WOMEN, MEN AND...TREES
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From: Indigo S.
Date: Tuesday, February 20, 2007, 10:51 PM
Subject: Women, Men and...Trees
ID: 256031

Trees and crops reclaim the desert in Niger....
~proving we can make a difference !
By Lydia Polgreen: February 2007

GUIDAN BAKOYE, Niger: In this dust-choked region, long seen as an 
increasingly barren wasteland decaying into desert, millions of 
trees are flourishing, thanks in part to poor farmers whose simple 
methods cost little or nothing at all.

Better conservation and improved rainfall have led to at least 3 
million newly tree-covered hectares, or 7.4 million acres, in Niger, 
researchers have found. And this has been achieved largely without 
relying on the large- scale planting of trees or other expensive 
methods often advocated by African politicians and aid groups for 
halting desertification, the process by which soil loses its 
fertility.

Recent studies of vegetation patterns, based on detailed satellite 
images and on-the-ground inventories of trees, have found that 
Niger, a place of persistent hunger and deprivation, has recently 
added millions of new trees and is now far greener than it was 30 
years ago.

These gains, moreover, have come at a time when the population of 
Niger has exploded, confounding the conventional wisdom that 
population growth leads to the loss of trees and accelerates land 
degradation, scientists studying Niger say. The vegetation is 
densest, researchers have found, in some of the most densely 
populated regions of the country.

"The general picture of the Sahel is much less bleak than we tend to 
assume," said Chris Reij, a soil conservationist who has been 
working for more than 30 years in the Sahel, a semiarid belt that 
spans Africa just below the Sahara and is home to some of the 
poorest people on Earth.

Reij, who helped lead a study on Niger's vegetation patterns 
published last summer, said, "Niger was for us an enormous surprise."
About 20 years ago, farmers like Ibrahim Danjimo realized something 
terrible was happening to their fields.

"We look around, all the trees were far from the village," said 
Danjimo, a farmer in his 40s who has been working the rocky, sandy 
soil of this tiny village since he was a child. "Suddenly, the trees 
were all gone."

Fierce winds were carrying off the topsoil of their once productive 
land. Sand dunes threatened to swallow huts. Wells ran dry. Across 
the Sahel, a cataclysm was unfolding.

Severe drought in the 1970s and '80s, coupled with a population 
explosion and destructive farming and livestock practices, was 
denuding vast swaths of land. The desert seemed determined to 
swallow everything.

So Danjimo and other farmers in Guidan Bakoye took a small but 
radical step. No longer would they clear the saplings from their 
fields before planting, as they had for generations. Instead, they 
would protect and nurture them, carefully plowing around them when 
sowing millet, sorghum, peanuts and beans.

Today, the success in growing new trees suggests that the harm to 
much of the Sahel may not have been permanent, but a temporary loss 
of fertility. The evidence, scientists say, demonstrates how 
relatively small changes in human behavior can transform the 
regional ecology, restoring its biodiversity and productivity.

In Niger's case, farmers began protecting trees just as rainfall 
levels began to rise again after the droughts.

Another change was the way trees were regarded by law. From colonial 
times, all trees in Niger had been regarded as the property of the 
state, which gave farmers little incentive to protect them. Trees 
were chopped for firewood or construction without regard to the 
environmental costs. Government foresters were supposed to make sure 
the trees were properly managed, but there were not enough of them 
to police a country more than twice the size of France.

But over time, farmers began to regard the trees in their fields as 
their property, and in recent years the government has recognized 
the benefits of this by allowing individuals to own trees. Farmers 
make money off the trees by selling branches, pods, fruit and bark. 
Because these sales are more lucrative over time than simply 
chopping down the trees for firewood, the farmers preserve them.

The greening began in the mid-1980s, Reij said, "and every time we 
went back to Niger, the scale increased."

"The density is so spectacular," he said.

Mahamane Larwanou, a forestry expert at the University of Niamey in 
Niger's capital, said the revival of trees had transformed rural 
life in Niger.

