admin | June 20, 2024
News Brief
In western Kenya's Bukirimo village, four decades of sugarcane farming have led to soil degradation and biodiversity losses. But some East African farmers are moving away from sugarcane monocropping and adopting smart-farming initiatives like food forests, restoring the ecology in the Nile Basin and elsewhere. Food forests are a kind of agroforestry that involves intercropping a variety of food crops like cereals, fruits, vegetables, tubers, and herbs with trees on the same piece of land. The result is a variety of food for farmers and their families, and an opportunity for soils, rivers, and wetlands to recharge, particularly if the farmers don’t use chemicals. Efforts like this can bring back species like the Nubian flapshell turtle, which has become endangered in the area.
In the 44 years Naomi Rita Sitati has lived in Bukirimo village in western Kenya, she has known only one system of farming, monoculture sugarcane plantations, which her community has depended on for generations. Lately, however, she’s begun questioning this system after witnessing its destructive effects on soils and the environment. And now, some communities in East Africa are working with food experts and conservationists to establish smart-farming initiatives like food forests aimed at restoring the Nile Basin’s biodiversity.
Cultivating sugarcane in large plots is a common practice in western Kenya, and Mrs. Sitati was happy with it. Apart from creating jobs for thousands of Kenyans throughout the agriculture value chain, it’s a foreign exchange earner for Kenya, and a popular domestic sweetener.
But its impact on the region’s food supplies and biodiversity has been high, and over the years, Mrs. Sitati has seen the system accelerate deforestation and dependency on industrial agrochemicals to boost production.
She says: “Our soils are dead. When you try planting a food crop in a field where there was previously sugarcane, it does not grow. You cannot even see things like earthworms and ants.”
Emmanuel Atamba is the chief executive at Agricultural Production Systems and Institutions Development, a farming consultancy based in Nairobi. He says sugarcane is also reliant on irrigation, and farmers must extract huge volumes of water from rivers and other water bodies. This extraction by communities in the upper reaches of the Nile Basin reduces the volume of water reaching the lowlands, leading to drying of wetlands, surface water sources, and aquifers.
On a biodiversity level, such farming practices have endangered the existence of already threatened wildlife species like the Nubian flapshell turtle (Cyclanorbis elegans). The turtle used to range from West Africa to sub-Saharan Africa, and along the White Nile Basin in Sudan. But it’s disappeared from much of this range and today is listed as critically endangered.
To soften the blow of these threats while continuing to feed people, communities have been introducing smart-farming initiatives aimed at restoring the Nile Basin’s biodiversity.
Mrs. Sitati’s village in Kenya recently introduced food forests. A kind of agroforestry, food forests involve intercropping a variety of food crops like cereals, fruits, vegetables, tubers, and herbs among woody trees on the same piece of land.
Xavier Imondo, a teacher, oversees the community food forest in the 0.1-hectare garden at St. Denis Libolina School. The food forest features a mix of crops like banana, sweet potato, hibiscus, papaya, avocado, chili, and many more between trees like silver oak (Grevillea robusta). This gives the garden a bushy appeal that attracts wildlife species like pigeons, weaverbirds, sunbirds, earthworms, white ants, caterpillars, honey bees, and crickets.
Mr. Imondo says: “Food forests are a game changer for our farmers. Apart from giving families a variety of food, rivers and wetlands are regaining water recharge. The water is also safe because we do not use farm chemicals.”
Karen Nekesa is the regional advocacy and communications coordinator at Regional Schools and Colleges Permaculture Programme. She says destructive farming practices threaten biodiversity in the whole of East Africa. To help the region recover from food insecurity and environmental degradation, the organization has been working with farmers in Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Malawi, and Zimbabwe to establish agroecological farming.
Working with the Turtle Survival Alliance, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Turtle Surveillance, and the Rainforest Trust, Ugandan herpetologist Mathias Behangana says the most promising effort to conserve the Nubian flapshell turtle is establishment of community protected areas. But this is a long-term project that requires funding, which they don’t have at the moment.
Recharging wetlands by adopting farming techniques like agroforestry is one of the simplest things communities in the Nile Basin are doing to help this species that inhabits muddy waters and papyrus patches, though improvement isn’t happening as fast as conservationists would like.
At the sixth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly which took place in late February 2024 in Nairobi, the global biodiversity framework and overuse of fertilizers was discussed.
That’s happy news for Mrs. Sitati, the sugarcane farmer from western Kenya. It lets her know that she’s not alone and that the global community is battling biodiversity loss alongside smallholder farmers like her, even in a small region of the planet like the Nile Basin.
She says: “We are doing the most we can to restore the environment and save endangered wildlife species, but we cannot win this battle without support from governments and world leaders.”
This story is adapted from an article published by Mongabay, and titled: “Nile Basin farmers grow food forests to restore wetlands and bring back a turtle.” To read the full story, go to: https://news.mongabay.com/2024/02/nile-basin-farmers-grow-food-forests-to-restore-wetlands-and-bring-back-a-turtle/
Photo: The food forest at Naomi Rita Sitati’s home in western Kenya. Image by David Njagi for Mongabay