Trees “vital for food security”
NAIROBI, 28 August 2009 (IRIN) – Countries tackling food insecurity and climate change adaptation can greatly benefit from agroforestry – integrating fleshy plants and trees into their farming systems, environmental specialists say.
Sub-Saharan Africa has a history of food insecurity brought on by meagre rains, land degradation, declining soil fertility and bad management of resources, among other factors. “How do we, in a world of more than six billion people, rising to perhaps over nine billion, feed everyone while simultaneously securing the ecosystem services such as forests and wetlands that underpin agriculture, and indeed life itself in the first place?” Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the UN Environmental Programme (UNEP), posited at the second World Congress on Agroforestry in Nairobi. “We can empower people – not to wait for others to do something for them – but to take the initiative, one tree at a time,” Steiner said. read more…
For the poor of the world, improved agricultural productivity and reduced land degradation is vital. The United Nations, the World Bank, and other bodies are currently making tremendous investments in African agriculture. How researchers can contribute to ensuring that these resources are put to best use was the main question for the expert group meeting, organised by the United Nations, together with environmental economists from the School of Economics, Business and Law, University of Gothenburg. The 27 participants included researchers, agricultural consultants, ministers and aid donors.
Three-quarters of the world’s poor are dependent on agriculture. The fact that the World Bank last year chose agriculture as the theme of its principal annual report, the World Development Report, reflects the importance of agriculture in reducing poverty and achieving the United Nations Millennium Goals, which are the eight goals that world leaders agreed on in 2000 with a view toward cutting poverty by half by 2015. read more…
Discussion Platform, Brussels, 30-31 January, 2003
Q. What are the background and objectives of this event?
The need to increase crop yields in developing countries in a sustainable manner, in order to meet the increasing demand for food. The objective is to listen to all points of view and assess how life sciences and biotechnology can foster sustainable agriculture in developing countries.
To meet this goal, the European Commission, assisted by the members of the European Group on Life Sciences (EGLS), organised this discussion platform. The aim is to critically review the options that life sciences and biotechnology offer developing countries. The conference brings together representatives of these countries, scientists, representatives of the biotechnology industry, non-governmental organisations, international organisations, education and media specialists, officials from several governments and European citizens – particularly the younger generation. read more…
Infestations of Aquatic Weeds in Africa
All across Africa there are infestations of aquatic weeds clogging the waterways, and sucking the land dry. Typha, Phragmites, water hyacinth and others are using up the water that the people need. They are also blocking drainage, and so causing flooding. They are also breeding grounds for many pests and diseases. Their clearance and control would relieve many troubles. But the reason that these plants are out of control is their resilience.
Their control is a never-ending process, something that can only be sustained at a “real” profit – one that is generated economically, not politically. Fortunately, at least with Typha, there are profits to be had in food, in fuel and in fiber. When grown in clean water and soil, Typha is a champion food producer. What isn’t fit for human consumption can be brewed into ethanol or charred and briquetted into charcoal.
All of the aquatic weeds have the useful/annoying habit of collecting pollutants, so not just any can be eaten. Phragmites has the same fuel uses, but has never been used as a staple food. Water Hyacinth and water lettuce and some of the others have been used successfully as mulch, and as a biomass source for methane production.
The quantities involved are astonishing. There appears to be enough Typha Australis in the Lake Chad basin to feed the entire population of Africa (where it all fit for consumption and harvestable). Picture my horror at a picture of a dozen starving refugees hiding in a Typha stand that would feed and clothe a small town. These people are starving in the midst of plenty. And, unused and unchecked, that cornucopia of food is killing them with thirst.
Typha is a desiccation machine. The infestation in the Lake Chad basin and the other related wetlands is the driving force behind the expansion of the Sahel. Aquatic weeds generally roughly quadruple evapo-transpiration from the body of water they occupy. They are very productive plants, and sequester a great deal of CO2, converting it ultimately into soil, but for each molecule of CO2 they sequester, they also take one of H2O (carbohydrate), and transpire many more. The water is not reaching the lake, not recharging the aquifers, and not creating the “lake effect” rains the area used to have. Meanwhile, soil is being built up, raising the level of the terrain, filling in stream beds so that they are no longer functional.
What is needed is to control, and nearly eradicate these weeds, at what profit we can get from their biomass. To keep them under control, we will need companies that make a profit on their exploitation and control. Part of their clearance is the removal of the soil they have created that now clogs the waterways. There are many nearby places where that soil could be used, along with some of the charcoal as biochar.
