transformational opportunities in landscape regeneration in southern africa: setting the stage
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Transformational Opportunities in Landscape Regeneration in Southern
Africa: Setting the Stage
Dennis Garrity Drylands Ambassador, UNCCD
Distinguished Senior Fellow, World Agroforestry Centre
Alarming Trend in Land Degradation in Southern Africa
A Perfect Storm of Challenges •Soil fertility is further declining in many regions.• Rainfall is becoming more erratic and extreme. • Temperatures are increasing, intensifying
crop stress. • Inorganic fertilizers are increasingly expensive
and risky to use. • Population growth rates remain very high and
farm sizes are rapidly declining.
“All but four of the 17 Sustainable Development Goals are directly linked to the use of the land.
“It will require bold action to turn from the current land use practices and to restore more degraded land for our use.
“We need to adopt land use practices that are sustainable. And we have to restore more of the degraded land to meet our future growth.”
-- Monique Barbut
UNCCD Executive Secretary
“A lot of these agricultural practices are well known and surprisingly cheap. They include:
– No-Till agriculture, – EverGreen Agriculture, – Agroforestry, – Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration, and– Holistic Management and many more.
They are underutilized because we have not mustered the courage to make them competitive through incentives that stimulate their adoption.”
-- Monique Barbut, UNCCD Executive Secretary
The Farming Systems of Africa
Malawi Maize Lands Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration Expanding
Widely
The Parkland Renaissance on Niger farmlands
The albida effect• Microclimate buffering
• Soil fertility improvement
Microclimatic buffering: Crop Canopy Temperature
(CIMMYT, 2013)
Aerial view of a parkland dominated by Faidherbia in Niger
The 2nd Africa Drylands Declaration African Union (August 2014)
«WE RECOMMEND AND PROPOSE that the drylands development community commit seriously to achieving the goal of enabling
EVERY farm family and EVERY village across the drylands of Africa
to be practicing Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration by the year 2025."
Evergreen agriculture with Faidherbia albida in Zambia.
DroughtDroughtFlood
P addition resumed
Long-term maize yield without fertilizer in a Gliricidia system
P stopped
Impact of fertilizer trees on maize yield under farmer management
_______________________________________
Plot management Yield (t/ha)
Maize only 1.30
Maize + fertilizer trees 3.05 ____________________________________________________________
2011 Survey of farms in six districts (Mzimba, Lilongwe, Mulanje, Salima, Thyolo and Machinga)
Malawi National Agroforestry Food Security Programme
FaidherbiaGliricidia
Maize stubble
Faidherbia
Gliricidia
Maize
DRY SEASON
WET SEASON
Fertilizer-Fodder-Fuelwood Trees in Food Crop Production Systems
What would be the impact if African farmers deployed Evergreen Agriculture on a larger scale?
If practiced on: 5 m ha_________________________________________________
Value of nitrogen fertilizers produced by farmers $ 500 million
Amount of additional maize produced 5-10 m tons
Value of additional maize produced $ 1-1.5 billion
_____________________________________________________________________________
New COMESA-ICRAF platform
To assist the 19 member countries to link the scaling-up of fertilizer tree technologies to their input subsidy programs.
What is Evergreen Agriculture?
A VISION of a more agroecologically intensive farming that integrates trees directly into crop and livestock production systems.
Types of Evergreen Agriculture
1. Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) on cropland
2. Conservation agriculture with trees (CAWT)
3. Conventional agriculture interplanted with trees
17 Countries are engaged in EverGreen Agriculture
Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration
Conservation Agriculture with trees
Trees interplanted in conventional tilled cropland
Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration +
Trees interplanted in conventional tilled cropland
African Climate Smart Agriculture Alliance Vision 25by25
25 million farmers practicing CSA by 2025
Four African countries have established their own
restoration targets
Ethiopia has committed 15 million hectares,
DRC -- 8 million hectares,
Uganda -- 2.5 million hectares, and
Rwanda -- 2 million hectares.
Creating Action Plans
1. Achieve the Africa Union Target: Reach every dryland farm in Southern Africa with Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration.
2. With COMESA: Link national input subsidy programs with the massive upscaling of fertilizer-fodder-fuelwood trees supported by ICRAF.
Creating Action Plans(cont’d)
3. With NEPAD: Create national programs to scale-up Climate Smart Agriculture practice to reach 25 m farms by 2025.
4. With the Global Restoration Initiative: Make national commitments to the global target of restoring 350 m ha by 2030. Restored farmland, forests, grazing land.
“There is no shortage of productive land. “Only poor land management and the lack of political will to stir up land users and consumers into effective land stewards. “The proposed SDG are ambitious — as they should be. They have the seeds to turn us into better users than any other generation before us. But only if we are bold enough to adopt sustainable land use practices, and to restore degraded land to meet future growth.”
-- Monique Barbut UNCCD Executive Secretary
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