Nourishing the Planet

(From left to right) Dr. Frank Place, Dr. Dennis Garrity, Danielle Nierenberg, Dr. Delia Catacutan, Dr. Maimbo Malesu, and Bernard Pollack.

This is the second in a two-part series about my visit to the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, Kenya.

I’m always excited to meet with researchers who are passionate about their work. Dr. Dennis Garrity, Director General of the World Agroforestry Centre, assembled three members of his team to meet with me last week to talk about some of the innovations the Centre is helping support in Africa.

Dr. Maimbo Malesu, the director of Water Management Research, described the Centre’s work on water. “One of the biggest challenges in Africa,” says Maimbo, “is the lack of rainwater harvesting.” Many countries, he says, are only utilizing 2 to 5 percent of their rainwater potential. To help reverse this, the World Agroforestry Centre is helping train farmers and agricultural extension officers in places like Rwanda to build lined ponds that can catch and store rainwater. In 2007, there were just 65 of these demonstration ponds in Rwanda; now there are more than 400.

About 40 kilometers outside of Nairobi, the Centre is working with UNEP on a multidisciplinary project that incorporates water storage tanks, agroforestry, more efficient stoves, and microfinance projects to help communities deal with water shortages, deforestation, fuel shortages, and lack of credit for women.

Dr. Frank Place, an economist and head of impact assessment, explained the World Agroforestry Centre’s research on fertilizer trees—leguminous trees and shrubs that are grown along with or before or after crops—can improve soil, increase yields, and eliminate the need for artificial fertilizers. In some places, intercropping fertilizer trees with crops can be most beneficial for farmers who want to add nutrients to maize and other crops that need fertilizer, while in other areas indigenous trees that shed their nitrogen-rich leaves during the rainy season are the best way of increasing yields.

In addition, Dr. Place explained how fodder shrubs can help increase milk production in Kenya. There are nearly two million small dairy farmers in the country and lack of high quality food is their biggest challenge. And concentrated grain feeds are too expensive for most producers. But growing nitrogen-fixing fodder shrubs can provide a nutritious—and inexpensive—feed that helps dairy producers increase their income. Five hundred shrubs can feed a cow for a whole season and increase daily milk production by one to two liters a day, which, says Dr. Place, results in an additional income of $USD .50 per day and $USD 100 per year.

Dr. Delia Catacutan, a social scientist, is working with the Centre and Landcare International to help farmer and community groups work together to decide how land should be managed. In Uganda, Land Care has helped 40 different community-based organizations to negotiate and access services from the government. In addition, they’ve helped with conflict resolution and eased the tension between farming and wildlife. “Innovations,” Dr. Catacutan said, “don’t walk by themselves.” But by helping farmers work together and giving them a greater voice in decision-making, agricultural innovations such as agroforestry, are more likely to spread, as well as raise farmer income and protect the environment.

Stay tuned for more stories about how agroforestry can help improve food security in Africa.

This is the first of a two-part series on my trip to the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, Kenya.

The World Agroforestry Centre is located in Nairobi, Kenya, but you wouldn’t know it from the surroundings. Located on a lush campus, thick with vegetation, it offers a quiet oasis that seems far from the city of racing matatus and pollution ubiquitous in the city.

We were there to meet with the Director General, Dr. Dennis Garrity, and his colleagues to talk about the Centre’s work and learn more about how the types of innovations they are promoting for agriculture in Africa. We also had the opportunity to meet with Dr. Roger Leakey, the former head of the Centre.

“We’re trying,” said Dr. Garrity, “to build the case that what farmers are doing with trees on farms is important.” What they’re doing is integrating trees with crops, a simple approach that can have huge benefits.

According to Dr. Leakey, “agro-forestry is an interface,” combining social, institutional, policy, and scientific approaches, making it more holistic. “All the other single approaches,” he says, “end up not working.”

One particularly innovative example Dr. Leakey talked about was a Centre project in Cameroon. There, he explained, combining agroforestry with horticulture, the processing of value-added products, and marketing has helped strengthen the community. In fact, the project has resulted in more than 30 “measurable positive impacts.” Now, for example,young men are no longer leaving the farms to find jobs in towns, because they can make a good living by continuing to farm. (See “A Pathway out of Poverty. Good News from Africa.”)

The Centre is hoping to help farmers respond to the many challenges they face—low use of agricultural inputs, degraded soils, and food insecurity among them—through what they call “Evergreen Agriculture.” Both conservation agriculture with trees—a system that uses minimal tillage practices to increase soil fertility—and maize agroforestry (the practice of growing leguminous trees along with maize that replace the need for inorganic fertilizers) have been successful in terms of raising productivity and reducing costs for farmers, but they also have their limitations.

Maize agroforestry, according to the Centre report “Creating an Evergreen Agriculture in Africa,” has improved soil health and allowed farmers to double or even triple their yields, but it’s also extremely labor intensive. Conservation agriculture, on the other hand, can reduce labor requirements and costs of preparing the land initially, but can require more time later on for weeding crops.

Evergreen agriculture would combine the best of both these approaches. Its intention, according to the Centre, “is to dramatically improve soil conditions and crop yields, while keeping labor requirements to a minimum.” Garrity acknowledges that the system is still under development and needs much more investigation, but, he says, “Our hypothesis, however,. . . is that it will increase maize yields and provide greater household food security, while significantly reducing the smallholders labor and lowering overall investment in maize production. We also have evidence that it will improve drought resilience and increase above and below ground carbon sequestration as well”– An increasingly important component of any agricultural system as the impacts of agriculture on greenhouse gases becomes more evident.

I’ll be writing more about our visit to the Centre—stay tuned for blogs about their work on rainwater harvesting, Land Care International, and more about fertilizer trees.

It sounds like a child’s fantasy—chocolate berries, gingerbread plums, and sugar plums. But these aren’t the contents of a Christmas stocking, but some of the wild fruits of Africa that the U.S. National Research Council has recognized as important to improving food supplies and nutrition in some of the world’s poorest, most malnourished countries.

Organizations such as the World Agroforestry Centre which we had the pleasure of visiting earlier this week (stay tuned for a blog about the visit), are working with farmers to help identify indigenous fruit trees that farmers can grow along with their crops. These initiatives not only give a name to these fruits (many of which scientists didn’t know about), but also a value that wasn’t recognized previously. Although they’re often referred to as famine foods because they’re usually eaten after granaries are exhausted, many have enormous nutritional value, making them important foods year round.

Dr. Roger Leakey, former head of the World Agroforestry Centre, says in a recent article in New Scientist that unlike the Green Revolution that took place in the 1960s, this current revolution of domesticated fruit trees is not led by agribusiness, but by farmers. “Local farmers play a key role in developing and testing new varieties,” says Leakey, “and they’re the ones who stand to benefit the most.”

Because fruit trees can be grown along with other crops, they don’t require much additional work from the farmer. Trees also provide a variety of products, in addition to food, including fodder for livestock, fuel, and ingredients for medicines.

And corporations are taking notice, but in a way that likely benefits local communities. Unilever, for example, has entered into a partnership to promote the domestication of Allanblackia, a tree whose seeds contain an oil useful for cosmetics and the food industry. By providing farmers a fair price, Unilever is helping both generate income and protect biodiversity—two things that sub-Saharan Africa needs more of.