Africa’s drylands: dangers and opportunities

Hye Jung Han, one of my master’s students at SAIS, reports from a SAIS event last week.  The speaker was Dr. Dennis Garrity, UN Convention to Combat Desertification Ambassador:

The Sahel region of West Africa faces worsening social, political, economic and food insecurities. With a population burgeoning to 1.8 billion people, at least twice as much food must be produced per year by 2050 to avoid widespread starvation.  Food production per capita has been declining since the 1960s. Land degradation has become a serious problem, with declining soil fertility, escalating fertilizer prices and heightened risks of devastating droughts from climate change.  The region suffers erratic and extreme rainfall and increasing temperatures that lead to higher crop stress.  Smallholder food production, the economic mainstay of the region, is at serious risk.

Worsening food insecurity overlaps with low human development indices and extreme poverty.  These structural vulnerabilities drive chronic political conflict in the region.  Terrorism and political instability are centered on the African drylands.  Mali has been the most recent iteration, with destabilizing spillover effects in Niger, Nigeria and Algeria. The combination of conflict and land degradation is leading to rapid disappearance of available lands for farming.

For Dr. Dennis Garrity, United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) Drylands Ambassador, part of the answer lies in EverGreen Agriculture, a form of intensive farming that integrates trees with annual crops to regenerate land on small-scale farms. Fertilizer trees such as faidherbia albida have been widely used by farmers for generations.  This indigenous tree improves soil fertility and moisture conditions by buffering the microclimate, providing an effect not dissimilar to a greenhouse.  It is highly compatible with food crops because it does not compete with them for light, nutrients or moisture, and its nitrogen-rich leaves are used as fodder for livestock.

By scaling up this indigenous farming practice and applying scientific, tree-based management, EverGreen Agriculture has yielded significant livelihood and environmental benefits. In Malawi, maize yields on farms with fertilizer trees are 2.5 times higher than on farms without them, increasing from 1.3 to 3.1 tons per hectare. Mali has seen increases in household and national food security, with the intercropping of faidherbia trees leading to the enhancement of millet, sorghum, and livestock fodder production. Agroforestry is proving itself one of the lowest cost, least risky, and most easily diffused agricultural practices that can be made accessible to small scale farmers.

National governments are deepening their support. The successful experiences of Zambia, Malawi, Niger, and Burkina Faso prompted the Ethiopian Prime Minister to promise the establishment of a billion fertilizer trees on smallholder farms at the UN Climate Change Conference at Durban in 2011, prompting the Prime Minister of Uganda to announce a larger program. Seventeen countries are currently engaged in EverGreen Agriculture, with national scaling-up programs supported by the African Union, World Bank, IFAD, GEF, FAO, UNEP, UNCCD and other regional and local organizations.

Agroforestry systems such as EverGreen Agriculture build more productive and drought-resilient farming systems, relying upon local knowledge, science and practice. Working to regreen the Sahelian landscape and combat desertification, EverGreen Agriculture can improve household and national food security, increase the resource pie and ameliorate some of the chronic drivers of conflict that continue to plague the region today.