麻豆传媒

Returning to Africa after a 10 year absence, Chris Reij could barely believe his eyes. On the arid margins of the Sahara in Niger, all he could see were trees. It was no mirage: after studying land use in Africa for three decades, he was witnessing the untold story of the re-greening of the Sahel. He tells Fred Pearce about the African farmers who are defying the experts

Describe what you have seen on your recent trips to rural Africa.

You might call me an old Africa hand. I have been working there on and off for 30 years, looking at how people manage their natural resources. I was in Niger regularly between 1984 and 1994. Back then, a lot of the land was treeless. There had been frequent droughts. Farmers had chopped down their trees for firewood and the desert was spreading. When I went back in 2004, I drove 800 kilometres east from the capital, Niamey, and I thought, bloody hell, there are trees everywhere.

I went to a village called Dan Saga, which I knew when it had virtually no trees. Now it had 80 to 100 trees per hectare. On the way back to the capital we drove north into the Tahoua region. In 1994, most of this area was bare plateau. Now you couldn鈥檛 see the villages because they were hidden behind trees. I saw the same thing everywhere. What was emerging was nothing short of a miracle. I reckon Niger has gained 200 million trees in two decades.

What is fuelling all this tree planting?

In Dan Saga, I sat down with the villagers and asked them. They said they had nearly lost their land to the desert. Every year, they had to replant their crops several times because the sand buried them or the winds destroyed them. After long deliberation, they agreed that the only way to survive was to protect the young trees that grew spontaneously on their land. A few years later, the trees protected their crops against the winds and stopped the sands spreading. The trees are now part of their farming system, providing fodder for livestock so farmers get more manure for their fields. We have also found that in areas with trees, fewer adults leave the villages to find work elsewhere. Trees are creating more local economic opportunities.

Didn鈥檛 the people know about the value of the trees before?

Yes. A hundred years ago, the sultans of the city of Zinder punished people who cut down certain trees, by having their hands cut off. But during later colonial times, the farmers were told to grow peanuts, and experts instructed them to remove all the trees from their fields: modern agriculture was about cultivating a single crop on a bare field. They did as they were told. The other thing is that trees were considered state property 鈥� as they are in many African countries 鈥� so when nobody was looking the farmers just chopped them down and sold them as firewood.

What changed?

The farmers knew they had a crisis to resolve. 鈥淲e had to fight the Sahara,鈥� they told me. At the same time, the government was being weakened by economic crises and political instability. The people no longer had to obey the experts, and they started to see the trees as their own rather than the state鈥檚. They felt they were in charge.

The politics of this are important. All across Africa, people look after the things they own but ignore or destroy what is controlled by the state. The World Bank says good governance is essential for development, but in this case the weakening of the state created opportunities for farmers. It seems that we have all underestimated the capacity of African farmers to adapt to crises and changing conditions.

鈥淲e鈥檝e underestimated African farmers鈥� ability to adapt to crises鈥�

To help tackle desertification, African governments and the European Union are talking about creating a of trees across the Sahara from Senegal to Djibouti. Is this a good idea?

In January 2008, the green wall initiative became part of a wider cooperation agreement between the African Union and the EU. Fortunately, it is not only about planting trees, but also about different methods of managing natural resources, such as soils. But it is striking that in all the reports on this initiative, there is not a single word about the farmers who have created their own version of a green wall without the help of governments or outsiders. There is a risk that governments could do harm by intervening, but if they adopt policies that give farmers legal rights to their trees it could work out OK.

Is there any evidence that planting trees could influence Africa鈥檚 climate?

It鈥檚 hard to be sure, though some meteorologists say that more vegetation encourages more rainfall. It holds moisture on the land, which then evaporates to create more rain downwind. The farmers say the trees have reduced the strong winds, and that they bring more rain. We want to do research into that.

Yet in 2005 there was .

That鈥檚 true, but some places seemed to escape and nobody has explained why. In October that year I went back to ask the farmers I knew how it had been for them. In the villages without trees, they told me they had run out of food and sent many of their children to the feeding centres. Many of those children never returned.

In Dan Saga, however, they told me the trees had saved them. Not a single child had died. They had pruned some of their trees and sold the wood to get cash to buy cereals. They also had fodder from the trees, so their livestock survived. This is good news because this is something developed by the farmers themselves and it shows that they have adapted to climate change better than we sometimes imagine.

Why have so few people heard of this success story?

The outside world has such a strong sense that deserts are spreading in the Sahara that even the 鈥渆xperts鈥� refuse to believe anything else. After my first journey back to Niger in 2004, I mentioned what I had seen at a big international meeting on desertification. The chairman refused to believe me. These are remote places and few people will go there to see for themselves. In Koloma Baba, a village in the Tahoua region, I teased the president of the women鈥檚 group. 鈥淎ll the experts believe the Sahel is continuing to die. It鈥檚 in all the reports,鈥� I told her. Without blinking, this wise old woman replied: 鈥淭hose experts have never visited us.鈥�

We have a strongly ingrained idea that these people are either passive victims or else are destroying their own land. In fact they are coming up with solutions to their problems. It is important to recognise that and to support them.