The focus shifted more to water harvesting and retaining moisture

The watershed activities in the semi-arid regional state, receiving 400-800 mm of rainfall each year, have restored vegetation, caused groundwater levels to rise and reduced erosion.

Soil moisture has increased and in many places productivity has more than doubled. Much of the change has been due to government programmes, coordinated at the regional, district and village cluster level. What are some of the keys to this success; what have farmers experienced on the ground; and with over 15 years of experience in watershed management, what next for the region?

A new way of thinking

A new way of looking at watershed management has been an important success factor in Tigray. Before 2000, the emphasis in watershed management was on controlling soil erosion. About 15 years ago the focus shifted more to water harvesting and retaining moisture. The 3R principle – recharge, retention and reuse – explains the logic behind this approach. The central concept is to keep water in the landscape by storing it when plentiful, making it available during dry periods and extending the chain of uses. The ‘Rs’ refer to three elements of water buffering in a landscape. Recharge is about adding water to the buffer through infiltration.

Retention is about increasing the size of the buffer by slowing down the water cycle. And reuse is about circulating the water as much as possible. Enhancing each of these processes reduces unused runoff and evapotranspiration.

Many of the watershed activities in Tigray are based on the 3R principle and a repertoire of measures have been put to use by government programmes and individual farmers over the past ten years. They include physical measures (deep trenches and hill side terraces with earth or stone bunds, gully treatment, micro-basin and pitting for plantation) and water harvesting measures (river diversion, mini-dams, check-dam ponds, open hand dug wells and spring development). Local initiative combined with leadership by the local government supported a high intensity of work and led to large scale change.

Harvesting water with roads

An ‘out of the box’ solution that’s also proving successful is road water harvesting. In the village cluster, Kihan Tabia, examples of road water harvesting can be seen everywhere. There are many examples of road water harvesting being started through local initiatives and now supported by the regional and local authorities.

For example, Ataklti has two hectares of land in which he cultivates rainfed crops on a rotational basis; usually sorghum, teff and wheat. Some of his land is adjacent to the road. About ten years ago, he realised that the water from the culvert was causing erosion because it was concentrated at one point. It was eroding his brothers’ land, which became unproductive. He decided to divert the water from the culvert to his farmland to help his brother and at the same time benefit his crops. It was his own initiative to build bunds, but a few years later the government and the community helped him to strengthen the structure. The productivity of his farmland has increased and his brother is again able to cultivate rainfed crops. There hasn’t been any conflict with neighbours downstream over the use of the water from the road. And, when he has excess water during the rainy season, he lets the water flow to other farms.

Similarly, Tsadkan Berhe, from the same village cluster, has been diverting the water from the road to her land for over ten years. She has one hectare of land, where she also cultivates teff, sorghum and wheat. The bunds were built by the community as part of the Productive Safety Net Programme. The water coming from the road is extremely valuable, particularly for irrigation during dry spells in the rainy season. The quantity and quality of her crops have increased thanks to the water collected with the road. The extra water in the growing season allows her to apply fertilizers which increase her productivity. And, she is now able to feed her cattle during the dry season.

Bench terraces

With many watershed improvement options, selecting those that are locally appropriate is not trivial. In Wukro, Tigray, a stakeholder technology selection workshop identified bench terraces with hillside cisterns as a top priority for conversion of steep, often degraded hillsides into cultivable land. The workshop was organised at the end of 2012 by the WAHARA project, an EU-funded project aiming to increase the potential of water harvesting. Participants included representatives from the regional government, NGOs, educational institutes and local farmers.

The development of bench terraces has evolved from trials to a regional programme targeting the estimated quarter of a million landless youth in Tigray. The Embahasti sub-basin provides a successful example of the programme. A hillside of 15 ha has been converted to terraced land and is collectively owned and managed by 15 young women and 10 young men. Over the past two years the group has managed to meet its livelihood needs and make a saving of US$700.

‘The elephant and the mouse’

A series of watershed programmes in Tigray is largely driving changes across the landscape. This story shows that local farmers and landless youth negotiate this evolving context and shape their experiences. It shows that large scale watershed management with strong government ownership can be successful – rather than becoming a ‘white elephant’ – if it includes people’s participation, stimulating farmers and local experts in the watershed to adapt innovative and creative solutions to improve their livelihoods.

