E-Book, Englisch, 152 Seiten
Reihe: rüffer&rub visionär
Dieterich Tony Rinaudo
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-3-906304-43-4
Verlag: Rüffer & Rub
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
The Forestmaker
E-Book, Englisch, 152 Seiten
Reihe: rüffer&rub visionär
ISBN: 978-3-906304-43-4
Verlag: Rüffer & Rub
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark
The Australian agronomist Tony Rinaudo revolutionized reforestation in Africa with Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR). His method is based on deploying tree stumps and roots that still grow even in degraded landscapes: thanks to the protection and care of the shoots, the original tree population can be regenerated without major financial costs. The method is now successfully applied in at least 24 African countries. Where the desert was still expanding 20 years ago, farmers reforest large areas with FMNR: in Niger alone seven million hectares of land were already restored in this way.
Up to 700 million people will most likely be obliged to leave their homelands during the next three decades because of increasing desertification in the landscapes where they live. In the opinion of scientists, there is only one hope: to convince the local farmers of ‘sustainable land management’. Tony Rinaudo believes that with FMNR he has found the appropriate method for such management—and just in time to stop, or even to be able to reverse the destruction of livelihoods.
Autoren/Hrsg.
Weitere Infos & Material
Content
Prologue | Johannes Dieterich
Tony’s Travails | Johannes Dieterich
Discovering the Underground Forest | Tony Rinaudo
FMNR is Now a Widely Scaled-Up Agricultural Practice in the Drylands: A Robust Legacy of Tony Rinaudo’s Career | Dennis Garrity
“Trust Would Be a Good Starting Point” | Interview with Günter Nooke
Postscript | Tony Rinaudo
Discovering the Underground Forest
Tony Rinaudo
I felt a strange mix of joy and foreboding while sitting in the plane heading eastbound from Niger’s capital Niamey to the city and district of Maradi in West Africa. 18 years after leaving Maradi — where I had lived with my family for almost two decades — this visit in June 2017 was a homecoming for me. I felt joy that I would be seeing old friends, yet foreboding because success didn’t come easily then. The ghosts of old battle foes seemed to rattle their chains of self-doubt at me. Would Maradi look any different to when I had lived there? Would people still practise Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR), the farming method that we had developed there? When I had first arrived in Niger in 1980, I was 23 years old and fresh out of university. I was naïve but full of youthful enthusiasm and vigour. There was so much to learn from and about the people here in Maradi, their language, culture and history before even thinking of trees. We promoted many things during my time in Niger such as energy-saving cooking stoves, tree planting including edible seeded acacias, cassava cultivation, small gardens, indigenous ground cover species, pit latrines, mulching, zai pits, composting and FMNR. Of these, FMNR is the only activity which has spread and continues to be practised routinely until today. During my visit two things stood out for me. It was deeply satisfying to see how, 34 years after introducing the concept, farmers still actively managed the naturally occurring trees on their once barren land and do so without any external incentives. This knowledge, along with seeing the joy, pride and dignity worn on people’s faces was reward enough for the 18 years of considerable struggle and pain involved in birthing an FMNR movement. This concept had indeed become a normal part of farming practice and daily life. FMNR was also about much more than having nice feelings about trees. It is essential to have trees in the landscape and fundamental for achieving food security and economic development. Through the selection and management of indigenous trees, soil fertility is improved, high temperatures and wind speeds are reduced, more moisture is retained and made available to plants, so effectively reducing the impact of drought; more fodder is produced and hence livestock production is increased. In addition, the trees act as an insurance policy because they can be drawn on when disaster strikes, as it does regularly. In times of drought when all crops fail you can harvest a tree, or part of it to sell for cash to buy food. FMNR also acts as a stepping stone for further development. For example, as indigenous flowering trees return, lucrative beekeeping becomes possible. Certain regenerated indigenous tree species such as the Jujube tree, or Ziziphus mauritiana, can be top grafted with improved cultivars commonly named “Apple of the Sahel”, greatly increasing the price received for the superior fruit in the market. When I lived in Niger I did not have time to fully develop this value-adding aspect of FMNR and so it was deeply satisfying to see that World Vision staff were now building on the foundation laid by introducing beekeeping and grafting material. I came away from Niger with a deep sense of joy that God had used me to make a difference. The joy on people’s faces has stayed with me, while the jangling noise of the chains of doubt has been silenced. The Beginnings I grew up in the beautiful Ovens Valley in Australia. Here in my home district and on a global scale, I observed first-hand the disregard for and destruction of the environment in the name of progress, and I followed it globally on television and through reading. I saw that children, just like me who through no fault of their own happened to be born on the other side of