A useful first step would be for some organization to get a hold of the equipment used to inspect food for contaminants such as heavy metals and insecticides, and determine on the spot whether a particular Typha stand is fit for human consumption, or not. I have a few suggested starting sites, where there are people ready to try. Most of it is probably safe, but where the people are is where the pollutant hazard is greatest.
The aquatic weed problem is partly natural and partly anthropogenic. Every dam built creates new environments for weed expansion, both upstream and downstream. The weeds are more tolerant of changes in the water level and take over both where there is more water and where there is less, and completely dominate those areas where it varies.
Check into Typha, see how much damage it is doing in Africa and everywhere else desertification is going on, and see how much it could be doing for them. Attached is a sketchy little plan I’m circulating for financing the control of Typha, to do with as you will. I’m more into “low-tech” charcoal now – it has such a low startup cost.
Written by: Steve Klaber
Desertification – land degrading into desert – is often blamed on mismanagement and misuse of land. Local people are allegedly guilty of over-farming, over-grazing and allowing their populations to exceed the environment’s capacity. Lim Li Ching contests this myth, describing how local farmers in arid Africa are using innovative means to farm productively without destroying the environment, and highlights some criteria for sustainable agriculture.
Debates concerning natural resources often pivot on a ‘received wisdom’ about environmental change and people’s role in this process. In the case of the environment, the received wisdom is that people invariably degrade natural resources. Outsiders, perceiving environmental change as degradation, blame local land-use practices.
The dominant idea about desertification has been that dryland environments are rapidly degraded by a combination of natural and human factors. Desertification is defined as the degradation of drylands, involving loss of biological or economic productivity and complexity.
From the 1930s, the blame was laid largely on the land use practices of farmers and herders, and on increasing populations. This was reinforced in the late 1970s and early 1980s, culminating in the UN Conference on Desertification in 1977. Some scientists were uncertain about the causes and extent of desertification, and expressed concern at the lack of long-term data. Despite that, the Conference ended by stating that desertification was threatening 19% of the earth’s surface, and that this threat came from increased intensity of land use, overgrazing and inappropriate irrigation, exacerbated by drought.
Such claims were reiterated by the UN Environment Programme, which was the driving force for the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which entered into force in 1996. The rationale for the Convention is that “over 250 million people are directly affected by desertification, and some one thousand million (or one billion) are at risk…. Over the past two decades, the problem of land degradation in dryland regions has continued to worsen”.
Yet, evidence has been mounting that some of these assertions are unfounded. Most received wisdom on ‘desertification’ and ‘land degradation’ assumes an equilibrium environment with linear development. Thus, observations of expanding desert at certain periods and certain locations are extrapolated as ongoing, even accelerating, desertification.
For instance, work in northern Sudan that estimated the desert edge had shifted 90-100 km southwards in 17 years, is often cited. Whilst the period and location of the study was limited, it produced widespread understanding that “the whole southern Saharan edge” was expanding at a rate of 6 km a year. These results were later disproved.
In the first instance, there are in effect three related but distinct phenomena – drought, dessication and dryland degradation – that have been conflated in the term ‘desertification’. On a continuum, these have increasing time-scale effects and decreasing potential for recovery.
In particular, drought pulses are now seen as a key driving force of dynamic ecological systems – droughts lead to variability in ecosystem process and productivity, not its decline. And in many cases, what was assumed as dryland degradation is actually a result of drought, and can reverse quickly under normal rainfall. Additionally, data from dry years were often compared with that from wet years, ignoring longer-term climatic cycles. This led to an interpretation of a decline in productivity, rather than a variation in the response of natural vegetation or crops to soil moisture availability.
The new understanding is that arid and semi-arid areas are non-equilibrium environments, characterised by high levels of temporal and spatial variability and therefore, are unpredictable and uncertain. The critical indicator is a high coefficient of variation in rainfall (30% or more). Rainfall doesn’t follow regular patterns, at least not in the short-term, and it affects variability of patterns and amount of vegetation.
This dynamic conception of drylands is underpinned by changes within ecological thinking – the ‘new ecology’ – that have suggested that nature is in a state of continuous change. It contests conventional ecology, which depicts nature as tending toward stability, with notions of ‘carrying capacity’ and assumptions of a stable climax at equilibrium i.e. if the carrying capacity is exceeded, deterioration occurs.
