Evergreen Agriculture: Food Security

Dennis Garrity is director-general of the World Agroforestry Centre, which is headquartered in Nairobi, Kenya. The centre specialises in the sustainable management, protection and regulation of tropical rainforest and natural reserves.

Our theme today is about stories and about compelling movements that are poised to change the world. To me there is no greater blight on our integrity as a global community than continuing to ignore the constant hunger and the desperate poverty experienced every day by over a billion of our fellow human beings. The immense scale of raw hunger is particularly unacceptable in today’s world of ever-growing wealth and prosperity. It is a tragedy of immense proportions and particularly unacceptable because we are growing richer all the time.

I want to tell you a story about how we can change all that, and how it can be done in Africa by building upon the resourcefulness of African farmers who are engaged by the millions in creating a continent-wide evergreen agriculture. I want to demonstrate how you in the spatial-data generation and utilisation community can get involved in this movement and make a sterling contribution to solving the problem of ending hunger in the foreseeable future.

My story will seek to do three things. First, I want to make the case that assisting small-scale farmers to succeed in regenerating the health of their land is the real key to ending the vast majority of hunger in the world. Second, I will show a pool of evidence that they can largely do this themselves at little or no cash cost and with minimal risk, as long as they get some reasonable outside assistance. It is already happening on millions of hectares in a number of countries, and I want to show you how that story can be expanded on an enormously greater scale. And finally, I will propose that we launch at this summit a major new alliance of spatial-data generators and data users to assemble the knowledge that we need to guide the massive upscaling of this evergreen agriculture movement that is now gaining ground by the day in countries throughout Africa and Asia.

Hunger and Its Causes

Hunger is a global tragedy, a failure of both the global will and of the national political will. That billion of hungry people was supposed to be cut in half by 2015 as a target of Millennium Development Goal number one, but in reality, however, the number of hungry people has been increasing relentlessly during the past decade. Hunger is increasingly localised in two regions: South Asia and Africa. To overcome hunger and provide for the increased population expected in the next thirty-five years, the developing world absolutely must double its food production again over the following few decades.

Hunger in today’s world is primarily a condition on the small-scale farm. That’s because four out of five of the world’s hungry poor are actually rural farming communities and households. That’s something you may not be aware of, because people think of hunger as a city or an urban affair, but actually it is not. These rural people are simply not growing enough food to last them through the entire year. They experience a hunger period that generally occurs during the crop-growing season when the family needs the most energy for their agricultural activities.

In Zambia, for example—and this is typical across Africa—there are times during the season when virtually 100 per cent of the farm families are completely out of maize, their basic food. Over the years, we have noticed that cereal yields fortunately have been increasing in most regions in the tropics—but not in Africa. And since populations in Africa have been doubling and redoubling in these years, per capita food production has been steadily declining. Smallholder agriculture is now in deep crisis in Africa. Farm sizes are also declining rapidly and a majority of farm households in many countries cannot now even produce enough food to last the entire year. That hunger period I mentioned is an annual event for hundreds of millions of rural people. And when the rains fail there is famine, as evidenced by the devastating famine currently in progress in my neighbourhood in eastern Africa.

Now why is that? Well, most observers believe that the fundamental problem is that Africa’s soils are degrading rapidly and their nutrient supplies are not being replenished. And, indeed, if we look at fertiliser use in Africa, we find that commercial fertiliser use is minimal in the aggregate compared to other regions of the world. Only one in five farmers in Africa is applying any fertiliser at all. This is both because fertilisers tend to cost twice or three times as much at the farm level as elsewhere in the world, but even more important, frequent droughts make the risks of buying and applying fertilisers just too steep to bear for poor farmers.

So, ending world hunger for hundreds of millions of people will depend on regenerating the health of their land. But we need to think and act in different ways—outside-the-box, unconventional ways—if we are going to address this conundrum in a manner that really meets the realities on the ground.

A Green Cover for the Land

Unlike in the temperate areas, smallholder farmers in the tropics actually have always husbanded trees on their farms, along with their food crops, and they continue to cultivate them for a great variety of purposes. The World Agroforestry Centre recently completed a global analysis of tree cover on agricultural lands that revealed that on over half of the world’s agricultural land, tree cover is actually greater than 10 per cent. And in some regions, such as South-East Asia and Central America, tree cover on farms exceeds 30 per cent.

