Fruit · Maradi and Zinder regions, southern Niger · 1983 to now
Niger's farmer-managed regreening
Farmers in southern Niger regrew trees from living stumps across about 5 million hectares, an estimated 200 million more trees.
about 5 million hectares
See it change from space
Google Earth Timelapse shows every year since 1984. Press play, and watch the land change.
The story
The droughts of 1968 to 1973 hit Niger hard. Aerial photos from 1975 show farmland where most of the trees seen in the 1950s were gone. Many tree-planting projects in that period failed.
In 1983 Tony Rinaudo, an Australian agronomist with the mission SIM in Maradi, saw that what looked like shrubs in farmers' fields were shoots from living stumps and roots: an underground forest. They could be regrown for a fraction of the cost of nursery seedlings.
During the droughts of 1984 and 1985, farmers were offered food in return for protecting this natural regrowth on their fields. Farmers chose the most useful stumps, kept the tallest straight stems, pruned the rest and protected them. Neighbours saw the results and copied them.
A 1993 policy change moved ownership of trees on farms from the state to farmers, which helped the practice spread. By 2005 the sparse tree cover of the 1970s had been replaced by young, dense parkland, even as villages grew.
Researchers estimated about 5 million hectares were regreened by 2009, and about 7 million by 2017. Farmer-managed natural regeneration is now used in at least 25 countries.
How they did it
- Find living tree stumps and roots already in the fields
- Choose the most useful species for food, fodder, fuel and sale
- Keep the tallest, straightest stems on each stump and prune the rest
- Protect the regrowth from animals and cutting, and keep pruning
- Change the rules so farmers own and benefit from the trees on their land
What changed
- Trees regrew across an estimated 5 million hectares of southern Niger.[1]
- About 200 million more trees, estimated at 40 trees per hectare across 5 million hectares.[1]
- An estimated extra 500,000 tonnes of cereals a year, reaching about 2.5 million people.[1]
- Comparing 2005 and 2013 imagery, tree density rose on nearly a quarter of sample plots and fell on less than 2 percent.[2]
- By 2017 the practice covered an estimated 7 million hectares.[2]
- Used in at least 25 countries, at roughly US$20 per hectare.[3]
Who did it
Farming families across southern Niger, women and men, did this on their own fields. Tony Rinaudo (SIM, later World Vision Australia) helped start and spread it, and won the Right Livelihood Award in 2018. Chris Reij, Gray Tappan (USGS) and Melinda Smale documented it with aerial photos and satellite images.
Worth knowing
The 5 million hectare and 200 million tree figures are estimates. The tree count assumes 40 trees per hectare rather than counting trees.
The researchers note that no study had yet systematically measured the full impacts, and crop yield gains vary from place to place.
What we can take from it
- Look for the forest already under the ground before buying seedlings.
- When farmers own the trees on their land, they protect them.
- A cheap practice that farmers can copy from their neighbours can spread further than any project.
Watch
Sources
- 1.Agroenvironmental transformation in the Sahel: another kind of Green Revolution (Reij, Tappan and Smale 2009, IFPRI Discussion Paper 914) · IFPRI (copy hosted by OER Africa) · Research
- 2.Farmer-managed restoration of agroforestry parklands in Niger (Smale, Tappan and Reij 2018) · U.S. Geological Survey · Research
- 3.Tony Rinaudo, 2018 Right Livelihood laureate · Right Livelihood · Official
- 4.Landscape Restoration and Re-greening · USGS EROS Center · Official
- 5.FMNR Hub · World Vision Australia · Official
- 6.An Australian agronomist watched almost every seedling he planted in Niger die, until he noticed living stumps · ECOticias · Story
More places brought back
Shaanxi, Shanxi, Gansu and Inner Mongolia, China · 1994 to 2005 (and since)
Loess Plateau
about 35,000 km² in two World Bank projects
The Loess Plateau had one of the highest erosion rates in the world. From 1994, farming families built terraces and small dams, stopped free grazing and replanted the slopes. Vegetation cover doubled, incomes doubled and the Yellow River carries far less soil.
Fazenda Bulcão, Aimorés, Minas Gerais, Brazil · 1998 to now
Instituto Terra
608 hectares of Atlantic Forest
When the Salgados came home to Aimorés in the 1990s, the family farm was bare and eroded. Lélia suggested they plant the forest back. Two decades on, the hills are forested, many species have returned and dry streams flow again.
Tigray, northern Ethiopia · 1991 to 2020
Tigray
more than 1 million hectares
After famine and war in the 1980s, Tigray's communities spent about 30 years terracing hills, building check dams and closing worn-out land to grazing. Groundwater came back, irrigation grew from about 40 to almost 40,000 hectares, and the region won a UN-backed gold award in 2017. The 2020 to 2022 war took a terrible toll on people and on this work.