“It is not possible to know what is possible”, says Frances Moore Lappe, author of the bestseller Diet for a Small Planet and eighteen other books on hunger, poverty, and environmental crises. The story of Yacouba Sawadogo, an indefatiagble farmer in Burkina Faso in West Africa, is a striking testimony to this notion. Burkina Faso lies in a region of Africa known as Sahel, a semi-arid zone between the Sahara Desert and the lush savannas of Central and Southern Africa. From the late 1960s to the early 1980s this region experienced rapid encroachment by the Sahara Desert. This resulted in a famine that killed 100,000 people and left another 750,000 people on food aid. Millions of residents in Niger, Mali, Burkina Faso, Chand, and Mauritania abandoned their engulfed farms and moved to nearby cities, putting pressure on resources.

Yacouba Sawadago was among the few who decided to remain on his farm and dedicate his life to “greening the desert”. In 1981, he, along with a small group of farmers, began experimenting with ancient techniques to restore the soil. There were two simple techniques at the core of their approach. The first was called cordons pierreux whcih involved laying long lines of stones (each about the size of a fist) on the field. These cordons would cause rainfall to pause long enough to percolate through the soil. Seeds would be sowed these lines of stones, and growing plants would slow the water flow even further. Within a few years, a simple line of rocks could restore an entire field. The second approach was to hack thousands of foot-deep holes (zai) in the fields during the dry season. Each zai would be pitted with manure, which attract termites. The termites would digest the manure, making termites more available. In each hole, Sawadogo would plant a tree. Within three years, Sawadogo had transformed a piece of barren land into a 12-hectare productive farm and forest with large variety of species

While Sawadogo was initially dismissed by his peers, his success did not go unnoticed, and his approach went viral. Sawadogo went on a campaign to educate farmers across the region on his approach. It is estimated that in less than twenty years, over half a million hectares of the desert have been converted to fertile fields by indigenous methods in Burkina Faso and Niger, affecting over 3 million lives. Desertification is still often viewed by experts as an irreversible process triggered by declining rainfall and destructive farming methods. However, teams of researchers from University College London, the University of Copenhagen, and the Free University, Amsterdam, assert that satellite images indicate that there has been a steady reduction in “bare ground” with “vegetation cover, including bushes and trees, on the rise in the dunes”. This is being witnessed across the Sahel from the Atlantic Ocean to the Red Sea, 6,000 kilometers away. Today, a variety of aid organizations ranging from the World Wide Web Foundation to the United Nations are studying these ancient greening techniques and working with farmers across the region to help implement them. There is little question that stories like that of Yacouba Sawadogo are what Margaret Mead had in mind when she said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, its only thing that ever has”.

QUESTION: Briefly describe FIVE positive impacts of the Greening the Dessert program.