Marta Agujetas Perez, Kifle Woldearegay and Frank van Steenbergen

Marta Agujetas Perez and Frank van Steenbergen work for MetaMeta, a social research and development company.
Email: marta@metameta.nl, fvansteenbergen@metameta.nl

Kifle Woldearegay is a faculty staff member at Mekelle University, Ethiopia.
Email: kiflewold@yahoo.com

The post An Ethiopian watershed evolving appeared first on Ileia.

Mr Dame Diop is a farmer in the village of Bayen, near Thiès, in Senegal. We met him last October in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, at an international conference on Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration, an increasingly popular technique for increasing and managing the presence of trees on agricultural land. Mr Diop talks in French, slowly but articulately.

“When I was young, there was lots of forest in our village. But in the 1970s, our country joined many of the so-called Green Revolution programmes. The national government instructed farmers to intensify traditional shifting cultivation practices, clear forest and start growing groundnuts. In return we received subsidised fertilizer and seeds. We grew groundnuts to sell and bought food to eat ourselves. In the beginning all went well. But then there were severe droughts, the government’s policies changed and fertilizer subsidies stopped. We were left with empty stomachs. On 12 December, 1992, some people from a project visited our village, and since then the project has helped us to restore trees on 57 hectares of land. These trees appeared to do miracles. They grew quite big in five to ten years, and we grow grains and horticultural crops between them. Crop production is stable and, even in dryer years, none of us needs to buy food from outside. In most years we can sell crops on the market in Dakar.” Mr Diop’s main interest is in finding a way that more farmers in his community can benefit from this approach.

Yields and taxes

Mr Ibra Diakhithé, President of the Rural Council of Niakhene, 100 km north of Dakar, thinks that people can earn a living through fighting desertification. With an annual rainfall of 200 to 300 mm, Niakhene is where the Sahel and the Sahara meet. “During the drought of the 1970s, at least one third of our people migrated, and whole villages were abandoned. This could happen again very easily as a result of global warming. But we are working hard to avoid it.” Mr Diakhité gave a stubborn smile.

“A few years ago the government handed over environmental management to the local government. We are happy with this mandate, even though we only have small budgets at our disposal. With the little money available for our Rural Council, I prioritised actions that would help people make money. For example, when I started as President in 2002, 42 out of the 62 villages did not have running water. I managed to get running water for all villages. This helped to reduce the workloads of women, so now they have more time to take care of their fields and their trees. Trees on the farms help farmers to create protected horticultural gardens, that are now equipped with drip irrigation. In this way, people have business opportunities, and do not need to move away in search of work. The greener the village is, the more people can produce.”

This is undoubtedly a successful story, but does it help the Rural Council? “You might think that more business would mean more revenues for the local government. Unfortunately this is not the case. We only levy a ‘solidarity tax’ of 1,000 francs per person per year (about € 1.50); so more local businesses does not mean that we get higher tax revenues. We still depend on the support of foreign-funded NGOs and programmes.”

Yet a local tax on, for example, agroforestry products might be a good idea. Farmers and researchers have shown the many benefits of trees on agricultural land in the Sahel. Trees have deeper root systems than annual crops, and some species can withstand droughts remarkably well. Trees also help rainwater from short heavy showers to penetrate deeper into the soil, helping ensure that crops make it to the end of the rainy season.

Some researchers claim that there should no more than 25 to 40 trees per hectare; many farmers disagree. Mr Ali Meyno, a farmer in Aguié, in Niger, grows up to 150 trees per hectare. “I combine tree growing with micro-dosing fertilizer. This gives me cereal yields of up to four tons – and I also sell fuel and construction wood on the rural market. I also rent barren land for a very low price. The first thing I do is start bringing the trees back and improving the soil, which immediately doubles yields. The following years I manage the tree coverage on the land and my yields are even higher. Thus I make a good profit. And after three years I hand back the restored land to the owner.”

Mr Ali and members of his community benefit from strict local government procedures that regulate land tenure. People who lend or rent land are sure they will get it back after the agreed period. And farmers who invest time and resources in regenerating trees retain the harvesting rights once these trees yield wood. As a result, Aguié has a lively wood market, from where trucks leave every day to towns in Nigeria. The mayor, Ousmane Boubé, is happy with the financial results.

