According to Frederic Mousseau, Policy Director of the
Oakland Institute who coordinates the research for the Institute’s agroeocology
project, millions of African farmers don’t need to adapt to climate change.
They have done that already.
Like many others across the continent, indigenous
communities in Ethiopia’s Gamo Highlands are well prepared against climate
variations. The high biodiversity, which forms the basis of their traditional
enset-based agricultural systems, allows them to easily adjust their farming
practices, including the crops they grow, to climate variations. People in Gamo
are also used to managing their environment and natural resources in sound and
sustainable ways, rooted in ancestral knowledge and customs, which makes them
resilient to floods or droughts. Although African indigenous systems are often
perceived as backward by central governments, they have a lot of learning to
offer to the rest of the world when contemplating the challenges of climate
change and food insecurity.
Often building on such indigenous knowledge, farmers all
over the African continent have assembled a tremendous mass of successful
experiences and innovations in agriculture. These efforts have steadily been
developed over the past few decades following the droughts that impacted many
countries in the 1970s and 1980s.
In Kenya, the system of biointensive agriculture has been
designed over the past thirty years to help smallholders grow the most food on
the least land and with the least water. 200,000 Kenyan farmers, feeding over
one million people, have now switched to biointensive agriculture, which allows
them to use up to 90 per cent less water than in conventional agriculture and
50 to 100 per cent fewer purchased fertilizers, thanks to a set of
agroecological practices that provide higher soil organic matter levels, near
continuous crop soil coverage, and adequate fertility for root and plant
health.
The Sahel region, bordering the Sahara Desert, is renowned
for its harsh environment and the threat of desertification. What is less known
is the tremendous success of the actions undertaken to curb desert
encroachment, restore lands, and farmers’ livelihoods. Started in the 1980s,
the Keita Rural Development Project in Niger took some twenty years to restore
ecological balance and drastically improve the agrarian economy of the area.
During the period, 18 million trees were planted, the surface under woodlands
increased by 300 per cent, whereas shrubby steppes and sand dunes decreased by
30 per cent. In the meantime, agricultural land was expanded by about 80 per
cent.
All over the region, a multitude of projects have used
agroecological solutions to restore degraded land and spare scarce water resources
while at the same time increasing food production, and improving farmers’
livelihoods and resilience. In Timbuktu, Mali, the System of Rice
Intensification (SRI) has reached impressive results, with yields of 9 tons of
rice per hectare, more than double of conventional methods, while saving water
and other inputs. In Burkina Faso, soil and water conservation techniques,
including a modernized version of traditional planting pitszai have been
highly successful to rehabilitate degraded soils and boost food production and
incomes.
Southern African countries have been struggling with
recurrent droughts resulting in major failures in corn crops, the main staple
cereal in the region. Over the years, farmers and governments have developed a
wide variety of agroecological solutions to prevent food crises and foster
their resilience to climatic shocks. The common approach in all these responses
has been to depart from the conventional monocropping of corn, which is highly
vulnerable to climate shocks while it is also very costly and demanding in
purchased inputs such as hybrid seeds and fertilizers. Successful sustainable
and affordable solutions include managing and harvesting rain water, expanding
conservation and regenerative farming, promoting the production and consumption
of cassava and other tuber crops, diversifying production, and integrating
crops with fertilizer trees and nitrogen fixating leguminous plants.
The enumeration could go on. The few examples cited above
all come from a series of 33 case studies released recently by the Oakland
Institute. The series sheds light on the tremendous success of agroecological
agriculture across the African continent in the face of climate change, hunger,
and poverty.
These success stories are just a sample of what Africans are
already doing to adapt to climate variations while preserving their natural
resources, improving their livelihoods and their food supply. One thing they
have in common is that they have farmers, including many women farmers, in the
driver’s seat of their own development. Millions of farmers who practice
agroecology across the continent are local innovators who experiment to find
the best solutions in relation to water availability, soil characteristics,
landscapes, cultures, food habits, and biodiversity.
Another common feature is that they depart from the reliance
on external agricultural inputs such as commercial seeds, synthetic
fertilizers, and chemical pesticides, on which is based the so-called
conventional agriculture. The main inputs required for agroecology are people’s
own energy and common sense, shared knowledge, and of course respect for and a
sound use of natural resources.
Why are these success stories mostly untold, is a fair
question to ask. They are largely buried under the rhetoric of a development discourse
based on a destructive cocktail of ignorance, greed, and neocolonialism. Since
the 2008 food price crisis, we have been told over and over that Africa needs
foreign investors in agriculture to ‘develop’ the continent; that Africa needs
a Green Revolution, more synthetic fertilizers, and genetically modified crops
in order to meet the challenges of hunger and poverty. The agroecology case
studies debunk these myths.
Evidence is there, with irrefutable facts and figures, that
millions of Africans have already designed their own solutions, for their own
benefits. They have successfully adapted to both the unsustainable agricultural
systems inherited from the colonial times, and to the present challenges of
climate change and environmental degradation. Unfortunately, a majority of
African governments, with encouragement from donor countries, focus most of
their efforts and resources to subsidize and encourage a model of agriculture,
largely reliant on the expensive commercial agricultural inputs, in particular
synthetic fertilizers mainly sold by a handful of Western corporations.
The good news is that an agroecological transition is
affordable for African governments. They spend billions of dollars every year
to subsidize fertilizers and pesticides for their farmers. In Malawi, the
government’s subsidies to agricultural inputs, mostly fertilizers, amount to
close to 10 percent of the national budget every year. The evidence that
exists, based on the experience of millions of farmers, should prompt African
governments to make the only reasonable choice: to give the continent a leading
role in the way out of world hunger and corporate exploitation and move to a
sustainable and climate-friendly way to produce food for all.
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