one based on meat and dairy produce.

Now, as we know, it only takes a hectare of land to feed a family if their diet consists mainly of rice, beans or potatoes and the occasional chicken. But it may take ten times this amount if they choose to eat meat and cheese everyday. Moreover the bodily wastes from a cow, some allege, produce more greenhouse gas than a car.

So land that might support crops for humans is now employed to produce grain to feed animals. Which is why, say the Food and Agriculture Organisation, there are now serious world shortages of wheat and maize.

As if this weren't enough, we in the developed world, waste great heaps of food. Time was when out-of date food would have been fed - if not to the poor, then at least to pigs. Now hygiene regulations consign large quantities to landfill.

We even throw away much food purchased in perfectly good condition. Britons, we learn from a recent survey reported in The Times, discard 5 million edible potatoes every day, along with 3 million tomatoes, 4.5 million apples, 1.5 million bananas and a million oranges. This is almost a third of the quantities purchased in the first place.

Much of this food will have been transported long distances, by air, sea or land. Many road miles, much road fuel, will have been expended on its long journey to the dustbin. Is it this fuel that we now want to dilute with biofuels produced in such damaging circumstances?

The scientists tell us that even allowing for climate change, there is enough land to feed adequately all of the world's 6.4 billion population. But only if we use the land and its bounty sensibly; only if we all learn to moderate our consumption, whether this be of meat or transport. We have to learn to control our waste (as well as our waists).

Much of this involves long term lifestyle change. In the short term, there is one easy thing that we can do in the interests of the 20 million babies born each year with low birth weight to malnourished mothers, whose weak start in life blights their whole future existence.

That is simply to drop the biofuel target.

*Peter Sain ley Berry is editor of EuropaWorld

EU Observer

Ghana under serious desertification threat

The Deputy Minister of Agriculture In-Charge of Crops,Clement Eledi, has noted about 70 per cent of Ghana's land is under serious threat of desertification caused by soil erosion. Referring to statistics contained in a report by the Environmental Protection Agency, Institute of Statistical, Social and Economic Research of University of Ghana (ISSER) and the British Department for International Development, the Deputy Minister said unsustainable agriculture and land management practices are costing the country about two per cent of the Gross Domestic Product per annum.

The Environmental Specialist of the Africa Region of the World Bank, Matteo Marchisio, said Ghana has about 69 per cent of land degradation, which is higher than the average land degradation in Africa of 45 per cent.

The Executive Director of the Environmental Protection Agency, Jonathan Allotey, who gave an overview of efforts that has been made in promoting sustainable land management in Ghana since the 1900 to date, said no single institution could address the problem of land degradation. "By acting through a joint work programme, partners can leverage their own efforts and organize and amplify their actions according to respective comparative advantage," he said.

He said the collaborative approach to sustainable land management is people centered based on multi-partnership and responsibility encouraging participatory decision-making and management.

Ghana Broadcasting Corp.

Niger, Mali source $400 million for dams

Niger and Mali have secured more than $400 million from mainly Islamic donors to build dams on West Africa's Niger river to generate power and help grow food for the largely desert countries, officials said.

Donors at a summit organised by the Islamic Development Bank last week in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, pledged $236 million to build a dam in Niger, and nearly $200 million for a similar project in neighbouring Mali, the two countries' governments said.

Home to one of the world's poorest and fastest-growing populations, Niger stretches deep into the Sahara desert.

It suffers frequent hunger crises exacerbated by widespread poverty and desert encroachment onto traditional farmland, and its economy depends largely on uranium mined in the arid north by former colonial power France.

"Funding for building the Kandadji dam and associated projects has been secured," Prime Minister Seyni Oumarou said after returning from Jeddah.

The government has been talking about building the Kandadji dam upstream from the capital Niamey for nearly four decades, but the Islamic donor funds should allow the first phase of the huge development project to begin in mid-2008.

The Niger river, crossing the extreme southwestern corner of the country on its way to Nigeria and the Atlantic, has a fertile flood plain ripe for irrigated agriculture and potential to reduce the country's huge dependence on imported electricity.

"Building the dam will allow us to solve at least three problems: firstly regenerating the natural environment, secondly improving food security through water-based agriculture or irrigation, and thirdly to provide electricity," Oumarou said.

However, the donor funding will cover barely a third of the projected 300 billion CFA franc ($670 million) cost of the broader Kandadji project, and Oumarou said the hydropower station itself would be financed through a public-private partnership. He said a dozen potential investors had expressed interest in the project, which would reduce Niger's dependence on neighbouring Nigeria's National Electric Power Authority, from which it imports much of its electricity needs.

