Where to go?
During all my conversations with the brave women volunteers of Loumbal Baladji in the warmth of the field school, I regularly repeated to them that they had to observe their environment and that all their present and future actions had to take into account the sustainable preservation of this environment. Knowing the climate reality of their region before deciding what practices they will choose to apply for the future is essential.
In the 20th century, some countries around the world decided to divide the world into two categories: developed countries and so-called developing countries. It’s clear that the selection criteria were defined by the first group. Because if we decide to look at the situation according to different criteria, it leads to different conclusions. For example, Africa is one of the richest continents in terms of raw materials, arable land, human resources, and ancestral knowledge based on observations carried out over several millennia.
Having categorized the world, the “developed countries” decided to help the other part of the planet develop, implementing their intensive practices based on the ultra-mechanization of land work and the use of synthetic fertilizers and chemical pesticides. These methods pay little attention to soil life and ecosystem balance, and even less attention to maintaining overall fertility in the long term, but they produce impressive results in the short and medium term, with yields increasing tenfold during the first decades.
In recent years, there has been a profound questioning of the use of this approach, and questions are being asked about its consequences: many soils have become infertile and pesticides have slowly but surely made sick and killed those who applied these products, and those who ate them.
We’re clearing new land, but it’s a headlong rush.
What will we do when all available land has become infertile?
Organic farming, agroecology, permaculture, and other regenerative agriculture practices are increasingly being adopted by Western farmers before they have exhausted the planet, completely destroyed cultivated areas, and risk no longer being able to feed their populations.
Returning to our women in Fouta and our African farmers who abandoned the age-old practices of their ancestors, who respected the soil, life, and the environment, and replaced them with the “new” methods of developed countries, there is still time to turn back from this perilous path and choose the type of agriculture they desire for tomorrow.
The rethink is slow in coming, but time is running out. It is essential to raise awareness about the consequences of these degrading practices for the environment and to disseminate methods that respect biodiversity before these populations find themselves in the same impasse.
We must re-examine the practices of the elders and start using those that preserve and improve the environment. We must draw inspiration from men like the Burkinabe Sawadogo Yacouba.
In the 1970s, in the village of Gourga, Yacouba’s hometown, the increasing number of barren lands and the encroaching desert triggered an exodus of the region’s populations in search of more favorable lands.
Faced with the failure of all the strategies of development aid agencies in “developed” countries, Yacouba Sawadogo, rather than choosing the path of exodus himself, decided to try to revive a technique used in the past by his ancestors: the Zaï technique. Thanks to it, the world would soon know Yacouba as “the man who stopped the desert.”
The year after the planting of the characteristic half-moons of the Zaï, harvests were once again possible, and yields improved year after year, giving rise over time to a veritable forest in these lands, which were considered infertile.
Fifty years after its inception, he was awarded the Alternative Nobel Prize, the United Nations awarded him the title of Champion of the Planet, and the Zaï technique, known as the half-moon technique, is used all over the world to bring life back to soils that have become infertile.
One lesson to be learned from this story is that we must be careful before transferring things that have worked elsewhere, and think about the long-term consequences. We must also look at what works well in our closest environments and in conditions similar to ours, because they are more likely to work in countries in the same region.
And this doesn’t just apply to agriculture. Some solutions used in the past may contain solutions to the challenges we face today.
It’s up to each population to choose how to leave a viable environment for current and future generations.
So, where do we want to go?
Hamidou Maïga is the founder of Hamidou Horticulture
