In 1981 Tony Rinaudo and his wife moved from Australia to the Niger Republic on the edge of the Sahara Desert. Somewhere, somehow, they wanted to make a difference. But after two years of intense tree-planting and trying to coax some life from the arid landscape regularly devastated by severe drought, he despaired.
‘We ran a typical reforestation project relying on tree planting. In this very hostile environment, establishment rates were very low. In fact, it was quite futile, and I was ready to give up, but I believed that God had called me to Niger to make a difference, though I didn’t know how. 2 Peter 1:3 was a mystery to me [“By his divine power, God has given us everything we need for living a godly life. We have received all of this by coming to know him, the one who called us to himself by means of his marvelous glory and excellence.” (NLT)]. I didn’t think God had included Niger when he said that he had provided everything that we needed for life (our physical bodies), though I believe the Bible is true.
What I didn’t realize was that before this landscape was altered, it provided abundantly. What I didn’t know was that by working with nature much of that abundance could be restored. However, it was the environmental degradation that I witnessed that moved me to work in this area of reforestation and sustainable agriculture and land use.
Ephesians 2:10 says, "For we are God’s handiwork, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do." (NIV) Living here, dust storms became a common occurrence. Some days it was hard to see even 50 meters ahead because of dust storms. The impacts of the 1984 Sahel drought and famine were greatly multiplied by the effects of deforestation.
Many projects attempted to solve the problem by planting trees. However, there were enormous problems even in the nursery – water shortage, birds, lizards, frogs, grasshoppers, termites, goats, and cattle all made it extremely difficult to raise seedlings. The constant, daily need to draw water by hand from 50 – 100-metre deep wells meant that few farmers wanted to raise trees.
It is estimated that in Niger 60 million trees were planted from nurseries over a 20-year period, with less than a 20% survival rate. I felt very discouraged. I looked north, south, east, west and thought that if we continued to use this nursery and tree planting technique, at this rate it would be impossible to revegetate the land on a large enough scale to make an impact. How many million dollars would I need? How many decades would it take? And it was the same story all over West Africa. I knew perfectly well that 80 or 90% of the trees I had ready to plant would die.
For me the solution came as an answer to prayer. I saw for the first time what I had seen all along but hadn’t recognized. There are millions of living tree stumps in farmlands, grazing lands and degraded forests across Africa and other countries with the potential to regrow into trees, if we give them a chance.
In that moment, everything changed. We didn’t need to plant trees. It wasn’t a question of having a multi-million dollar budget and years to do it. Everything needed was already in the ground. Nature would heal itself—people just needed to stop hammering it.
So, Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) was born and the systematic regeneration and management of trees and shrubs growing from living tree stumps, roots and seedlings began. In the field, after clearing sections of the land, tree stumps are left in the ground, supported by a mature root system full of stored energy. Nurtured well, new shoots can feed off these root systems which cause them to grow very quickly.
It’s an embarrassingly simple solution to what appeared to be an intractable problem. But it involved overturning generations of accepted wisdom, and a resistance to giving some land back to nature.
When you’ve got people who are on the edge of starvation every year, not just in famine years, you’ve got this perception that you need every square inch of farmland to grow food crops. But here’s this nut of a person telling people they should sacrifice some of their land for trees!
I was known then as ‘the crazy white farmer’, but I managed to convince ten farmers in as many villages to back our plan to allow trees to regrow across the land they’d been intensively farming for decades. A drought was the catalyst for a work-for-food program that brought reluctant farmers into the fold. When the farming yields were, at first, no worse, then better, then dramatically so because of the growing trees, the new technique became very popular.
Over more than 30 years in west Africa, more than 6 million hectares have been regenerated. The farmer-managed natural regeneration technique is responsible for 240 million trees regrowing across that parched continent. The difference in the landscape from before and then after reforestation can be seen on satellite images from space.
Here is the secret... The trees improve farming yields, reduce ground temperatures and hold water in the soil. They provide firewood and make farming, in places where the temperature regularly reaches 40 degrees Celsius (104o Fahrenheit) , more comfortable.
In Niger today, FMNR has spread to over 50% of the farmland or 5-6 million hectares. And the results are staggering. Farmers produce half a million more tonnes of cereal per year than in the 1970s and 1980s. As a result, 2.5 million people are now more food secure and no longer on the brink of malnutrition. Five indigenous fruit species have begun bearing fruit. Some of these fruits have not been seen in 40 years.
The rewards are enormous. The Chief of Yameriga, Yamdaan Zimbil Longmoare in Ghana, was so overjoyed by the changes witnessed in his village in the space of two years that he said, "God cares even about tree stumps! This gift of FMNR is from the Almighty God and therefore anywhere you visit brings life and joy."
Originally published by A Rocha International. Republished with permission.
A Rocha (http://arocha.org/) is a global family of conservation organizations working together to live out God’s calling to care for creation ?and equip others to do likewise. A Rocha means ‘The Rock’ in Portuguese and the initiative is present in more than 20 countries around the world. They provide a missional response to the global crisis of biodiversity loss by carrying out community-based conservation projects, aiming to protect the environment through local, community-based conservation, scientific research, and environmental education.
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