Niger's economy depends heavily on uranium mined in the north, where Tuareg nomads have rebelled against government forces this year, killing dozens of soldiers. The government dismisses the rebels as drug traffickers and bandits. The dam site at Kandadji around 180 km (110 miles) northwest of Niamey, near Niger's borders with Mali and Burkina Faso, has not been affected by the rebellion.

Mali, whose economy is in better shape than Niger thanks to significant gold reserves and greater stability in recent years, plans to start work in 2008 on access roads and the following year on building a dam at Taoussa on the Niger river between the ancient Saharan trading cities of Timbuktu and Gao.

It too will provide hydropower and irrigation.

"In the first place, the Taoussa dam was a dream, but we have entered an era of ambition and today it is becoming a reality," President Amadou Toumani Toure said on Malian radio on Monday.

Reuters

Land degradation takes its toll on Lesotho

Overgrazing of marginal land by cattle is a main contributing factor to the reduction of plants that retain topsoil when the rains come. Flash floods are common in the summer. Incorrect farming techniques also contribute to soil erosion, a greater conservation threat to the environment than drought: seasonal rains come and go but soil erosion never ceases.

Only 10 percent of Lesotho's 30,000sq km of mountainous terrain is classified as arable, according to the June 2007 report by the Lesotho Meteorological Services.

"Much of the land of Lesotho is vulnerable to extensive soil erosion," noted the 2007 Lesotho Drought Flash Appeal made in July by UN agencies. Several of them are involved in conservation programmes, without which agricultural production would remain compromised and food assistance from international donors would become a perpetual necessity.

According to Lineo Mdee, Sustainable Development Advisor at the UN Development Programme in Lesotho, continuing degradation of the natural resource base and the impoverishment of the soil are key factors in food insecurity. Two long-term developments have contributed to soil degradation: a region-wide process of desertification, which has turned stretches of arable land into marginal land, and a decades-long mismanagement of land.

"The original vegetative cover has disappeared, and invasive species that cannot retain moisture and which deplete the soil are increasing," said Mdee. "These are plants originating from outside Lesotho and Africa. Now, with the drought and Lesotho's usual fierce windstorms, the topsoil is blown away. When we do get rain it comes in torrents, and it makes gullies and dongas."

Harvesting scarce indigenous trees for firewood also poses a problem, exacerbated by people's poverty. Other fuel sources are unaffordable, and few people in rural areas are connected to the nation's electrical grid.

"This is a cold country. People need fuel; people are burning wood, and also crop residue. The few trees are going and, instead of ploughing back into the earth the crop residue to assist the next year's crops, there is nothing left," said Mdee.

Counteracting land mismanagement tops the conservation programmes initiated by UN agencies. "We need to find crops that really suit the soil types of this country and weather. Because of traditional customs, people grow maize and sorghum, though these are not the best crops for our conditions. We have declining productivity of the land as a result," Mdee commented.

Hassan Abdi, Programme Officer for the WFP in Lesotho, said training farmers to make the most of their land would boost harvests and preserve the environment. "We are advocating conservation agriculture as a way to halt further soil erosion and make more productive what farmland there is. We are encouraging people to get into environmental management."

Rather than burning crop residue, like maize stalks, during winter, or using it as cattle fodder, conservation agriculture requires farmers to leave it on the ground to nourish the soil.

"We assist communities to build earth dams and, in some cases, concrete dams, and at the same time we are reducing runoff by building retaining structures," said Abdi. Throughout the lowlands, barriers in dongas and hillocks of stones or layers of rocks held by wire mesh are built to retain soil.

In another WFP-sponsored programme, communities plant trees in dongas to rehabilitate the environment. "These are able-bodied persons who are unemployed, and because it is a community initiative the people have a sense of ownership of the project," said Abdi. "We give them some food as an incentive so at the end of the day they do not go home with empty stomachs."

IRIN

Land degradation is robbing Africa of soil fertility: World Bank

Policymakers grappling with the challenge of attaining economic growth across Africa will do well to confront the twin challenges of desertification and land degradation that are silently robbing the continent of its soil fertility and ecosystem services.

Desertification is a very severe form of land degradation, involving the steady but gradual loss of agricultural productivity and distinct decline of ecological health. It is marked by blighted lunar landscapes, encroachment of cultivable land by sand dunes, denuded range lands and parched aquifers.

Desertification, drought and lately, climate change are all adversely impacting farming, threatening the principal source of livelihood – and exports – for millions of poor people.

