Making Room For Farming And Wildlife In Africa
August 10, 2001
Africa Has To Use Its Farmland More Intensively if the Continent is to
Retain Its Unique Wildlife Diversity
CHURCHVILLE, Va.–”Improvement in the way that farmers manage their natural resources can allow many different wild species to find homes within and around farms with no reductions and sometimes with increases in crop yields,” says a new report, “Common Ground, Common Future: How Ecoagriculture Can Help Feed the World and Save Wild Biodiversity.”
It’s a joint effort by two important international conservation groups: The World Conservation Union in Switzerland, which includes a wide variety of government agencies from both First and Third Worlds, along with 10,000 conservation scientists and more than 700 non-government organizations.
Future Harvest represents 16 Third World agricultural research centers seeking ways to simultaneously increase crop yields, improve farming sustainability and conserve wildlife habitat.
The ecoagriculture they jointly recommend would focus on higher yields to save more room for nature, reducing agricultural pollution, and linking wildlife habitat on farms to wildlife populations in forests and wildlife preserves.
In central California, farmers in an earlier era converted wetlands to rice production, pre-empting the habitat of many bird species. Now rice farmers have discovered that by flooding their fields during the fallow season, their farms can again be habitat for many species of songbirds, ducks and cranes.
The flooding helps the farmer by decomposing waste straw and controlling weeds and diseases. Researchers have found the flooded fallow rice fields provide nearly as much food for the birds as natural wetlands and with fewer predators. Some of the rice farms are now being managed jointly with restored natural wetlands to provide year-round wildlife habitat for key bird species.
In Zimbabwe, local farmers have found a low-cost “natural” way to get the high yields of irrigated farming. Instead of building costly dams and irrigation canals, the farmers fence off irrigated gardens in shallow, seasonally waterlogged depressions called “dambos.”
Researchers say the dambo yields twice as much as mechanically irrigated land, at far less cost. Nor does dambo cultivation mine the groundwater or reduce downstream flows. Nearly 20,000 hectares of Zambian dambos are already cultivated, with a potential for up to 80,000 hectares mainly in the poor communal farming areas.
Similar wetlands are found in Malawi, South Africa, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Nigeria. Africa no longer has room for the long 15- to 20-year bush fallows that formerly supplied the soil nutrients for its farmers. Africa must now use its farmland more intensively, as the world’s other farmers have done, if it’s to retain its unique wildlife diversity. Fortunately, researchers are developing short-duration fallows that feature fast-growing trees and shrubs.
Some of the trees and shrubs are legumes that put nitrogen back into the soil. In eastern Zambia, 3,000 farmers have begun using an improved two-year fallow that nearly triples annual net farm income from their staple maize crop.
In western Kenya, several thousand farmers increased yields 21 percent by using one-season shrub fallows, which give better economic returns than continuous cropping because the farmers don’t have to buy fertilizer. Preserving some fallow land is also important to nesting birds and small mammals, even if the fallow periods are short.
The World Conservation Union-Future Harvest report also notes that “In impoverished soils, such as many found in Africa, some chemical fertilizer is often needed in combination with organic nutrients to build up soil organic matter for sustainable production.”
In Chiapas, Mexico, farmers are getting assistance payments to shift from an unsustainable pattern of extensive fallow that demands regular forest-clearing to sustainable agroforestry systems. The payments come from the International Federation of Automobiles, to offset the greenhouse gas emissions of its car races!
The report warns that international aid to Third World agricultural research has fallen dramatically in the past 15 years. Too many people fear that more food will mean more overpopulation, although we live in the first era when more food has meant lower birth rates and better diets for kids.
The challenge for preserving wildlife, meanwhile, has never been greater. “I had no idea of the scale that habitat change is taking place,” says report coauthor Sara Sherr of the University of Maryland.
Nor is there any real way to preserve wildlife species if we ignore the 2.5 billion farm families living close to the wildlife, or fail to make more effective use of the 37 percent of the earth’s land area already being farmed and pastured.
That’s the message from the World Conservation Union and Future Harvest.
DENNIS T. AVERY is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis. His views are not necessarily those of BridgeNews.
OPINION ARTICLES and letters to the editor are welcome. Send submissions to Sally Heinemann, editorial director, BridgeNews, 3 World Financial Center, 200 Vesey St., 28th Floor, New York, N.Y. 10281-1009. You may also call (212) 372-7510, fax (212) 372-2707 or send e-mail to opinion@bridge.com.
Dennis T. Avery is based in Churchville, Va., and is director of global food issues for the Hudson Institute of Indianapolis.
Posted in Commentary |