“The market committee decides who should pay taxes, and how much. We share the tax money between the state, the local government and the technical services. These services support farmers by running a capacitybuilding programme on agroforestry.” This is a virtuous circle: the more people produce, the more revenues the local government gets, which allows for more and better capacity-building programmes, and also for better land registers.

Different roles, different opinions

Why is it so difficult to replicate this success? Scientists such as Antoine Kalinganire, at the World Agroforestry Centre in Nairobi, recognise at least one reason. “Foresters should leave the farmers alone!” he exclaims with a big laugh. “Let the foresters manage the forests, and not the farms. Farmers treat the trees on their land like a regular crop. They plant, maintain, cut and sell the produce, following their socio-economic logic. When foresters interfere with the growing of trees on farms – which happens all over Africa – they cannot establish fully productive systems. Foresters oblige farmers to apply for permits to fell a tree, even when tree densities are high. The result is that farmers cannot manage their trees economically. No wonder they clear trees and invest exclusively in annual crops – and miss part of the steady income they could have had.”

Mr Maizombou Assoumane, a forest guard from Doutchi, Niger, does not agree: “We only protect trees so that outsiders or irrational farmers do not cut them down”. This misunderstanding of the role of foresters seems to be backed by stories such as the one told by World Vision’s Martin Nzale: farmers in a village in Kaffrine, Senegal, were happy with the effect of the trees on their soils, which provided shade and fire wood. Then last year this changed: “A rumour went around that fields with high tree density would be taken back by the forestry service. Many people were afraid and had their family members cut down the trees in order not to lose their land. These trees could have served as their pension! And now they are all gone.”

A group of farmers we met in Rouda Adoua, a village in Niger, also regarded the forester as a policeman. Asked what they would do if the foresters left their region, they immediately said that “we would cut down all the trees!”… Then one of them timidly contradicted the group: “Maybe not… I think we would keep many trees to fertilise the land.” After a ten minute discussion, most people agreed: “If we didn’t need the foresters’ approval to grow and cut trees, our land would soon be covered with a variety of species that we could harvest to use and sell.”

Back to basics

Mr Diop, the farmer from Thiès, was witness to the discussions at the Ouagadougou conference, and welcomed the ideas of establishing a large-scale farmer-to-farmer project for promoting agroforestry. He is convinced that the local authorities will welcome this project. But he also wonders if we do not need another generation of projects that link agroforestry to tenure rights and markets.

In many parts of the Sahel there are more and more trees following the promotion of agroforestry. In some small pockets, local conventions on the tenure of land and trees, together with a lively market, have helped entrepreneurial farmers to re-green their land. What they need is clear regulations to support entrepreneurial agroforestry – for all those involved.

Frank van Schoubroeck and Mamadou Fall

Based in the Netherlands, Frank van Schoubroeck works as a consultant at Governance for Green Agriculture. E-mail: govga@govga.org.
Mamadou Fall works at IED-Afrique, Senegal, as an agroforestry expert. E-mail: mamadoufall@gmail.com.

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Farming Matters | 27.2 | June 2011

Ten years after it was set up, ROPPA is now an effective platform for the exchange of information between twelve West African countries.

Apart from its regular activities (such as its training programme), it organises ad hoc meetings like the one held a few weeks ago in Niamey, where representatives from each country looked at the regional agriculture programmes and discussed their role in terms of improving the availability of inputs, the quality of seeds, extension and support services and the processing of products for regional and local markets. Special attention is thus given to the role of supra-national blocks and programmes.

What does the West African Economic Community mean to farmers?

Policies for agricultural trade vary widely in the region. Most producers favour the free movement of agricultural products and they don’t think it is a good idea if one country protects its markets and another allows free movement. But we don’t have a free market, like in Europe. There are countries that are open to imports and others where the police randomly stop products at the border, which is very frustrating to farmers and traders. You must also realise that there are complementary regions in West Africa. Semi-arid or arid regions are excellent meat producers. Other regions are tropical and humid and can produce irrigated crops. The free movement of agricultural products could help feed the population of West Africa.

