tagged w/ agroforestry
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With drought conditions chronic in the Sahel, many farmers give up trying to grow crops and head to towns and cities to find work. In Chad many go to the south or to Lake Chad where irrigation from the fast-shrinking lake is used to farm. But some agro-ecologists say governments, donors and farmers should not abandon agriculture in the Sahel, and despite being “very difficult”, with the right approaches, there is “huge potential” in natural regeneration, traditional irrigation methods, and simple alternatives such as crop diversification.
“The Sahel has enormous potential – this is a very marginal food-growing environment, so we are forced to learn how this natural system works. All we’re doing is looking for the clues in nature,” said Tony Rinauld, a research and development adviser on natural resources to World Vision Australia who worked in the Sahel for’ years, practicing agro-forestry, a traditional land-use system that combines trees or other woody perennials with crop and animal production.
The Kanem and Bahr el Ghazal regions in western Chad are chronically food insecure, and periodically experience acute malnutrition rates above the emergency threshold. According to NGOs, rates reached’ percent in Kanem earlier in 2012 and many families have already run out of food and are down to one or two goats.
Both regions are dotted with fertile oases, known as ‘wadis’, that have for years been left by their traditional ‘owners’ – the aristocrats, or ‘Sultanate’, and village chiefs – to grow little more than date palms, lemon and mango trees. Vegetables are systematically grown in just 100 of Kanem’s 500 wadis, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which runs a project with the European Union (EU) humanitarian funder, ECHO, to help the poorest families grow vegetables in 120 oases across Kanem and Bahr el Ghazal.
“Here [in Kanem] one crisis just flows into the next one… but we are trying to keep people here and to see how we can enlarge the wadis further,” said Abdul Karim, FAO’s food security head in Mao, the capital of Kanem.
Sultanates and village chiefs lend the oases to separate producer committees of men and women for 5 to 10 years, while FAO helps build a water point and provides the pump, gives farmers seeds and tools and trains them in market gardening.
Minder Mohamed Ali was guarding fields of lettuces, carrots, aubergines and onions in Aloum 2 wadi, 8 kilometers from Mao. “We eat some, we sell some of the vegetables – many farmers weren’t able to do much before this, as they have had no production this year,” he told IRIN.
“Now we see vegetables in the market every day,” the representative of the Sultanate in Mao, ni Alifeh Mahadi Alifey Mahlabtra, told IRIN. “It is also a motivation for people to do something… we will [probably] renew the contract in five years – we want people to get enough food,” he said. “Before, people here grew rice, now we are completely dependent on our wadis.”
With the right level of investment and the right approach, anything is possible, said Augustin Ilunga, head of the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Mao, which has for decades been helping to keep severely malnourished children alive. “In a desert landscape like this, with climate change, it will take a lot of work to change… but with the right attitude it’s possible. Otherwise we’ll be here giving Plumpy’Nut [a highly nutritious foodstuff given to malnourished people] forever,” he told IRIN.
Ultimately, this project has worked only because land was made available to the very poorest groups, who ordinarily would not have had access to it, said Remy Courcier, Emergency coordinator at the FAO in the capital, N’djamena. “Land ownership and land rights are central to improving prospects in the Sahel.”
Courcier told IRIN that investors in Chad should follow other Sahelian examples. “Here in Chad not much has been done over the past 30 years, but in Niger there is lots of research into improved seed varieties, traditional irrigation, environmental protection such as controlling sandy dunes – we could use more of this.”
more at the linkWith drought conditions chronic in the Sahel, many farmers give up trying to grow... more
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I have been a member of Tree Nation for going on five years now. Tree Nation is a free Internet community/organization where you can be a part of planting thousands of trees in four separate forests globally to help counter deforestation and desertfication right from your modem. Their original forest in the heart of Niger has now planted over 52,000 trees on their way to the goal of 100,000 for 2012! All total over 397,000 trees have been planted. I have several trees planted there in my name as well. There are other forests in Columbia, Nicaragua and their newest in Madagascar. This article is about a new moringa park being introduced in Niger and also about beginning to use agroforestry in their Niger plantation.
