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Africa could be losing 15 per cent of its food production because of
the declining fertility of its soils. But the process of decline is reversible,
using cheap, simple technologies that peasant communities know best, claims
a report from a UN agency tackling the problems of the world’s poorest people.

The International Fund for Agricultural Development launched the report*
in Washington DC last week at a joint meeting with the World Resources Institute.
Its findings suggest that the pessimists who believe Africa is being overtaken
by irreversible ecological decline are wrong. And it questions conventional
views about desertification in arid parts of the continent.

The fund is claiming important successes for its African programme,
which is spending almost $600 million on encouraging and developing traditional
technologies on peasant farms as the solution to the continent’s inability
to feed itself.

‘The ideas we are promoting are not developed in laboratories or research
centres,’ says the fund’s director for Africa, Bahman Mansuri. ‘We are finding
them in farmers’ fields. We are providing farmers with the money to develop
their own systems of farming and harvesting scarce water.’ The fund is the
first UN agency to embrace ‘appropriate technologies’ of the kind promoted
for many years by charities such as Oxfam.

A typical example is the West African revival of simple stone walls,
about 30 centimetres high, built along the contours of hillsides. They prevent
the thin soils from being washed away after storms, and hold rainfall on
the land long enough for it to water crops. This native technology had
largely died out before being reintroduced by Oxfam field worker Bill Hereford
in the fields of Burkina Faso.

The system worked, raising crop yields by a third in dry years, where
previous schemes paid for by the European Development Fund, using muck-shifting
bulldozers to create dykes, had failed. By the late 1980s stone walls snaked
across hillsides in more than 300 villages.

The fund adopted the technology as part of its African programme and
offered funds to help build the walls in neighbouring Niger. Today, says
Mansuri, similar walls ‘protect soils and catch scarce rainfall across several
thousand hectares of Niger’.

Another system, developed in Niger, is to construct crescent-shaped
earth ‘bunds’, extending up slopes to catch runoff. One arm of the crescent
is shorter than the other, so that excess runoff is released, avoiding waterlogging.
Mansuri claims that when this system was introduced in northern Niger,
‘thick grass soon covered what had been barren fields’.

Will spreading deserts wipe out such gains? Not usually, says Mansuri.
‘Desertification is not a case of irreversible desert advance,’ he says.
‘Deserts advance and retreat according to rainfall. The Sahara in Sudan,
for instance, has retreated by 40 kilometres in the past three years because
the rains have been good.’

‘Our task is not to hold back the desert,’ says Mansuri. Most of the
fund’s projects are in the dry zones away from the deserts where there are
productive soils and many people. ‘Here, we can build soil fertility and
bring sustained success for poor farmers,’ he says.

‘The most important task is to improve food security for the poor, who
may not have money to buy food if their crops fail.’ That may mean encouraging
farmers to stick with traditional drought-resistant varieties of grains,
rather than switching to new so-called high-yield varieties of maize, for
instance, which often turn out to be low-yield varieties when the rains
are poor.

Unlike the major development banks, the fund is set up to finance small
projects for poor farmers, usually run at village level. ‘In Uganda we give
families $120 to buy tube wells to water their crops. Sometimes we give
farmers sheep and goats, and ask for young animals in return in a few years’
time,’ says Mansuri. ‘But the World Bank cannot work that way. Any project
costing less than $10 million is not cost-effective for them.’

*Soil and Water Conservation in Sub-Saharan Africa, IFAD, Rome