Planting trees in Senegal: more than meets the eye

By John Leary/ Special To The Tab

 

Confronting the Sahara desert, a mere 150 miles to the north and moving steadily southward, the farmers of Kaffrine in central Senegal are facing an environmental disaster.

The Wolof people have unknowingly punished their soils with over a century of uninterrupted peanut farming. The annual harvest, which entails ripping peanuts out of the ground, leaves farmlands exposed to the intense sun and harsh winds that last the long dry season. The need for fuelwood and construction materials has depleted local forests. The Wolof are desperate for new ideas to deal with irregular rainfall, locust attacks, and the encroaching desert. For many, food security is only a dream. The baobab, tamarind, and bush mangoes that dot the horizon are all that remain of a once thriving forest, and even native Acacia trees are struggling to regenerate.

Trees for the Future's International Program Manager John Leary explains multipurpose windbreaks to Senagalese farmers.

 

These local environmental catastrophes on the tip of West Africa reflect global trends that affect all of us. Clearing forests releases massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, leading to alterations of planetary weather patterns and reducing the planet’

s capacity to sequester the greenhouse gases emitted from industries. As a result, every country is facing climate extremes, such as droughts, floods, melting glaciers, and hurricanes.

Fortunately, local people are coming to understand that some of the solutions to these profound problems often lie within the collective wisdom of their own communities - in agricultural practices that have been ignored for decades.

The initial response of desperate farmers has often been to ask international development organizations to construct water pumps. In fact, access to fresh water often quickly creates a boom in vegetable and animal production. However, pumps have been only a short-term solution. What at first appeared to be a springboard to sustainable development has proven to be the Trojan Horse of the African Sahel.

It is a tragic, but common, scenario. Herds of animals concentrate at the water sources, trampling stressed soils and eating all that remains of local vegetation. New gardening industries further deplete the remaining forest resources as communities cut trees to build wooden fences in order to protect precious gardens.

At the request of village leaders and local forestry officials I began working with these Senegalese farmers in 2001 while serving as an agroforestry extension agent in the Peace Corps. They were ready to listen to anybody with a workable plan. To develop a plan that would accommodate their needs, expectations and capabilities, I knew I needed to listen carefully to what these traditional people had to say.

Agroforestry is a complex systems approach, and it takes a lot of listening to understand the needs of local agricultural systems and to ensure that a tree-planting program will meet those needs. Planting trees is the first line of defense, but it is not an end in itself- it is a preventive strategy to address many environmental, social, and economic problems simultaneously.

For that first year, I mostly listened. I learned that the Wolof people are tired of working - literally and figuratively - for peanuts. More and more, it is taking far too long to produce far too little. Production keeps falling. Soils have lost strength, and the scant remaining topsoil is badly eroded by fierce winds in the dry season. Fertilizers are expensive, and farmers get only one payday per year, in November, after peanuts have been processed. The rest of the year is a painful waiting game. Animals have nothing to eat in the dry season after all grasses have been cut or burned, and women become exhausted from walking miles to collect wood for fuel. As I listened to their stories, it became clear that these farmers actually knew the solution to their problems, and they just needed an outside catalyst.

The farmers told me that first they needed to protect their fields from animals and wind erosion. They told me they needed sources of animal forage, organic matter, and wood for fuel. They said they needed to diversify the types of crops and the timing of production. My role was to bring in outside knowledge and experiences to help communities utilize untapped resources. My solution was windbreaks - double rows of trees that protect fields and produce great quantities of useful products.

The reason these communities had not established multipurpose windbreaks decades ago was simply that no one had ever seen or heard of windbreaks. When the French colonized Senegal, they taught farmers how to use every square inch of their land to produce peanuts- techniques that became the so-called “traditional”

farming methods. But long before the French arrived, Senegalese were experts at integrating millet production in pockets of brush and forests, leaving environments intact to regenerate and serve as natural windbreaks, while keeping available a supply of native fruit and nut trees. The deeper traditional knowledge inherent in this system had been lost when lands were cleared to expand peanut production.

The first year, I worked with a few farmers to surround their field with thick hedges of seedlings. We planted thorny trees on the outside to keep animals out, and we planted fast-growing trees on the inside to establish a tall windbreak. Everyone was surprised by the rapid rate of growth of these species- many grew more than 20 feet in 16 months, starting from seed! I had selected trees that quickly grow back after branches are cut, trees whose leaves drop lots of nitrogen into the starved soils and trees and shrubs that produce beans, fruits and high-protein animal forage (leaves and seed pods).

Farmers in Kaffrine have seen that the solution works. What started with three pilot farmers has expanded into 25 communities and is growing at a rate of 15 villages every year. Families have changed the way they farm, collect firewood, improve soil, feed animals and protect crops. These proud local people, with some encouragement and agroforestry knowledge from an outsider, were able to generate a local solution to a profound environmental problem.

There is much more work to do, and funding is often inadequate, although these programs are not expensive. The global community has a stake in ensuring food security for communities experiencing more droughts due to climate change, but the programs have ripple effects far beyond those communities.

Halting the erosion of the Sahara has direct benefits for people in the Western hemisphere who suffer health problems from the increasing amounts of airborne dust being carried across the Atlantic by trade winds. We live in a profoundly interconnected world, and in the long run, there is no place to hide from the serious consequences of environmental degradation anywhere on the planet.

John Leary is the International Program Manager for Trees for the Future, www.plant-trees.org, Since 1988 TFTF has aided thousands of communities to plant over 43,000,000 trees, returning sustainable productivity to 70,000 acres of land and removing over one million tons of CO2 from the global atmosphere.

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