In our workshop we discussed how to overcome the different approaches seen in different countries. Our work is made more complicated because the producer organisations are very different from country to country. In countries with many resources, producer organisations are strong and help making policies more consistent, while in other countries there is little attention paid to local dynamics. There is no consistency between the policies of different countries in the region, so it is ROPPA’s task to help exchange information and harmonise such policies.

Is agroforestry a priority for ROPPA?

Sustainable land use is our priority, and we see agroforestry as part of the good management of natural resources. The climate is changing and all producers have to re-think their practices. It is clear that deforestation and the expansion of the Sahel are continuing. There is plenty of evidence showing that genetic diversity is diminishing: with climate change affecting our region, we risk losing thousands of trees that are well-adapted to our context. Agroforestry can be a key component for the necessary diversification of agricultural practices.

But why haven’t farmers adopted agroforestry at a large scale?

There is a historical reason why farmers have not taken up agroforestry. Policies for the management of natural resources used to be bad. The national forest services had the role of protecting trees, and they forbade farmers from utilising trees as they had done in the past.

Farmers were even jailed when they used trees growing on their own land! The forest services appropriated these trees with little respect for farmers’ properties. This led farmers to become hostile to trees and they cut down every single tree to avoid any hassle with the forestry services.

Today, we must explain that the tree belongs to the people on the farms. And more and more people understand that there are many benefits of having trees on their land. They need only a little coaching to follow agroforestry practices and in some countries, such as Niger or Mali, this is being practiced at a large scale. Even in some coastal countries you see the development of agroforestry.

Could agroforestry take over timber production from forests?

Of course! There is not much forest left in West Africa and agroforestry will take over the production of firewood and wood for construction. Most of the wood you find on rural markets is grown on farms. There are also international markets for wood. It would be a good idea to serve global markets with wood from agroforestry. Of course, it takes time to grow timber. I know that there are some places where they already grow timber for the market. Yet this is work in progress. We must develop family-farming based agroforestry systems that can produce timber which is adapted to the needs of the international market.

What is the role of pastoralists in agroforestry?

Today there are many pastoralists who start farming. They plant leguminous tree species for fodder. For example, there are camel herders who plant trees that their camels can eat and they subsequently settle down. That is a profound change in their lifestyle. Like all agriculture producers, pastoralists are being forced to change their activities. The underlying cause is climate change, which is turning our world upside down. People tell me every day how climate change affects their livelihood: rains come rarely or stop in the middle of the growing season, fields become barren and, sometimes, major flooding occurs. Complete villages were washed away in Niger last year and the river uprooted big trees. For us, climate change is actually very practical and affecting all our lives.

How do policy makers respond?

The reality in West Africa leaves us no choice. It’s not like in other countries where they have oil or gas or something else to live from. ROPPA fights for the preservation of natural resources and we think that people need to have trees in their fields. It is clear that we need policies that support agroforestry: where there are no trees, the land is barren and unproductive; where there are trees, there are opportunities to grow.

Most countries have formulated a National Action Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change. Agroforestry plays an important role in such plans. We must work at a very large scale. There are several options for organising this. The initiative may come from us, as producers, but it may also come from research, or from governments. In any case, all the actors should be involved and develop their own specific roles.

What is the role of African traditional leadership in natural resource management and agroforestry?

The role of traditional leadership differs according to local traditions. There are chiefs who only play the role of a social authority, and others have authority over land. Some are the guardians of tradition, and others the guardians of social relations. Chiefs with authority over land can also determine if a tree belongs to a farmer or not. In fact there are many chiefs at many levels, from local to national level. All play a role in agricultural development and land preservation.

Traditional chiefs can be very helpful, but they can also be dangerous for development. They can organise the people, but they can also stick to traditions and block necessary changes. There are some leaders who are very powerful and don’t have the inclination to work for development and the people suffer. There are other leaders who are sensitive and organise people in groups and development is possible under such chiefs. Projects should facilitate the constructive role of traditional leadership, particularly with reference to land tenure.

And what can landless people do?

Everywhere there are people who have no land, who cannot produce and who are extremely poor. This situation is extremely difficult. Therefore we have to make reforms and work to empower family farmers. You know, these days land is becoming scarce. If everybody wants to remain members of the big ‘agricultural family’, it is very important that we diversify.

