OUAHIGOUYA, Burkina Faso (Reuters) – Yacouba Sawadogo mumbles advice to his children as they press a seedling into the red earth using a century-old technique he has adapted to ward off a forest from Burkina Faso’s starvation-rained soil.
The 70-year-old farmer is hailed across the province as “the man who stopped the desert.” He won this title after modifying a method of growing plants in pits to trap water, essential in the hardscrabble region that is part of the Sahara.
After a terrible drought that ravaged the Sahel in the 1970s and 1980s, many Sawadogo residents abandoned their farms in northern Burkina Faso. But he stayed.
Pressures are maintained on the ground. Wind erosion, water scarcity, rapid population growth and overgrazing cause around 470,000 hectares of land to be degraded per year, according to data from the environment ministry.
Its use of so-called zai pits has created in four decades an oasis of 40 hectares of thorny acacia, yellow fruit sap and other trees near its village in Yatenga province, on the border with Mali.
“This forest you see today was really a desert; here there was not even the shadow of a single tree,” he says, with the sunlight running down his face through the upper canopy.
Farmers have dug small wells in the sun-covered soil for centuries and filled them with organic matter for their plants. Sawadogo experimented with the excavation of wider and deeper pits and the use of stones.
When the rains arrive, their pits collect more water that is fed to the seeds, increasing crop yields by up to 500%, according to the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP).
The adoption of zai and similar soil and water conservation methods across the West African nation over the past 30 years has improved food security, groundwater levels, tree cover and biodiversity, according to a study of 2018 in the magazine Sustainability.
Sawadogo will continue planting. “If there are no trees and the land is not maintained, it would be a disaster.”
Report by Thiam Ndiaga and Yvonne Bell; Written by Alessandra Prentice; Edited by Edward McAllister and Andrew Heavens