Under The Shifting Sands, A Blessing For The Desert

Sydney Morning Herald

Wednesday August 13, 2008

Connie Levett

THE farmlands of West Africa look desperate to the untrained eye - sandy, barren and hostile. But despite much talk of desertification as the Sahara's dunes creep ever southward, a quiet green miracle is taking place. And the efforts of an Australian development worker have provided the impetus for the homegrown project.

More than 200 million new trees have grown up in the region in the past 20 years, reforesting 5 million hectares of semi-desert in the Sahel, a strip of land directly below the Sahara. A substantial part of that regrowth is due to regeneration of underground forests.

The Dutch researcher Dr Chris Reij says the regreening is largely due to the farmers adapting their practices. The farmers have not planted and watered new trees but tended regrowth from seeds and dormant root systems.

"The whole aspect of underground forests is you almost find, I don't want to say as much biomass underground as you find above ground, but it's obvious that the root systems of the trees that are now growing increasingly in parts of the Sahel are as important as what is above ground," he says.

Reij, who works for the Centre for International Co-operation at Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, says there was no surprise regreening had taken place, but the scale of it, especially in the landlocked state of Niger, took him aback. He says Australian Tony Rinaudo's work on tree regeneration in eastern Niger in the 1980s encouraged this project. "Tony's work catalysed the regreening in the Maradi region. Other parts of Niger came to visit this and contributed to spreading of the idea." It was driven partially by the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s, Reij says.

Reij, who is in Australia this week to meet World Vision and other partners, and raise awareness and funds for the Sahel Regreening Initiative, says the work by farmers challenged conventional wisdom on how to stop the creeping dunes. His claims are backed by data and analysis from the US Geological Survey in North Dakota.

"It's a popular concept we currently see in the Sahel that the African heads of state have a program which is called the green wall. The perception is you have to plant rows of trees in order to stop the sand from moving southwards," Reij says. "It's a bit of an illusion because that does not work. In fact, the farmers have protected the natural regeneration .... and they have done so on about 5 million hectares since the middle of the 1980s."

The benefits are many. "[It] creates more productive, more complex farming systems. Trees have become part of the farming system, trees can produce fodder, people can keep more livestock." They thus have more manure, which doesn't have to be used for cooking fuel as there are trees for firewood. It can be fertiliser. "You have improved soil fertility, which leads to higher agricultural production. It does contribute to solving part of the food problem."

© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald

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