Continued from 1st post
BOTTOM-UP
"It is one of Africa's greatest ecological success stories.. .a model for the rest of the world."... local farmers have used picks and shovels to regenerate more than 19,000 square miles of land. Chris Reij, geographer at VU (Free University) Amsterdam30
NORTH AFRICAN NATION
A recent story of subsistence farming illustrates wonderfully what we need to understand about feeding human populations sus-tainably. This story of simple, traditional technologies used by desperate and very hungry people to restore their lands proves that success or failure depends on two things: whether the techniques fit the particular ecosystem, however small it is; and whether the local people have control over the land s management.
Yacouba Sawadogo, a farmer living in Burkina Faso with three wives and thirty-one children, had learned about a technique called "zai" horn, from his parents. The "zai" is well adapted to conditions in this cruelly poor north African nation, in the heart of the Sahel, where productive savanna has been converting to desert since the 1970s. For years Sawadogo spent every dry season hacking thousands of foot-deep pits into his desert fields; he placed manure in each one to attract termites, which digested the organic material and allowed it to be absorbed by the soil. He also dug channels in the cementlike earth, which loosened it up. When the yearly rains came, water would trickle through the underground labyrinth of termite tunnels, and Sawadogo would plant trees—trees that could survive in these desert conditions. Soon he was noticed by his neighbors as "the only farmer from here to Mali who had any millet" and ended up forming a zai association to teach hundreds of others.
Sawadogo also became known for using an incredibly elegant and cheap water-retention scheme called cordons pierreux (rock strings), in which fist-sized rocks are laid out like chains perpendicular to the flow of rainwater. "Snagged by the cordon, rains washing over the crusty Sahelian soil pause long enough to percolate. Suspended silt falls to the bottom, along with seeds that sprout in this slightly richer environment. The line of stones becomes a line of plants that slows the water further. More seeds sprout at the upstream edge. Grasses are replaced by shrubs and trees, which enrich the soil with falling leaves. In a few years a simple line of rocks can restore an entire field."31'
These techniques don't leave much scope for the high-tech, outside-input programs of the Gates Foundation or the products of Monsanto, but, since they were initiated and spread rapidly by the poorest of poor farmers, are right now transforming enormous chunks of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger into what has a chance of being permanently productive land. As always, there's a catch. Sawadogo, like all the other farmers in Burkina Faso, doesnt really own the land he works'. Farms are leased from wealthy landowners who can repossess them any time they please. Unfortunately, his farm lay close to the city of Ouahigouya, and in 2008 Sawadogo saw the beautiful forest he single-handedly created annexed for timber and city lots. He gets a tenth of an acre—the size of a tiny city lot— for his decades of backbreaking restoration labor; even his bedroom and his father s grave are being sold in other lots.
One can imagine that most neighbors, seeing this, might give up on restoring their own land. In nearby Niger, however, smallholders have managed to wrest control over their farms from the government and can benefit from the work they put into them. That means the environment can benefit from the land s restored ability to hold on to water and carbon. This is the principal reason why the struggles of indigenous and traditional people for tenure over their lands, also seen in countries like Bolivia, Ecuador, and Peru, are so important to every one of us—not just to our most elementary ideas about human justice and sharing but to the future health of the entire planet.
Again and again, it is indigenous and traditional people, the dispossessed, the poorest of the poor, who not only end up defending natural systems directly but work out what are most often the best ways of sustaining and restoring them. Even when it comes to livestock, its the traditional and aboriginal people of the world who are trying to hold the line against monoculturing our future. A 2007 Food and Agriculture Organization (fao) conference on the state of the world s animal genetic resources admitted that diversity is plummeting at a terrifying rate—two thousand more species at risk every four or five years. Livestock diversity, like plant diversity, protects the food supply against future diseases or changes in conditions. A rare breed like the British Tamworth hog descended from a breed originally developed in the West Indies and so does very well under hot conditions, while the black, Hebridean sheep may have as many as six horns and can subsist entirely on brambles and woody shrubs, making it "of considerable value in ecological projects to control invasive scrub." But they and so many more are endangered.32
CATTLE IN NORTH INDIA
In the first edition of this book, we told the story of farmers in northern India, associated with Vandana Shivas Navdanya group, who were turning down grants from the World Bank encouraging them to switch from their traditional cattle breeds to Holsteins and Jerseys. Their genetic banks, individual village bulls, have been painstakingly bred over centuries to provide what each locality needs. That's not just high milk production but the strength to pull loads and create a lot of manure, desperately needed for fertilizer and fuel. Most importantly, these cattle can survive very poor feed, a cruelly hot climate, and many diseases. The pressure to succumb can be intense; one village near Dehradun in northern India was denied a World Bank grant to bring in needed drinking water because the villagers refused to give up their native bulls in exchange. This is an example of farmers with some ownership rights who nonetheless don t have full tenure—the ability to manage their farmland as they need to. If they try to resist outside interference, they are pressured, economically punished, or legislatively prevented.
No one is suggesting that some central legislation isn't necessary to prevent farmers from dumping pesticides in streams, being cruel to their stock, or otherwise threatening local sustainability and health. But centralized regulations commonly favor cultural or economic agendas that can have damaging effects on local ecosystems. That's why local input is key, and legislating farm management is a delicate balancing act all over the world. It shouldn't be subject to centralized control, like the West's Green Revolution coercion, any more than it can completely be dispensed with, as in failed states like Haiti or Somalia.
In the West's management system, the reason why breeds like Holstein and Hereford cattle and Leghorn chickens have become so ubiquitous is not because they taste better or even because their production levels are the highest. It's because their constitutions are tough enough to survive the ghastly conditions of confinement, overcrowding, and unnatural feed that are central to industrial agriculture. Although the response of the un's fao has been to establish gene banks, this loss of diverse breeds is a direct attack on the very forms of smallholder agriculture that are vital to a sustainable food future. Activists are agitating for a change in policies that force industrial agriculture on farmers through government programs and slanted economic support. One such group is the Livestock Diversity Forum to Defend Food Sovereignty and Livestock Keepers' Rights.
They represent pastoralists, indigenous peoples, smallholders, and ngos from twenty-six countries. In September 2007 they demanded a new Global Plan of Action from the un that "challenges industrial livestock production," because "the dominant model of production is based on a dangerously narrow genetic base... propped up by the widespread use of veterinary drugs." They pointed out that "it is clear that the rights of livestock keepers are not compatible with intellectual property rights systems [i.e., gene banks] because these systems enable exclusive and private monopoly control." What they want is "livestock keeping that is on a human scale, based on the health and wellbeing of humankind, not industrial profit." With the new iaastd report, they're a lot closer to finding powerful allies to help them toward this goal.
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To be continued
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