We see so much deforestation taking place in our world and so many negative effects from our behavior. This is one bright spot proving that people globally can join together in good spirit to work to make the world a better place.I hope you check it out and maybe even become part of the solution in planting trees in places where they are most needed now.
Excerpt:
"Alongside planting trees, we are beginning to farm fruits and vegetables as we cultivate the trees planted. Our goal is twofold: to enhance the quality of the soil and the growth of the trees through agroforestry and to take advantage by selling the products farmed in the process.
So far, we have planted tomatoes, aubergines and cucumbers. While the first two have yielded good results, many cucumbers have been lost owing to the pest of caterpillars. We are, however, going to continue farming the vegetables and we hope to make the most of distribution outlets in the capital of Niamey and in local markets to sell them alongside our production of Moringa leaves.
The Moringa plantation:
We have also decided to reorganise our site to open a new Moringa park. 15 metres wide, it runs alongside the channelling strip used for channelling the irrigation from the basin, which is a round 200 metres long. It will be ideally placed to take advantage of the water well and our soon-to-be-in-place micro irrigation system, by using the border irrigation technique, which involves irrigating a whole area of land at one time. As for our old park, until the irrigation system has been expanded it will only be being farmed on a seasonal basis.
In all, over the last few months we have harvested around 200 kg of Moringa leaves. And, while we’re on the subject, we thought you might want to know that we’ve just collected our first Baobab leaves since they were planted 4-5 years ago!"I have been a member of Tree Nation for going on five years now. Tree Nation is a free... more
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In this extract from his book, To Cook A Continent, Nnimmo Bassey argues that climate negotiations, from Durban in late 2011 onwards, will increasingly confront the issue of climate justice.
The atmosphere is a common space, a global commons. Industrialised nations pumped a disproportionate amount of emissions into the atmosphere and they have cornered a disproportionate amount of global resources, largely by exploiting nations that are on the other side of the coin. Climate impacts are already being felt in a severe way in Africa as well as in other regions of the global South. Centuries of exploitation have weakened the resilience of these regions and in tackling climate change these historical facts must be addressed. One way of addressing this is by the payment of climate debt to make the needed financial and technological resources available to these vulnerable regions.
The Conference of Parties at Copenhagen and the following one at Cancun did not generate outcomes consistent with scientific warnings that the world faces a severe climate crisis. Copenhagen ended with an accord spearheaded by President Barack Obama of the United States with the backing of the BASIC countries (Brazil, South Africa, India and China) concocted in a 'Green Room' dreamed up by Denmark's conservative ruling party. In that room, Patrick Bond recalled, were 26 countries 'cherry-picked to represent the world. When even that small group deadlocked, allegedly due to Chinese intransigence and the overall weak parameters set by the US, the five leaders (Obama, Lula da Silva, Jacob Zuma, Manmohan Singh, and Wen Jiabao) attempted a face-saving last gasp at planetary hygiene.'12
The demand of climate justice is that those who created the climate problem must be the ones to mitigate it, and in the process must transform their economies and societies.13 There are two ways to go about making this happen. First, rich nations must reduce rapacious consumption patterns and address the climate crisis with real solutions and not ones that have been seen to be false. Second, the rich nations have to support the poor nations who are being forced to adapt to a situation they did not create. One practical way of making that happen is through support for sustainable, green development paths.
Among governments, the Bolivians have made the clearest call for climate justice while India and China have used related arguments to defend their growth paths. At a time when the world has been calling for a curtailment of polluting industrial establishments, China has been building new coal-fired power plants at a prodigious rate.14 It is interesting to note that while China is massively expanding its coal-powered plants, it is also quickly assuming leadership in the utilisation of wind power. The discourse on how much both China and India must do in tackling global warming must not overlook the fact that vast numbers of people in both India and China still require electricity supply and that meeting that gap requires huge financial outlays.
