EverGreen Agriculture: A Solution for Degraded Landscapes
Authors: May Gathigo and Susan Onyango | Published: October 19, 2017
Widespread land degradation is an increasing threat to ecosystem health, food production systems and livelihoods across sub-Saharan Africa. Processes such as soil erosion, biodiversity loss and deforestation, which are largely human-driven, significantly reduce the land’s capacity to deliver key ecosystem services including storm and drought buffering, soil nutrient availability, and thus food and fodder production. The good news is that affected countries, which have made crucial commitments to reverse this trend through initiatives such as AFR100, now take this fundamental problem increasingly seriously. But on the ground, the need to do something is immense – something recognized by donors.
Crucially, donors are extremely aware that compared to the scale of the need, the available funds are puny. They are thus keen to find and support transformative technologies that show great promise. And that is where Purity Gachanga, a superb smallholder farmer from Kenya’s Embu County, played a pivotal role.
During a visit to her farm in 2015, Dr. Roberto Ridolfi, the Director for Sustainable Growth and Development at the European Commission’s Directorate General for Development and Cooperation, saw for himself the astounding transformation that agroforestry could bring to poor smallholders. What Purity showed is that transformation does not necessarily lie in the bells and whistles of expensive new technologies, but mostly in the understanding and judicious use of agroecological processes.
Keen to see this transformation spread across the continent, Dr Ridolfi proposed a challenge: show that the work of farmers like Purity can be scaled up to re-green at least a million hectares at low cost. Should that work, the thinking went, the path would be clear to fulfill Dr. Ridolfi’s grand vision: to help tens of millions of farmers across Africa re-green hundreds of millions of hectares of degraded lands.
That challenge took the form of a just-initiated five-year effort developed by Dr. Ridolfi’s directorate, the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF), the Economics of Land Degradation initiative and the NGO members in the EverGreen Agriculture Partnership including Catholic Relief Services, World Vision and Oxfam. Its title says it all: ‘Reversing Land Degradation in Africa by Scaling-up EverGreen Agriculture’.