The ‘new ecology’ also involves a conception of historical time. Land that appears ‘degraded’ may have already been that way long before farming or grazing. Researchers might erroneously associate degraded land with destructive human activity while knowing little of a place’s environmental history.
Dynamic ecological systems mean that ecological drivers are external in dryland environments, and hence not necessarily subject to density-dependent events. Instead, human livelihood adaptations in these environments are very specialised; people are in reality raising meat and crops under ecologically sound conditions.
New research reveals that in many of the poorest African countries along the Sahara’s edge, in Nigeria, Niger, Senegal, Burkina Faso and Kenya, integrated farming, mixed cropping and traditional soil and water conservation methods are increasing per capita food production several fold, keeping well ahead of population growth.
For example, the use of sheep manure for fertiliser has allowed increased yields for farmers in Kano, Nigeria. Additionally, planting leguminous crops increases nutrient levels in the soil by fixing nitrogen from the air. Integration of crops and livestock enhances nutrient cycling – legumes and manure return to the soil what crops take out.
A 4-year study in eastern Burkina Faso found that despite declining rainfall since the late 1950s and increasing populations, there is no evidence of land degradation connected to human activities nor a decline in food productivity. Conversely, yields of many crops have risen. The study found no proof of soil fertility decline over 30 years.
Farmers have not achieved environmental sustainability through a capital-intensive or high-tech path. In Burkina Faso, the increased yields of sorghum, millet and groundnuts is hardly attributable to increased external inputs, because these crops receive little fertiliser and are largely based on hand hoe cultivation.
Farmers have a rich repertoire of soil and water conservation technologies, such as crop sequencing, crop rotation, fallowing, weeding, selective clearing, intercropping, appropriate crop & landrace selection, adapted plant spacing, thinning, mulching, stubble grazing, weeding mounds, paddocking, household refuse application, manure application, crop residue application and compost pits. They use many mechanical practices too.
Perhaps more important than the practices is the selective way they are used, which vary with different field types, allowing optimal adjustment of limited labour and inputs to the requirements of different crops and soils. If land becomes limited, farmers do not need to invent new management systems; they apply these soil and water conservation practices more intensively, and only when and where needed.
High local population densities, far from being a liability, are actually essential for providing the necessary labour to work the land, dig terraces and collect water in ponds for irrigation, and to control weeds, tend fields, feed animals and spread manure. As population densities increase, farmers intensify their cooperation systems, grouping to tend each other’s fields at busy periods, lending and borrowing land, livestock and equipment, and swapping seed varieties.
People thus invest heavily in creating and maintaining social networks, such as land networks, labour networks, women’s natal networks, cattle networks, technology networks and cash networks.
Furthermore, in Maradi district in southern Niger, where repeated droughts have wrought environmental damage, farmers have been fighting back, and have actually reversed desertification. This is also true of Machakos (renamed Makueni) district in Kenya. In the 1930s, British colonial scientists condemned the eroding, bare hills of the drought-prone area to environmental oblivion. This narrative was consistently reproduced in the 1950s and 1970s. Yet, while there have been droughts, the hills are greener, less eroded and more productive today than before, despite a fivefold population increase. The local Akamba people had responded to the droughts by switching from herding cattle to settled farming, giving them incentive to work the land effectively.
“This is no high-tech breakthrough, nor a result of Western aid programmes”. A major reason for the overestimation of land degradation is the underestimation of local farmers’ abilities.
This demonstrates the importance of relying and building on local people’s knowledge and practices. Many external interventions have usurped and undermined local systems of decision-making and resource management. It’s time to turn the received wisdom on its head, and learn from local communities, instead of blaming them wholesale for land degradation.
In light of all this evidence, a ‘new realism’ now exists about desertification, which gives climatic variation equal footing with human activities, as a cause. The UNCCD now takes care to point out the reversibility of drought, the influence of climatic variation, and recognises that the causes of desertification are complex, as is the human-environment relationship.
Policies need to appreciate the inherent uncertainty in science. ‘Opportunistic management’, i.e. seizing opportunities to evade problems, working within complex systems, adapting to instability and exploiting environmental instability, is needed for dynamic ecosystems.
Dynamic ecological theory does not replace conventional theory but is more appropriate in some contexts, such as in dryland ecosystems. Environmental complexity doesn’t lend itself to simple, linear or reductionist technological fixes. Ecosystems are dynamic wholes and sustainable agriculture works in tandem with these, as local farmers in Africa are showing.