Following the catastrophic outcome of the United Nations climate negotiations held in Copenhagen in December 2009, President Evo Morales of Bolivia announced that the world would meet in Bolivia for a thorough and inclusive discussion on this vital issue.
The summit, held in Cochabamba in April 2010, attracted 35,000 participants from 140 countries. The summit stood in sharp contrast to the Copenhagen event in many ways. First, this was an assembly of governments and peoples. In Copenhagen no effort was spared in keeping civil society out of the conference: the conference was marked by lockouts of civil society, detentions of climate activists and outright brutality towards non-violent protesters on the streets. In Cochabamba the police were offering assistance and were also participants. Whereas Copenhagen showed a disdain for the voices of the people, Cochabamba was about raising the voices of the people. The only similarity between the events is that they were both held in cities whose names start with letter 'C' followed by nine letters.
The key outcome of the Cochabamba conference was the People's Agreement. This agreement demanded that countries cut their emissions by at least 50 per cent at source in the second commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol (2013–17), without recourse to offsets and other carbon trading schemes. In terms of finance, the People's Agreement demands that developed countries commit 6 per cent of their GDP to finance adaptation and mitigation needs. The financial suggestions of the Copenhagen Accord are a drop in the ocean compared to what is needed to secure vulnerable peoples and nations. The peoples of the world also affirmed that there is a climate debt that must be recognised and paid. The payment is not all about finance but principally about decolonising the atmospheric space and redistributing the meagre space left. Developed countries already occupy 80 per cent of the space.
The climate debt is also about taking actions needed to restore the natural cycles of Mother Earth and one clear way of achieving this will be through the proclamation of a Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, with clear obligations for humans. Bolivia is in the forefront of promoting the adoption of this declaration at the United Nations. The People's Agreement recognises that the causes of climate change are systemic and that systemic changes are needed to tackle them. On this note, the model of civilisation that is hinged on uncontrolled development can only compound the crisis. The world needs to move towards living well and not continue on the path of domination of others and of conspicuous and wasteful consumption.
An area glossed over in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations is the role of industrial agriculture in climate change. The People's Conference debated this key sector and reached the agreement that the way to a sustainable future is through the enthronement of food sovereignty based on agro-ecological agricultural systems. The issue of access to water being a human right was also affirmed by the people and later on in the year by the United Nations.
In all, the People's Agreement recognises that real strategies to tackle climate change must be based on the principles of equity and justice in dealing with the structural causes. Without climate justice it will also clearly be impossible to achieve the much talked about Millennium Development Goals (MDGs).
Cochabamba resonated with calls for urgently securing the rights of Mother Earth as a means of reconfiguring our relationship with the earth and with each other – in a way that respects the past, today and the future. All these will be a pipe dream unless peoples' sovereignty is supported, restored or built across the world. Cochabamba was a turning point in the march to transform our world from the path of conflict, competition, exploitation and domination to a path of solidarity and dignity. It held a ray of hope for Africa.
More at the link
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I posted this excerpt from this article because it hits the nail on the head about the mechanisms involved in the schemes being put forth by industrialized nations, the World Bank and corporations (industrial agriculture especially) looking to use this planetary emergency as a way to profit from it without really doing anything to address it. And that includes our seeds and water. Our voices now can make a dfference and they must be heard.In this extract from his book, To Cook A Continent, Nnimmo Bassey argues that climate... more
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Hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers in southern Africa are adopting fast-growing trees and shrubs to fertilise their fields naturally, for improved yields and incomes, according to a study.
Scientists at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), a non-profit research organisation in Kenya, analysed two decades-worth of efforts to bring 'fertiliser trees' to African farms and announced their findings — which were published in the International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability — last month (14 October).
Fertiliser trees, such as the acacia tree, capture nitrogen from the air and transfer it to the soil in a process known as nitrogen-fixing. This restores nutrients and increases crop productivity, with the potential to double or even triple harvests. They also improve water efficiency on farms and help prevent soil erosion.
