Like many women in Niger, Salmou Boureima is not allowed to own agricultural land yet she is responsible for feeding her family and helping her husband farm millet, in addition to grinding grain daily and collecting firewood and water. With frequent droughts and low annual rainfall, Boureima’s family often had insufficient food, but in 2007 she joined a women’s association to learn how to increase the productivity of degraded village land.
More than half of the Sahel is degraded. “This scarcity of cultivable land leads to food insecurity and poor nutrition, a matter made worse by the rapidly growing population in this region,” explains Dov Pasternak*. To increase food production within the region, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi Arid Tropics (ICRISAT) has developed means of using indigenous water harvesting technologies to improve nutrition as well as the status and income of women farming degraded land.
Reclaiming degraded land
Impermeable to water, crusted laterite soil occupies a large area of the degraded lands. However, the water holding capacity is higher than sandy soil, enabling plants to live on water stored in the heavier soil for long periods. ICRISAT’s Bioreclamation of Degraded Lands (BDL) system uses half-moon shaped micro-catchments, called demi-lunes, to store run-off water. Ziziphus mauritania trees (Apple of the Sahel) are planted in the open side of the demi-lunes to avoid water logging. Between rows of demi-lunes, women plant indigenous vegetables such as okra and roselle in planting pits called zai holes. These 20 x 20cm holes not only catch water, but also contain about 200g of manure. Moringa trees are then placed in trenches set up every 20 metres to harvest any additional water run-off.
With deep roots, Ziziphus mauritania uses the stored water to produce nutritious fruit which is rich in vitamin C, iron, calcium and phosphorus. Moringa leaves are also highly nutritious, containing seven times the Vitamin C in oranges, four times the Vitamin A in carrots, four times the calcium in milk and three times the potassium in bananas. “In dry West Africa, between 13-15 per cent of children suffer from acute nutritional deficiency,” Pasternak explains. “The BDL is an effective means to provide vegetables and fruit with high nutritional value to remote villages in the Sahel.” (…)
Read the full article in the New Agriculturist
More on ICRISAT’s BDL-Bioreclamation of Degraded Lands”-Project.
Picture courtesy Dov Pasternek (ICRISAT)
A great full-ciecle way to catch and use run-off water. Larger-scale retention ponding of rain run-off, supplying water for drip irrigation, might also be feasible.
[...] approach of bioreclamation of degraded lands shows how women's groups could revitalise barren lands by using simple water and soil [...]
[...] civil society and local population to scale up successful projects. For instance, the approach of bioreclamation of degraded lands (BDL) mentioned in the article shows farming techniques adapted to arid climate and degraded lands [...]
[...] civil society and local population to scale up successful projects. For instance, the approach of bioreclamation of degraded lands (BDL) mentioned in the article shows farming techniques adapted to arid climate and degraded lands [...]
[...] civil society and local population to scale up successful projects. For instance, the approach of bioreclamation of degraded lands (BDL) mentioned in the article shows farming techniques adapted to arid climate and degraded lands [...]
As the editor of the Planet Fixer Digest, I am always amazed at all the solutions I found around the world to improve feeding around the world. I thought the “zai” was the ultimate solution for desertification ( see here at http://theplanetfixer.org/2358/fight-desertification-by-digging-holes-in-the-desert/ ). And here we are: a nearly perfect combo better that just using zai: demi-lunes + moringa + zai. I will certainly include this new twist to the zai system.
Roger Pilon, Editor
The Planet Fixer Digest