The ‘underground forests’ that are bringing deserts to life
They call it the “underground forest”, and it has proved, literally, to be an answer to prayer, both for one young Australian and for countless people living in one of the hungriest corners of the planet. For it has enabled millions of hectares of severely degraded land to produce good harvests, spurring a grassroots agricultural revolution that – almost unnoticed by the outside world – is spreading across West Africa’s Sahel.
The revolution – and similar, largely unpublicised, developments around the globe – offers hope of reversing perhaps the world’s most alarming environmental crisis: land degradation costs at least 30 billion tons of priceless topsoil and deprives farmers of an area three times the size of Switzerland every year. And it represents one of the best ways of combating climate change and preventing conflict.
The story starts with Tony Rinaudo – a young Australian missionary in the Maradi region of Niger in the early 1980s – who tried to ease the suffering of the people in an area where desperately poor farmers could sow crops up to four or five times a year only for them to be smothered by drifts of sand. Time and time again he planted trees to stabilise the soil, retain water from the occasional rains and provide shade for crops. Every time they died.
One day he gazed despairingly out on the unforgiving desert, wondering: “How many saplings, how many people, how many millions of dollars would I need for this?”
Driven to prayer, he says, he “saw for the first time what had been there all along. Seemingly useless small bushes scattered over the dry land, which we had despised as weeds, were actually the outward signs of a vast underground forest.”
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