"Four hundred thousand farmers in southern Africa [Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Zimbabwe] are growing the trees to boost their farm yields, and there are still millions of resource-poor smallholders who could benefit from them," said Oluyede Ajayi, lead author of the study and a senior scientist at ICRAF.
The study found that maize yields and farmers' incomes are significantly higher in areas where the trees are used. In Zambia, for example, incomes for farmers using fertiliser trees averaged US$230–330 per hectare, while those who did not use the trees earned just US$130. This increase in income provided food for up to 114 extra days.
Ajayi told SciDev.Net that soil fertility plays a critical role in ensuring food security for smallholder farmers in many African countries. Efforts must be made to take advantage of all available options — including fertiliser trees — rather than engage in less useful academic debates on organic versus inorganic fertilisers, he argued.
"Given the wide range of fertiliser trees that have been developed, [support for farmers] is required to ensure the fertiliser trees [are used] in the right locations," said Ajayi.
He called for policy and institutional frameworks that would support their use and for more information dissemination on the need for fertiliser trees.
More at the linkHundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers in southern Africa are adopting... more
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Agroforestry, the deliberate placement of trees into crop and livestock operations, can help capture substantial amounts of carbon on agricultural lands while providing production and conservation benefits. However, we currently lack tools for accurately estimating current and projected carbon values in these systems.
In North America, windbreaks are an effective carbon-capturing option. Only occupying about 2 to 5% of the land, windbreaks also help protect crops and livestock, as well as reduce wind erosion. They provide a means to increase production while reducing greenhouse gases.
James Brandle, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln professor, explains that unlike forests, the linear design of windbreaks creates a more open environment with different light and climate conditions. As a result, agroforestry trees usually have different characteristics than trees grown under forest conditions. New tools specifically designed for windbreak trees are needed to determine current or future amounts of carbon contained in agroforestry practices.
Researchers at the University of Florida, University of Kansas, University of Nebraska and the USDA National Agroforestry Center (NAC) have developed a model to predict the amount of carbon contained by agroforestry systems. This modeling approach uses detailed web-available data for windbreak, soils and climate.
While this research focused only on green ash windbreak growth in Nebraska, it provides a good basis for determining agroforestry's contributions in farming operations.
This research was supported by the Research Joint Venture Agreement through the USFS Rocky Mountain Research Station, Forest Service, and the McIntyre-Stennis Forestry Research Program at the University of Nebraska. The complete results from this study were published in the May/June 2011 issue of the Journal of Environmental Quality.Agroforestry, the deliberate placement of trees into crop and livestock operations,... more
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Farmers in Malawi have increased their maize yields by up to 280 percent when the crop is grown under a canopy of one particular fertilizing tree, Faidherbia albida. Unlike most other trees, Faidherbia sheds its leaves during the early rainy season and remains dormant during the crop-growing period.
A unique acacia known as a "fertilizer tree" has typically led to a doubling or tripling of maize yields in smallholder agriculture in Zambia and Malawi, according to evidence presented at a conference in the Hague this week.
The findings were central to the arguments of agroforestry experts at the conference, who urged decision makers to spread this technology more widely throughout the African nations most vulnerable to climate change and food shortages, and to think differently about more practical ways to solve the problems that are most pressing to smallholder farmers.
Speaking today at The Hague Conference on Agriculture, Food Security and Climate Change, Dr. Dennis Garrity, Director General of the World Agroforestry Centre, said that evergreen agriculture-or the integration of fertilizer trees into crop and livestock-holding farms-is rapidly emerging as an affordable and accessible solution to improving production on Africa's farms.
"Doubling food production by mid-century, particularly in Africa, will require nonconventional approaches, particularly since so many of the continent's soils are depleted, and farmers are faced with a changing climate," Garrity said. "We need to reinvent agriculture in a sustainable and affordable way, so that it can reduce its emissions of greenhouse gases and be adapted to climate change."