For example, some people might remain as food crop growers and others breed cattle. Others still might engage in irrigated agriculture or horticulture and produce for the urban market. Others will engage in processing food products, while others will sell agricultural produce.

Agroforestry is yet another branch in the farming family’s activities, and the nice part is that it is synergetic and complementary to food production. In the Sahel, trees do not need watering but help to create better climatic and soil conditions for food crops. You can conclude that if we see farming as a set of different activities, you don’t need land to make a living.

What advice does ROPPA have for projects interested in agroforestry?

There is no doubt that we have to stop the degradation of natural resources by encouraging small farmers to practice agroforestry. Projects can document all the benefits of agroforestry for family farmers, the production of raw materials for industry and its benefits at a time of climate change. Projects need to keep strong links with others all so that we know that what they are doing makes good sense for the people on the ground. Given the opportunity, family farmers have the ability to restore land and develop the economy of West Africa.

More information

Please visit www.roppa.info for more information about the network.

Interview: Frank van Schoubroeck

The post “Where there are no trees…” appeared first on Ileia.

In September 2008 Hans Feijen reported how the Egyptian FFS started with a “neutral” agriculture agenda, and then slowly introduced urgent social issues. What’s the situation today?

In September 2008 Hans Feijen reported how the Egyptian FFS started with a “neutral” agriculture agenda, and then slowly introduced urgent social issues. What’s the situation today?

According to Maaike van Hoeflaken, Team Leader of the Fayoum Farmer Field Schools project, most schools have now moved well beyond the original agricultural curriculum, and routinely start with a participatory needs assessment. While participants want to discuss all sorts of agronomical and livestock issues, they also want to talk about things like waste management in townships.

At least 60 percent of all field schools are mixed or for women only and, in such schools, health issues such as birth control or female circumcision are high on the agenda, even if they are culturally sensitive issues. Those in charge have contacted specialised organisations for their support in dealing with these issues.

Besides training farmers, networking with authorities has become an important part of the FFS curriculum. This is particularly effective when the requests are in line with government programmes.

For example, the government realises that the population in the region should not grow further because of water scarcity. An FFS that wants to discuss issues like family planning now finds it easier to access the services of a specialised government programme. But this relationship also works the other way round: when the government comes up with a specific programme, such as one to control avian flu, the FFS network provides a good vehicle to spread their message.

The National Rural Development Strategy says that rural development is about more than just agriculture. The ministries for health, education, and family and population have all approached the FFS network to make use of its outreach. Last May, Egypt’s First Lady, Suzanne Mubarak, visited the programme.

FFSs were included in the national extension policy and the government created a separate budget line for them. The Fayoum Agricultural Directorate has been appointed as the lead agency for spreading the methodology all over the country, for which it is creating a “FFS Centre of Excellence”. Five more governorates are planning to introduce a FFS programme – showing that farmer field schools are becoming institutionalised in Egypt.

Text: Frank van Schoubroeck

For more information, send an e-mail to Maaike van Hoeflaken: fayoumffs@gmail.com

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“It’s a one-way track when GMOs enter a country”

We live in Bruno, Saskatchewan, in the prairies of mid-west Canada. For people from Europe or Asia, Saskatchewan is a vast area, where farmers need cars to visit the other end of their farm. In 1946 my wife and I took over the farm from my father.

Percy and Louise SchmeiserMost farmers in the area were growing wheat in those days, but we were part of a small group of farmers who were growing rapeseed, or canola, as we call it, growing it in pockets up to 30 km apart.

At the time canola was vulnerable to black leg and a pod rot, and it was common knowledge that you needed rotation intervals of four-years.

My wife was a canola breeder and she managed to gradually increase the crop’s resistance. By the 1980s she had developed varieties that were resistant to these diseases, and we didn’t need to rotate crops anymore. In the 1990s our neighbours were also changing over from wheat to canola.

I was not a full-time farmer, as I also worked as an elected member of the provincial parliament and, for some time, as a mayor. So we were active members of our community.

Q: So you successfully bred locally-adapted canola crops. Then, what happened?

In the 1990s, different companies started to promote the idea of genetically modified crops. They were telling an optimistic story: through the new GM technologies they could breed varieties that would need fewer pesticides, and would have higher yields and be more nutritious than ever. They presented genetic engineering as the way forward to reduce hunger. We farmers and politicians took the story as it was told to us. We did not know how threatening GMOs were going to be to our farming systems.

