How the UN is Holding Back the Sahara Desert

2 years ago, before the work, this was a barren wasteland, nothing had been farmed here for 40 years, when the UN world food program told the villagers that they were going to reclaim this land as part of the Great Wall Green, they said it was impossible, but here we are in Africa, in the

desert

at the northern end of Sagal and life has returned and the stakes couldn't be higher because when the ground washes away and the land becomes a

desert

, people leave and head to cities and places like this. They are falling apart but thanks to the work of the villagers and the world food program using techniques and systems that I am going to tell you about in this video The tides have changed and the natural wealth is growing again and increasing the livelihoods of the people here , welcome. to senagal i am here during the rainy season to see the work of the great green wall of africa my wife and I started in darar a city of approximately 4 million people it is the largest city in Sagal it is the westernmost point of the entire continent of Africa I met with the world food program there in Dar to talk about our trip, so we drove with the world food program.

It was about a trip across the Sahel, the ecosystem really changed a lot in the southern part, the trees were bigger. Scattered among the millet fields as we drove north, the trees were getting smaller and smaller, we are at the end of the rainy season, this land is as green as it is now all year round. I have never seen so many animals grazing in the entire Sahel. a large open pasture, so we drove to the point where it passes into the Sahara desert, which is the Sagal River. We are here on the Sagal River, which is the border between Sagal and this side of Morania, on the other, when you look from space.

In fact, I can see the side morania sand dunes where they collide with the senagal river. The senagal river is actually the division between the Sahara and the Sahel in many parts of the river, so the Sagal river here not only serves as the border between Sagal and morania and not only as the border between the Sahel and the Sahara but if this river area has vegetation could represent the first line of defense of the great green wall of Africa the great green wall of Africa is a vision the project to plant a barrier of trees along the entire width of the African continent from Senegal to Jouti and The purpose of this great green wall is to stop the southward expansion of the Sahara Desert.

The Sahara Desert has expanded by about 10% in the last 100 years, which is why we have the Sahara. Desert, then we have the Sahel, then we have the savannah and then we have the rainforest. The design is to have a barrier of trees to stop the expansion of the desert towards the south, so I am here on the ground, on the great green wall, to show how we can restore degraded landscapes we can keep the Sahara at bay create abundance have people living here and thriving we are here at the WFP project site we are on a very degraded area of ​​land at the beginning when we presented the process and the idea to the community I did not believe they said no this is not true this is not feasible we cannot recover this land more than 40 years we are here nothing is growing on this side the process began with community-based participatory planning at the end of this process was We agreed that one of the main actions in the land reclamation project is a kind of school where they come to learn how to improve, they learn, people believe, are convinced and also committed.

You can see in the PMA that we have planted. and we rehabilitated about 300,000 hectares of land in recent years and what you see here are 30 hectares of those 300,000. This is a contribution to the great green wall because the great green wall is like a mosaic of forests that together create this wall. that will protect the Sahel from the invasion of the Sahara desert, we are working on degraded lands and bringing them

back

to life and that requires some stages when we start with soil like this we see here, okay, it's crusty. sunburnt i.e. it cannot support any kind of life because it is literally hard as cement, there is no way seeds or plants can take root here, we bring them

back

to life and re-produce them so they can feed people and you can feed communities and communities can start to thrive again.

Wait, we need to create water harvesting structures that keep water on site. If we look at the ground as it is now, the water cannot stay here, so it drains and flows. So these crescents are the first step in this rehabilitation process in this soil accumulation process. On this side here we have 7,500 crescents. Each of which has a diameter of 4 M. It takes one person to dig a crescent per day. This site has been excavated by a team of 150 people so how does the crescent work? Basically, the rain comes here and we've put the crescents into contour lines, which means that the rain, when it hits the ground, flows into this area here, which is a little bit. lower down to hold the water and we create this embankment, it's a little bit higher and we make sure that the water doesn't overflow, well, it stays here and feeds these plants, so we mainly use local species like sorghum. and millet, which was actually domesticated here many thousands of years ago, so it actually comes from the Sahel and also produces a maximum amount of biomass, so they are perfect for rehabilitating the land and at the same time feeding people .

This is nothing new. We haven't invented a technology here. Crescent technology is actually an endogenous technology of the Sahel and has been forgotten over time. We've rescued it from the past, so the whey you can see behind us actually grew only on rainwater for 10 to 10 years. 15% of the water that will be trapped here will enter the soil and recharge the water table. That way we achieve water balance, so we're not depleting water resources, but we're making sure we keep enough water in the soil. for future generations then we have another system which is mainly line planting, we have horticulture beds where we can plant okra tomatoes etc. here we have ditches where we have planted Moringa, we have planted pigeon peas and we have also planted some okra which has grown enormously here and the idea here is that we have biomass ditches that will provide us with biomass as the system grows between these ditches, we have holes to plant where we have planted fruit trees, we have guavas, citrus, this is just a first step in In this pilot we will also use other native species that will be planted in the holes that will drive soil rejuvenation and soil protection as the system begins to grow in abundance and produce food and life for the people here in its mature state, this system will look like a forest, okay.

Forestry lines that will produce biomass and fruits and we will have other intermediate lines where we will produce horticultural vegetables. This is exactly the way nature works. We find Copic agriculture, which is a type of conservation agriculture that has been developed in Brazil based on global indigenous knowledge around the world, many indigenous populations traditionally have a similar way of doing agriculture that is different from conventional agriculture and that mimics the forest dynamics in The next step we will be growing trees here, so if we look at the vastness of this area here, we can plant 10,000 trees in these structures.

Sometime you come to The Villages and you don't see anyone, you can just see some animals to say, "Okay, I think there are people here." Usually, every year after the rainy season, most of the youth migrate to Dak and other big cities in Sagal. This is internal or local migration. Some leave Sagal to go to Spain. What are they going to do? The agriculture they leave behind. to harvest apples there why do they leave the same activity here before they were thinking about how to migrate but now they don't think about that with this room B that we installed now we are going to work for 12 months in the production of vegetables now these young people who are very key to the security of the village for the development of the village now they do not need to leave to leave only the elders in the village now they will contribute to the local dynamics of the community now they are together, now they have social cohesion This project was really very interesting because the Program World Food wanted to demonstrate how the most devastated areas could be taken and turned back into resilient places for food production and specifically located their project in a highly degraded landscape that had been bulldozed until it was completely compacted.

Earth, this is actually the first line of the great green wall of Africa, the Sagal River, at least for this region, that is where it will have its true dividing line between the Sahara and the Sahel, so the work of the WFP is Sort this out. problem directly here on the ground with the great green wall of Africa