A Photo and Its Story
Few threats to human civilization are as serious as the rapid spread of the world’s deserts. So far research offered few solutions. But now an Australian agronomist has come up with an effective one all on his own, and it requires only a simple tool…
Fascinating pictures and the story behind them
The barren, lifeless landscape with its arid, parched ground rolls on for as far as the eye can see. The last inhabitants of the small village of Humbo in Ethiopia have been living in the desert—and struggling to survive. The last tree was cut down years earlier, and replanting trees in the bone-dry soil seemed impossible. The villagers had long since abandoned all hope. Their dire expectation: If the burning heat didn’t kill them, they’d all die of thirst as the region continued to dry out. But Humbo did not die—quite the contrary: Only a few years later the area had changed so drastically that it was unrecognizable. The wasteland had turned into a flourishing forest.
CAN YOU SAVE THE WORLD WITH A POCKET KNIFE?
The name of the man who brought back the forest is Tony Rinaudo. The Australianborn farmer and agronomist has learned to transform dry wasteland of the kind he found in Humbo into a thriving forest—and he does so with a simple method: farmermanaged natural regeneration (FMNR). It takes advantage of the root systems that remain in the ground after the trees are gone. When Rinaudo first saw the small bushes, he thought they’d grown on their own in the desert. Then he realized they were sprouting from the roots of trees that had been cut down. The root systems were still alive. Was it possible to regrow the trees from them? “It changed everything,” he recalls. “We didn’t need to plant trees on a multimillion-dollar budget. Everything we needed was already there.” Pruning the bushes to only the strongest shoots made them regrow as trees. “If you do it correctly, the trees will come back even in dry regions. And where the trees grow, you can raise millet and sorghum as well,” says Rinaudo, now 63.
He discovered the method almost by accident. In a desperate attempt to revive an area of Niger, a landlocked country in Western Africa, he’d planted 6,000 trees, but soon they had all died. Then he made his breakthrough discovery: green shoots emerging from a dried-out tree trunk. That meant the roots of the tree were still alive. All it would take, he hoped, was to prune
the tree into shape and protect it for half a year from grazing animals. Thanks to his care and its deep roots, the tree grew back.
CAN YOU REAWAKEN A FOREST?
A World Vision International study of FMNR has called this method “the largest positive environmental transformation in Africa in the past 100 years.” While some governments might spend millions every year to plant trees (and see much of the money vanish into politicians’ pockets), FMNR requires nothing more than time, effort, and a knife. Initially it was difficult to get governmental approval for the FMNR endeavor in Niger. Regulations prohibited some aspects of it, and the farmers themselves were unsure of its wisdom and practicality. Rinaudo says FMNR really took off there when the farmers “stopped seeing trees as weeds and started seeing them as assets.” One study showed that the adoption of FMNR could restore arability to infertile land in a single season as the debris from the trees was incorporated into the soil by termites that at the same time loosened it up. Over five years, fields planted with trees saw a threefold increase in grain production. The African regions that have adopted FMNR now produce surpluses of grain that they sell for profit. And reforestation has also mitigated chronic drought in the region— all because someone figured out how to get to the root of the problem.
CAN A FOREST CONQUER A WASTELAND? WHEN I CAME HERE THE FIRST TIME, THERE WAS HARDLY A TREE.”
TONY RINAUDO, agronomist and expert in the reforestation of wastelands and deserts
All Australian agronomist Tony Rinaudo needs to transform a dry desert landscape into a flourishing forest is a small pocket knife. In the same way a gardener prunes roses to encourage proper growth, Rinaudo cuts back the growth sprouting from old stumps to encourage it to regrow into tree form. In the first 20 years after its introduction to Niger, FMNR spread across 12 million acres, which is about 50% of the nation’s farmland. By now FMNR has been introduced to almost 20 countries in Africa and in Southeast Asia as well as to Haiti.
Forests now stand where livestock grazing, burning, and harvesting for fuelwood had previously prevented the trees from regrowing. Sometimes seemingly bare fields may contain hundreds of root systems per acre. According to a World Vision report, the reintroduction of trees to farming systems creates “greater abundance of beneficial soil organisms” and also improves moisture retention as well as availability of nutrients. Rinaudo’s program resulted in 18 trees per acre instead of the previously recorded 1.6 (compare the photos at right).