OUAHIGOUYA, Burkina Faso (Reuters) – Yacouba Sawadogo murmurs advice to his children as they press a seedling into the red earth using a centuries-old technique he adapted to conjure a rainforest from Burkina Faso’s rain-hungry soil.
The farmer over 70 is hailed in his province as “the man who stopped the desert”. He won the title after adjusting a method of growing plants in wells to retain water – essential in the region of difficult access to the Sahara.
After a terrible drought devastated the Sahel in the 1970s and 1980s, many of Sawadogo’s neighbors abandoned their farms in northern Burkina Faso. But he stayed.
The pressures on the land remain. Wind erosion, water scarcity, rapid population growth and overgrazing cause the degradation of about 470,000 hectares of land per year, according to data from the Ministry of the Environment.
Its use of the so-called zai wells has created in four decades an oasis of 40 hectares of prickly acacia, yellow fruiting saba and other trees near his village in Yatenga province, on the border with Mali.
“This forest you see today was really a desert – there was not even the shadow of a single tree here,” he says, sunlight hitting his face through the canopy above.
Farmers dug small holes in the sun-burned soil for centuries and filled them with organic matter for their plants. Sawadogo experimented with digging wider and deeper ditches and using stones.
When the rains arrive, their pits collect more water that goes down to the seeds, increasing crop productivity 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 country over the past 30 years has improved food security, groundwater levels, tree cover and biodiversity, according to a 2018 study in Sustainability magazine.
Sawadogo will continue to plant. “If there are no trees and the land is not maintained, it would be a disaster.”
Reporting by Thiam Ndiaga and Yvonne Bell; Written by Alessandra Prentice; Editing by Edward McAllister and Andrew Heavens