Arid, semi-arid and dry lands are particularly prone to the ravages of desertification. Globally, dry lands are estimated to cover more than 40 percent of the Earth’s surface and are home to nearly two billion people – one-third of the world’s population.

The causes of land degradation are many, including population pressure on fragile lands, overgrazing, poor land management practices and drought.

... over the last four decades the African continent has suffered seven major episodes of drought. In two key regions – the Sahel and the Horn of Africa – the droughts of 1972-74 and 1981-84 caused massive social disruption and human suffering.

Because desertification degrades whole ecosystems, it deprives poor people of the environmental services on which they most depend. For example, degraded lands can no longer produce crops, provide forage for livestock, or provide wood for fuel. Already, farm yields across Africa are one-third less than those achieved by Asian farmers. The result is that Sub-Saharan Africa is the only region in the world where food production is stagnating, and hunger is on the rise.

Speaking to the challenges posed by a changing climate, Sir Nicholas Stern’s 2007 review “The Economics of Climate Change,” warned that declining crop yields, especially in Africa, could leave hundreds of millions without the ability to produce or purchase sufficient food.

Maintaining soil fertility and protecting the environmental resource base is critical for the largely agrarian economies of 47 countries south of the Sahara desert where the farm economy frequently accounts for anywhere between 25 to 50 percent of gross domestic product.

To tackle the problem of land degradation more forcefully in Sub-Saharan Africa, in 2005 the World Bank and its partners, including the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), launched the TerrAfrica initiative tasked with promoting sustainable land management practices by mobilizing coalitions, knowledge, and scale up financing.

“The stakes are exceedingly high,” says Christophe Crepin, a lead environmental specialist in the World Bank’s Africa Region which hosts the TerrAfrica Secretariat. “By working directly with African governments, the TerrAfrica partnership is strengthening our collective ability to deal with problems of desertification and land degradation...

World Bank

Burkina Faso : Coping with less rain

The heat wave that started in March has not yet, two months later, given way to the first rainfall of the new farming season, except in a few isolated parts of Burkina Faso.

"The good, generous years - when farming could begin in April thanks to early, plentiful and lasting rains - are long behind us," remarks 60-year-old farmer Abel Raogo, sitting in his field in the shade of a shea tree. "Forty years ago, we weren't tormented by constant anxiety and uncertainty, worried about poor harvests, like we are today."

Hamadou Tamboura farms and raises livestock near Sapouy. He moved there five years ago from the arid Sahel region in Burkina's north. But now his land in Sapouy has become exhausted and no longer produces enough.

Raogo and Tamboura toil in different areas but the two farmers have seen the reality of the changing weather, although they are not sure of the reasons. They do not ask for explanations of "climate change." They do understand the immediate dangers represented by degrading soils, drying rivers and other changes in their environment - and they want urgent, concrete solutions to those problems.

Burkina's economy is based mainly on agriculture, which provides livelihoods for 80 per cent of the population. Natural constraints, such as degraded soils, recurrent droughts, deforestation and spreading deserts, have a major impact. They combine to make people's lives more vulnerable.

Over the past four decades, Burkina has experienced frequent extremes of climate. Drought in the 1970s caused a serious famine, which cost numerous lives and major livestock losses. Although famine has been less severe since then, it remains a frequent spectre in parts of the country.

Over the decades, Burkina's desert areas have been spreading. Lower rainfall and higher temperatures have contributed to the silting and evaporation of lakes and rivers and a long-term decline in the capacity of water reservoirs. In the Central Plateau region, according to government figures, three-quarters of the 84 dams and reservoirs are silted and require rehabilitation. Farmers report that some dams and reservoirs no longer hold enough water during the dry season to enable them to produce crops.

Ironically, the north, which usually has Burkina's lowest average rainfall levels, has in recent years sometimes experienced unexpectedly heavy rains.

The government has initiated action on a variety of fronts.They include developing small-scale irrigation projects on 26,000 hectares of land and training thousands of farmers in irrigation techniques and water management, as part of a decade-long plan to promote irrigated farming.

Other measures include starting or completing construction of more than two dozen medium-sized dams and water reservoirs,producing more than 8 million tree seedlings to replant 13,000 hectares of land, planting more than 1,660 kilometres of "living hedges" as wind breaks,rehabilitating nearly 4,000 hectares of degraded land and fixing sand dunes over nearly 350 hectares in the Sahel.

Farmers are also being encouraged to adopt improved and hardy new seed varieties that require less water, such as high-yielding cassava and the New Rice for Africa (Nerica).

AllAfrica.com