The article's in the September 2008 National Geographic Magazine made a huge impact on me, knowing the benefits of vermicompost, it seems there is a huge gap that we must bridge between piling up waste and turning our garbage into good quality topsoil. Here is an extract of the article's written by Charles C. Mann and Joel K. Bourne, Jr.
To boost food production, Kramer and colleagues founded SOIL, a nonprofit group that builds composting toilets in rural communities to get much needed organic matter and fertility back into fields. "With the current hunger crisis, it's very clear," says Kramer, an adjunct professor at the University of Miami. "If Haitians had more local production, they would not be so vulnerable to imported food prices."
Until then Haiti remains a poignant lesson in what soil scientists have preached for years: As a nation's soil goes, so goes the nation.
"Tè a fatige," said 70 percent of Haitian farmers in a recent survey when asked about the major agricultural problems they faced. "The earth is tired"
This year food shortages, caused in part by the diminishing quantity and quality of the world's soil (see "Dirt Poor"), have led to riots in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. By 2030, when today's toddlers have toddlers of their own, 8.3 billion people will walk the Earth; to feed them, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates, farmers will have to grow almost 30 percent more grain than they do now. Connoisseurs of human fecklessness will appreciate that even as humankind is ratcheting up its demands on soil, we are destroying it faster than ever before.
"Taking the long view, we are running out of dirt," says David R. Montgomery, a geologist at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Journalists sometimes describe unsexy subjects as MEGO: My eyes glaze over. Alas, soil degradation is the essence of MEGO. Nonetheless, the stakes—and the opportunities—could hardly be higher, says Rattan Lal, a prominent soil scientist at Ohio State University. Researchers and ordinary farmers around the world are finding that even devastated soils can be restored. The payoff, Lal says, is the chance not only to fight hunger but also to attack problems like water scarcity and even global warming. Indeed, some researchers believe that global warming can be slowed significantly by using vast stores of carbon to re engineer the world's bad soils. "Political stability, environmental quality, hunger, and poverty all have the same root," Lal says."In the long run, the solution to each is restoring the most basic of all resources, the soil."
... Sometime in the 1970s, "Sahel" became a watchword for famine, poverty, and environmental waste. Technically, though, the name refers to the semiarid zone between the Sahara desert and the wet forests of central Africa. Until the 1950s the Sahel was thinly settled. But when a population boom began, people started farming the region more intensively. Problems were masked for a long time by an unusual period of high rainfall. But then came drought. The worst effects came in two waves—one in the early 1970s and a second, even more serious, in the early 1980s—and stretched from Mauritania on the Atlantic to Chad, halfway across Africa. More than 100,000 men, women, and children died in the ensuing famine, probably many more. "If people had the means to leave, they left," says Mathieu Ouédraogo, a development specialist in Burkina Faso, a landlocked nation in the heart of the Sahel. "The only people who stayed here had nothing—not enough to leave." Scientists still dispute why the Sahel transformed itself from a savanna into a badland. Suggested causes include random changes in sea-surface temperatures,air pollution that causes clouds to form inopportunely, removal of surface vegetation by farmers moving into the desert periphery—and, of course, global warming. Whatever the cause, the consequences are obvious: Hammered by hot days and harsh winds, much of the soil turns into a stone-hard mass that plant roots and rainwater cannot penetrate. A Sahelian farmer once let me hack at his millet field with a pick. It was like trying to chop up asphalt.
When the drought struck, international aid groups descended on the Sahel by the score. (Ouédraogo, for instance, directed a project for Oxfam in the part of Burkina where he had been born and raised.) Many are still there now; half the signs in Niamey, capital of neighboring Niger, seem to be announcing a new program from the United Nations, a Western government, or a private charity. Among the biggest is the Keita project, established 24 years ago by the Italian government in mountainous central Niger. Its goal: bringing 1,876 square miles of broken, barren earth—now home to 230,000 souls—to ecological, economic, and social health. Italian agronomists and engineers cut 194 miles of road through the slopes, dug 684 wells in the stony land, constructed 52 village schools, and planted more than 18 million trees. With bulldozers and tractors, workers carved 41 dams into the hills to catch water from the summer rains. To cut holes in the ground for tree planting, an Italian named Venanzio Vallerani designed and built two huge plows—"monstrous" was the descriptor used by Amadou Haya, an environmental specialist with the project. Workers hauled the machines to the bare hills, filled their bellies full of fuel, and set them to work. Roaring across the plateaus for months on end, they cut as many as 1,500 holes an hour.
Early one morning Haya took us to a rainwater-storage dam outside the village of Koutki, about 20 minutes down a rutted dirt road from Keita project
headquarters. The water, spreading oasis like over several acres, was almost absurdly calm; birds were noisily in evidence. Women waded into the water to fill plastic jerry cans, their brilliant robes floating around their ankles. Twenty-five years ago Koutki was a bit player in the tragedy of the Sahel. Most of its animals had died or been eaten. There was not a scrap of green in sight. No birds sang. People survived on mouthfuls of rice from foreign charities. On the road to Koutki we met a former soldier who had helped distribute the aid. His face froze when he spoke about the starving children he had seen.