The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations has noted that two trends seem almost universal in the tropics: the number of trees in forests is declining, which is well known to all of us; but did you know that the number of trees on farms is increasing? The integration of trees in food-crop fields is a process that we call “evergreen agriculture”, a form of more intensive farming where trees are grown in compatible ways with annual crops, thus maintaining a green cover on the land throughout the year.

Imagine for a moment a future where smallholder farmers and large farmers as well practise much of their food-crop production under a canopy of trees. Imagine that these trees are not competing with the food crops, but rather quite the opposite: they are dramatically enhancing the yield of these crops because of their striking effects on soil fertility. For they are nitrogen-fixing trees, leguminous trees, acting as fertiliser factories in the field, providing tonnes of nutrient-rich biomass, year after year, with virtually no investment cost. Now, this is a kind of solution that poor farmers can afford.

During the dry season, when the trees are actually in full leaf, they provide a rich source of fodder through their leaves and pods when virtually all other vegetation has dried off and died. But in the wet season, the trees are dormant, without leaves, and therefore do not compete with the crops. Rather, as I said, they provide nitrogen fertiliser.

Africa’s Wonder Tree

This system isn’t an imaginary one. It is actually a system of agriculture already practised today by millions of farmers in Africa. The tree is an African acacia, an indigenous species present all across the continent, cultivated by farmers throughout the Sahel, to East Africa, to southern Africa, as a fertiliser and fodder tree.

I met some hard-working ladies a couple of years ago that were out harvesting their maize in central Malawi where they, and half a million of their neighbours, have these acacia trees in their maize fields. They told me that they were making barely ten bags of maize per acre (about a tonne per hectare) before they started culturing the trees. But since they began growing these trees as an intercrop with their maize, their soils have improved to such an extent that they are now regularly harvesting about triple their former yields, year after year in a sustainable manner.

Trial data from dozens of scientific studies in countries all over Africa bear out what these ladies were telling us. Growing cereal crops in association with these amazing African acacias typically doubles or triples crop yields. These trials show data from over forty sites in the last three years in Zambia. And these systems build soil organic matter. They recreate soil health and they make mineral fertiliser applications, if they are affordable, even more efficient.

Currently, the national recommendations in Malawi and Zambia are to plant just one hundred of these trees per hectare. The conservation farming unit of Zambia, which is part of the national farmers’ union, has extended small-scale conservation farming practices with these acacia trees on 240,000 hectares of Zambia, on small farms as well as large commercial farms.

In Malawi, the national agroforestry food-security programme has used a whole village mobilisation approach to extend the full portfolio of fertiliser, fruit, fodder, fuel-wood and timber trees to farmers all over the country. The programme has reached now two hundred thousand farm families in the past five years and is gearing up to reach all farms—that is, 2.8 million farms across the country in the future.

Recent surveys of actual farm yields as a result of the use by Malawian farmers of these fertiliser trees show that yields have practically tripled on their farms.

In Kenya, we now have a bold new policy to achieve greater than 10 per cent tree cover on all farms in the country. This is now being achieved through a national evergreen agriculture scaling-up programme. In Ethiopia, an indigenous fertiliser tree is commonly found in cereal crop systems throughout the country, but it could be extended on a much greater scale. In Durban at the 2011 United Nations Climate Change Conference, Ethiopia announced a programme to work with farmers to establish one hundred million new acacia fertiliser trees on farmlands across the country. Last April, the prime minister announced that Ethiopia would be reforesting fifteen million hectares of degraded lands throughout the country through community-based assisted natural regeneration.

Success in the Sahel

Let us turn to the West African Sahel. Niger is a country at the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. It is the poorest country in the world, eternally engaged in a battle with drought and desertification. Drought cycles of the 1970s and 1980s were devastating, but farmers in Niger have not been passive about battling drought. They have been actively engaged in re-engineering their agricultural landscapes and have been doing so on a huge scale. They have observed that the trees in their crop fields may have dramatically positive effects on the crops that grow underneath them. Satellite images show that a single acacia tree can have a really stunning positive impact on crop growth and biomass.

