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