Today there are barricades of trees to stop the winds, low terraces for planting trees, and lines of stone to interrupt the eroding flow of rainwater. The soil around the dam is still dry and poor, but one can imagine people making a living from it. Budgeted at more than $100 million, however, the Keita project is expensive—Niger's per capita income, low even for the Sahel, is less than $800 a year. Keitaboosters can argue that it costs two-thirds of an F-22 fighter jet. But the Sahel is vast—Niger alone is a thousand miles across. Reclaiming even part of this area would require huge sums if done by Keita methods. In consequence, critics have argued that soil-restoration efforts in the drylands are almost pointless: best turn to more promising ground.
Wrong, says Chris Reij, a geographer at VU (Free University) Amsterdam. Having worked with Sahelian colleagues for more than 30 years, Reij has come to believe that farmers themselves have beaten back the desert in vast areas. "It is one of Africa's greatest ecological success stories," he says, "a model for the rest of the world." But almost nobody outside has paid attention; if soil is MEGO, soil in Africa is MEGO squared.
In Burkina, Mathieu Ouédraogo was there from the beginning. He assembled the farmers in his area, and by 1981 they were experimenting together with techniques to restore the soil, some of them traditions that Ouédraogo had heard about in school. One of them was cordons pierreux: long lines of stones, each perhaps the size of a big fist. Snagged by the cordon, rains washing over 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. For a time Ouédraogo worked with a farmer named Yacouba Sawadogo. Innovative and independent-minded, he wanted to stay on his farm with his three wives and 31 children. "From my grandfather's grandfather's grandfather, we were always here," he says. Sawadogo, too, laid cordons pierreux across his fields. But during the dry season he also hacked thousands of foot-deep holes in his fields—zaï, as they are called, a technique he had heard about from his parents. Sawadogo salted each pit with manure, which attracted termites. The termites digested the organic matter, making its nutrients more readily available to plants. Equally important, the insects dug channels in the soil. When the rains came, water trickled through the termite holes into the ground. In each hole Sawadogo planted trees. "Without trees, no soil," he says. The trees thrived in the looser, wetter soil in each zai. Stone by stone, hole by hole, Sawadogo turned 50 acres of wasteland into the biggest private forest for hundreds of miles. Using the zaï, Sawadogo says, he became almost "the only farmer from here to Mali who had any millet." His neighbors, not surprisingly, noticed. Sawadogo formed a zaï association, which promotes the technique at an annual show in his family compound. Hundreds of farmers have come to watch him hack out zaiwith his hoe. The new techniques, simple and inexpensive, spread far and wide. The more people worked the soil, the richer it became. Higher rainfall was responsible for part of the regrowth (though it never returned to the level of the 1950s). But mostly it was due to millions of men and women intensively working the land.
Last year Reij made a thousand-mile trek across Mali and then into southwestern Burkina with Edwige Botoni, a researcher at the Permanent Interstate
Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel, a regional policy center in Burkina. They saw "millions of hectares" of restored land, Botoni says, "more than I had believed possible." Next door in Niger is an even greater success, says Mahamane Larwanou, a forester at Abdou Moumouni Dioffo University in Niamey. Almost without any support or direction from governments or aid agencies, local farmers have used picks and shovels to regenerate more than 19,000 square miles of land. Economics as much as ecology is key to Niger's success, Larwanou says. In the 1990s the Niger government, which distributed land in orthodox totalitarian fashion, began to let villagers have more control over their plots. People came to believe that they could invest in their land with little risk that it would be arbitrarily taken away. Combined with techniques like the zaï and cordons pierreux, land reform has helped villagers become less vulnerable to climate fluctuations. Even if there were a severe drought, Larwanou says, Nigeriens "would not feel the impact the way they did in 1973 or 1984."
Burkina Faso has not recovered as much as Niger. Sawadogo's story suggests one reason why. While villagers in Niger have gained control over their land,
smallholders in Burkina still lease it, often for no charge, from landowners who can revoke the lease at the end of any term. To provide income for Burkina's cities, the central government let them annex and then sell land on their peripheries—without fairly compensating the people who already lived there. Sawadogo's village is a few miles away from Ouahigouya, a city of 64,000 people. Among the richest properties in Ouahigouya's newly annexed land was Sawadogo's forest, a storehouse of timber. Surveyors went through the property, slicing it into tenth-of-an-acre parcels marked by heavy stakes. As the original owner, Sawadogo will be allotted one parcel; his older children will also each receive land. Everything else will be sold off, probably next year. He watched helplessly as city officials pounded a stake in his bedroom floor. Another lot line cut through his father's grave. Today Yacouba Sawadogo is trying to find enough money to buy the forest in which he has invested his life. Because he has made the land so valuable, the price is impossibly high: about $20,000. Meanwhile, he tends his trees. "I have enough courage to hope," he says.
"With eight billion people, we're going to have to start getting interested in soil," he said. "We're simply not going to be able to keep treating it like dirt."
| Next > |
|---|