"The benefits are so many it is really astonishing," Larwanou 
said. "The farmers can sell the branches for money. They can feed 
the pods as fodder to their animals. They can sell or eat the 
leaves. They can sell and eat the fruits. Trees are so valuable to 
farmers, so they protect them."

They also have extraordinary ecological benefits. Their roots fix 
the soil in place, preventing it from being carried off with the 
fierce Sahelian winds and preserving arable land. The roots also 
help hold water in the ground, rather than letting it run off across 
rocky, barren fields into gullies where it floods villages and 
destroys crops.

Wresting subsistence for 13 million people from Niger's fragile 
ecology is something akin to a puzzle. Less than 12 percent of the 
country's land can be cultivated, and much of that is densely 
populated. Yet 90 percent of Niger's people live off agriculture, 
cultivating a semiarid strip along the southern edge of the country.

Farmers here practice mostly rain- fed agriculture with few tools 
and no machinery, making survival precarious even in so-called 
normal times. But when the rains and harvest fall short, hunger 
returns with a particular vengeance, as it did in 2005 during the 
nation's worst food crisis in a generation.

Making matters worse, Niger's population has doubled in the last 20 
years. Each woman bears about seven children, giving the country one 
of the highest growth rates in the world.

The return of trees increases the income of rural farmers, 
cushioning the boom-and-bust cycle of farming and herding.

Ibrahim Idy, a farmer in Dahirou, a village in the Zinder region, 
has 20 baobab trees in his fields. Selling the leaves and fruit 
brings him about $300 a year in additional income. He has used that 
money to buy a motorized pump that draws water from his well to 
irrigate his cabbage and lettuce fields. His neighbors, who have 
fewer baobabs, use their children to draw water and dig and direct 
the mud channels that send water coursing to the beds. While their 
children work the fields, Idy's children attend school.

In some regions, swaths of land that had fallen out of use are being 
reclaimed, using labor-intensive but inexpensive techniques.

In the village of Koloma Baba, in the Tahoua region just south of 
the desert's edge, a group of widows has reclaimed fields once 
thought forever barren. The women dig small pits in plots of land as 
hard as asphalt. They place a shovelful of manure in each pit, then 
wait for rain. The pits help the water and manure stay in the soil 
and regenerate its fertility, said Larwanou. Over time, with careful 
tending, the land can regain its ability to produce crops. In this 
manner, more than 240,000 hectares of land have been reclaimed, 
according to researchers.

Still, Koloma Baba also demonstrates the limits of this fragile 
ecosystem, where disaster is always one missed rainfall away. Most 
able-bodied young men migrate to Nigeria and beyond in search of 
work, supporting their families with remittances. The women struggle 
to eke a modest crop from their fields.

"I produce enough to eat, but nothing more," said Hadijatou Moussa, 
a widow in Koloma Baba.

The women have managed to grow trees on their fields as well, but 
have not seen much profit from them. People come and chop their 
branches without permission, and a village committee that is 
supposed to enforce the rights of farmers to their trees does not 
take action against poachers.

Such problems raise the question of whether the success of some of 
Niger's farmers can be replicated on a larger scale across the Sahel.

While Niger's experience of greening on a vast scale is unique, 
scientists say, smaller tracts of land have been revived in other 
countries.

"It really requires the effort of the whole community," said 
Larwanou. "If farmers don't take action themselves and the community 
doesn't support it, farmer-managed regeneration cannot work."

Moussa Bara, the chief of Dansaga, a village in the Aguié region of 
Niger, where the regeneration has been a huge success, said the 
village had benefited enormously from the revival of trees. He said 
not a single child had died of malnutrition in the hunger crisis 
that gripped Niger in 2005, largely because of extra income from 
selling firewood. Still, he said, the village has too many mouths to 
feed.

"We are many and the land is small," he explained, bouncing on his 
lap a little boy named Ibrahim, the youngest of his 17 children by 
his three wives.