This observation has prompted over the past two decades millions of farm families in Niger to attack land degradation by regenerating medium-to-high densities of these highly useful trees on their farmlands. You can actually see that vision now on five million hectares of millet and sorghum farms in Niger where there has been an explosion of tree culture over the past fifteen years. These were virtually treeless landscapes twenty-five years ago. They are now totally transformed. They are not forests; they are agricultural fields with a dense cover of up to 150 trees per hectare.

Well, farmer-managed regreening in Niger alone has resulted in over five million hectares regreened in the past twenty years with almost no investment costs from the outside and no recurrent costs to government. It has resulted in over two hundred million new trees that have produced additional cereal-crop yields of at least five hundred thousand tonnes nationally; an additional 2.5 million people have been fed as a result. We have been witnessing this transformation, this intensification of tree cover, not only in Niger, but across the Sahel. For example, we’re seeing a vast regeneration of new agroforests across the farmlands of the plains in southern Mali. Some 450,000 hectares are estimated to have been regenerated in the past fifteen years.

The United States Geological Survey has recently mapped tree-cover density on the Mali plains. These maps and analyses have proved to be of huge significance, both in demonstrating the amazing scale of the spread at national and regional levels, which was until very recently entirely unappreciated, but also in targeting the next round of scaling-up.

In fact, the expansion of agroforestry parklands in West Africa is a very solid basis for a new vision of regreening the Sahel. The Global Environment Facility and the World Bank have both now pledged specifically to focus their co-investments in the region on spreading these sustainable land-management and natural-resource-management solutions in the Sahel in support of participatory, grassroots, assisted natural regeneration. And one key aspect of this is the emphasis on greater efforts on land surveillance for targeting new efforts across the region.

Now we must link those that are doing the mapping and monitoring with those who are piloting and upscaling these efforts. A couple of months ago, the African ministers of agriculture convened in Johannesburg. They were given a briefing bulletin on the opportunity for creating a climate-smart agriculture in each of their countries. The bulletin was prepared by the African Union, the World Bank, the Food and Agriculture Organisation, and a number of other organisations. In it, the great potentials for land regeneration on small-scale farms were highlighted as the basis of climate-smart agriculture. Why? Because they involve very low investment costs as they are truly participatory efforts that spread through the engagement of farmers and their communities. In fact, there is probably no more low-cost, low-risk method of land regeneration.

Currently, a massive effort is emerging among governments, research institutions, and international and national development partners to expand evergreen agriculture across tens of millions more hectares in Africa and Asia. Twenty countries are now implementing national evergreen scaling-up programmes, preparing to launch them or seriously studying the prospect of doing so. And currently we are working to ensure that the next phase of effort will be to accelerate this expansion, to continue the development of these programmes and spearhead ongoing studies that will lead to the involvement of additional countries in this effort.

Five Messages

In conclusion, I would like to leave you with five take-home messages. First, a fresh low-cost approach to land regeneration and food security has taken root in Africa and is spreading across the tropics. Second, millions of smallholders are adopting effective land-regeneration methods, and double-storey evergreen agriculture methods are increasingly seen as the basis for a reinvention of agriculture in the twenty-first century. Third, poor households should be the target over large areas to end hunger, particularly in the dry lands. Fourth, many nations are creating policy and institutional environments to favour this adoption. Finally, the remote-sensing and spatial-analysis communities are critical for attracting investment support for the upscaling of this unconventional approach.

We now need to launch a continent-wide effort to underpin this transformation that will expand the collection and analysis of geographic data better to target these scaling-up efforts and better to monitor the progress of land regeneration through land-health surveillance systems.

I believe that such an alliance of the data producers and the data users could dramatically accelerate the sustainable achievement of food security in Africa and Asia, and could do so at a pace that could truly end world hunger in the foreseeable future.

That’s where you come into the picture. We need to discuss together how such an alliance can be launched and how it can best contribute to the overall effort of achieving food security in Africa, and soon.