Garrity spoke to leading agriculture and climate scientists, policymakers, development experts, and private sector representatives from around the world gathered at The Hague to develop a concrete action plan for linking agriculture-related investments, policies, and measures to transition agriculture to lower carbon-emitting, climate-resilient growth.
In a recent article in Food Security, Garrity and co-authors highlighted how evergreen agriculture has already provided benefits to several million farmers in Zambia, Malawi, Niger and Burkina Faso. Fertilizer trees draw nitrogen from the air and transfer it to the soil through their roots and leaf litter, replenishing exhausted soils with rich sources of organic nutrients.
The trees bolster nutrient supply, increase food crop yields, and enhance the production of fodder, fuel and timber. These systems also provide additional income to farmers from tree products, while at the same time storing much greater amounts of carbon than other agricultural systems.
For example, farmers in Malawi have increased their maize yields by up to 280 percent when the crop is grown under a canopy of one particular fertilizing tree, Faidherbia albida. Unlike most other trees, Faidherbia sheds its leaves during the early rainy season and remains dormant during the crop-growing period.
This makes it highly compatible with food crops because it does not compete with them for water, nutrients, or light-only the bare branches of the tree's canopy spread overhead while crops of maize, sorghum, or millets grow to maturity below.
The leaves and pods also provide a crucial source of fodder in the dry season for livestock when nearly all other plants have dried up. The trees may continue to provide these cost-free benefits for up to 70 to 100 years.
In Niger, there are now more than 4.8 million hectares of millet and sorghum being grown in agroforests that have up to 160 Faidherbia trees on each hectare.
continuedFarmers in Malawi have increased their maize yields by up to 280 percent when the crop... more
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The conflict between conserving environments and improving livelihoods is constricting efforts for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) in Sub-Saharan Africa. But agroforestry — managing trees with agricultural production — could help.
The Financial Times calls the carbon market the world's fastest growing commodity market — with agriculture, forestry and other land use playing an increasingly important role. The idea behind REDD is simple — pay countries to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and degraded lands.
But working out practical solutions that meet key Millennium Development Goals — namely, to end extreme poverty and hunger, and ensure environmental sustainability — remains difficult.
More trees, better livelihoods
Developing countries' quest for food security through agricultural expansion often leads to deforestation and forest degradation. The main challenge for much of Sub-Saharan Africa is how to design agricultural landscapes to resolve livelihood-environment conflict and maintain forests' ecosystem benefits such as water storage, erosion control, biodiversity conservation and soil rehabilitation.
The way forward is to integrate climate and livelihood, adaptation and mitigation, REDD and agriculture. Agroforestry should be a key component of this approach. Integrating trees into agricultural landscapes on a massive scale would create an effective carbon sink while ensuring sustainable food production, and would help adapt to climate change in other ways too.
Tree-based systems are much better at accumulating carbon, above and below ground, than pure agriculture. A 'green investment' project in India has demonstrated how to harness tree planting for carbon off-setting (see Growing money on trees?). Tree and carbon experts from the World Agroforestry Centre suggest that a billion hectares of farmland (much of it in developing countries) could be turned into carbon-rich agricultural landscapes, potentially sequestering 50 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide — a third of the carbon reduction challenge.
Of course, saving carbon is not usually the top priority for small-holder farmers— but agroforestry can contribute many of the other benefits farmers want too. For example, a meta-analysis of 94 scientific publications — conducted by World Agroforestry Centre researchers and published in Plant and Soil in 2008 — indicates that using 'fertiliser trees' that capture nitrogen from the air and transfer it to the soil can reduce the need for commercial nitrogen fertilisers by 75 per cent while doubling crop yields. If combined with other soil fertility management, such as conservation agriculture, fertiliser trees can significantly boost sustainable soil health and increase food security. A diverse tree cover can also increase agroecosystems' resilience towards drought, pest and disease and other threats on food production induced by climate change.
more at the link.The conflict between conserving environments and improving livelihoods is constricting... more
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