the world, were going to bed hungry. My reaction was to feel angry and as a child, powerless. I remember praying a child’s prayer to be used somewhere, somehow to make a difference. An ordinary event was to provide fertile ground for an idea to germinate and begin to grow. I often went with my dad when he visited farms, usually to repair machinery. One day he dropped in on a farmer who had a large pile of second-hand books dumped on the floor in the middle of his tobacco shed. I flipped through a few books and picked up two of interest: “I Planted Trees” and “Sahara Conquest” by Richard St. Barbe Baker. He was an international campaigner from Hampshire in the United Kingdom and fought for the preservation of pristine forests and for the sustainable management and utilization of trees. I read his books cover to cover and was both comforted that there were adults who cared enough to take action, and felt challenged by the enormity and seriousness of the problem. Deforestation was not an inevitable consequence of progress. By going on the front foot something could be done to combat the destruction. “We had better be without gold than without timber,” Baker wrote in “I Planted Trees”. “Wood is necessary to civilized life, and therefore it is a basis of civilization. The greatest value of trees is probably their beneficent effect upon life, health, climate, soil, rainfall and streams. Trees beautify the country, provide shade for humans and stock, shelter crops from wind and storm and retain the water in the soil at a level at which it can be used by man. The neglect of forestry in the past has accounted for the deserts that exist, because of the fact that when the tree covering disappears from the earth, the waterlevel sinks … When the forests go, the waters go, the fish and game go, crops go, herds and flocks go, fertility departs. Then the age-old phantoms appear stealthily, one after another — flood, drought, fire, famine, pestilence.” With those powerful words in my mind I later went on to study agriculture and while at university I met my wife to be, Liz Fearon. We shared a common sense of calling. After graduation we were married, completed a Bible and Missions course and were accepted for service by the international Christian organization “Serving in Mission” (SIM). SIM is an evangelical, interdenominational mission organization established in 1893 and it works in over 70 countries. We were assigned to Niger Republic, West Africa. When we arrived in Maradi in 1980 we lived on the outskirts of the city at a property set up as a preparatory Bible and Farm School. We had a generator, which we ran for four hours during the evening for lights, fans and to pump water from a well. My enduring memory of those days was our need to wet the sheets several times before bedtime to cool down the foam mattress sufficiently to be able to sleep. I was shocked by the extreme degree of environmental degradation and I wondered if I, fresh out of university and with no experience, would be able to make any difference at all. Much of the woody vegetation that had been there only 20 or even ten years before my arrival was gone, mostly cut down by farmers. During a series of droughts, out of desperation, people would fell even the last trees — to sell the wood to buy food and meet basic needs. Statistically, an average of only four trees were left per hectare. We think today that depending on the species regenerated and how farmers manage them, farmland can comfortably support around 100 trees per hectare and still realize a yield increase from annual crops. At Niger’s independence in 1960 the population of the former French colony was under 3.4 million. When I arrived in 1980, the population hadn’t quite reached 6 million and by 1984 it was 6.72 million. The cities were growing rapidly and with them the demand for firewood. Maradi’s population more than doubled in the ten years after 1977, from 45,000 to 110,000 inhabitants. People in the countryside were poor with few means of earning income, so where trees were still relatively plentiful they were cut down to earn money. The rural population grew as well and the cycles for slash and burn agriculture shortened (this is the fallow period before returning to cultivate abandoned land). It reached a point where no land was being fallowed or only land that had become so exhausted that under the low- or no input agricultural system, it was not worth cultivating. Deforestation is a precursor of land degradation and desertification. It is estimated that 74% of rangelands and 61% of rain-fed croplands in Africa’s drier regions are damaged by moderate to very severe desertification. It occurs on all continents except Antarctica and affects the livelihoods of millions of people, including a large proportion of the poor in drylands. Those drylands occupy 41% of Earth’s land area and are home to more than 2 billion people — a third of the human population in the year 2000. They include all terrestrial regions where water scarcity limits the production of crops, forage, wood and other ecosystem provisioning services. Land degradation has a direct impact on predisposition to drought, flood, landslides, pest and disease outbreak. Desertification also affects global climate change through soil and vegetation losses. Dryland soils contain over a quarter of all organic carbon stores in the world as well as nearly all the inorganic carbon. It is estimated that 300 million tonnes of carbon are lost to the atmosphere from drylands as a result of desertification each year — about 4% of the total global emissions from all sources combined. Deforestation directly and negatively impacts the lives of millions of people....
