Wednesday 8 October
Burkina Faso’s poorest
farmers leading fight against climate change – new report
Burkina Faso’s subsistence farmers are leading the fight
against climate change despite getting almost no outside help, reveals a new
report from the Overseas Development Institute (ODI) – the UK’s leading
think-tank on development issues.
The report A greener Burkina- Sustainable farming
techniques, land reclamation and improved livelihoods will be launched
in Ouagadougou, on Wednesday 8 October, and reveals
that poor farmers on the edge of the Sahel in the Central Plateau have restored
up to 300,000 hectares of degraded land by using traditional farming practices.
These consist of careful land preparation, water conservation and
enriching the soil with natural nutrients rather than expensive
fertilisers.
These farmers have managed to provide food for half a million people in
the area who otherwise would have likely starved. While they have received some
help from international aid agencies and the government, most of the success
has been accomplished on their own.
Burkina Faso is experiencing increasingly unpredictable rainfall and
severe droughts as a result of climate change, threatening the lives of millions of people. Decades of over-farming and overgrazing, has also resulted in huge tracts of fertile lands changing into desert, with up to 65% of land
degraded in some areas.
Despite the scale of this crisis, international support for the whole of
sub-Saharan Africa to adapt to climate change has averaged only $130 million
annually, lending weight to what Archbishop Desmond Tutu calls ‘adaptation
apartheid’.
The report authors hope that the example of Burkina Faso’s poor farmers
in the Sahel region will empower others in the region to confront the effects
of climate change, adapting their agriculture methods to offset some of its
worst shocks, despite getting almost no outside help.