Q: What happened in Bruno?

In our area, Monsanto organised “informative meetings” with selected farmers. They were given samples of GMO seeds on the condition that they did not disclose that they had participated in these meetings. These farmers were told the same story: that GMO seed would reduce the need for chemicals and that overall yields would be higher. The farmers then planted GMO seeds in many different pockets of our province, without the local government or even their neighbours knowing about it.

My neighbour happened to participate in such a meeting and planted GMO canola in his field as well. The next thing we knew was that we received a letter from Monsanto claiming that we were using “their” varieties in our fields. Canola is an open pollinator and pollen (or maybe even seeds) from our neighbour had entered into our fields. We were accused of illegally planting their crop and charged with US$ 15 an acre for using their technology. This was the beginning of an on-going legal battle between the company and us.

Q: What struck you most in this case?

“For the first time in my life I heard about GMOs was in August 1999, when I got a letter ordering me to pay Monsanto for the use of ‘their’ seed material”

Since 1999 this case overtook our lives. The story is a whirlwind of events that shows the ruthless ways companies try to get control over and earn money from ordinary farmers like us.

The absurdity of the story is difficult to comprehend. In short, the company took seeds from our crops, and started putting one or two foreign genes in it.

After having put in such genes, the company takes out a patent – and next the variety is exclusively theirs! This is absurd enough, but then a farmer plants this new breed, and the pollen spreads within the area, like into our fields.

Even if just a small fraction of the plants carries the engineered gene, the company can claim rights over this crop! We refused to pay, and the result was that the company dragged us to court.

Q: How did your fellow farmers react?

We have no ill feelings for the neighbour who planted the GM seeds. He never intended to bring this story into our lives. We are still good friends – our children play hockey together. Farmers who planted GM canola had to sign a contract that they would not pass on GM seeds and that they would pay fees for using GM seeds in subsequent years. The company asked people to report farmers who were “illegally” planting GM seeds. They would offer people free chemicals or a Monsanto leather jacket for such reports, even money in some cases.

All of a sudden, we didn’t know anymore if the person we were talking to was going to report what was happening to the company. In small communities such as ours, such ways affect the social fabric. Now, as we say, instead of “agri-culture”, we are practising “fear-culture””. I can tell you that not many people wear Monsanto jackets these days!

Q: This is a story in Canada. Would seed companies be able to do the same in the developing world?

Since the start of this story in our fields, we have travelled all over the world to talk about our case and to learn more about the application of GMOs elsewhere. I am not a specialist, but what I understand from cases in India and Africa is that there are many ways through which companies gain control over farmers and force them to pay for “their” seeds.

For example, in micro-credit schemes, farmers get credit in the shape of chemicals and seeds that are genetically engineered. If you fail to pay for the seed, next time you get no credit. When GMOs spread naturally, companies might claim ownership over entire crops, as we have seen in our case.

Companies might introduce “terminator” genes forcing farmers to buy seeds every year. We have seen the chemical treadmill with the Green Revolution: you need to apply more and more chemicals for the same yield. Poor farmers then have no other option than to pay, even if he or she does not want to grow GMOs. I am a Canadian farmer who could drag a company to court – but how could a poor farmer ever do that?

The scary thing is that engineered genes quickly spread. Within a decade after their introduction, often over 90 percent of fields in an area might be infested. Buffers don’t help. In Europe they used to talk about the co-existence of GM and non-GM crops by creating obligatory buffers of 30 metres – although GMO pollen can easily be carried for miles! Everybody who plants a GM crop knows that he or she is infesting their neighbours’ fields.

Here in Saskatchewan, indigenous people grow wild rice in natural lakes. They are afraid that their wild rice populations will soon get infested with GMO genes.

“We have entered this path but do not know where it will lead us”

Q: What’s the problem with crops that contain new genes? The recombination of genetic material has been going on for millennia…

Traditional breeding resulted in varieties fit for agricultural fields that did not threaten wild populations. GM genes spread more aggressively.

For example, Bt genes inserted in a crop make the plant produce a pesticide that kills some pests. Normal pesticides are tested for health hazards and sometimes forbidden on these grounds and in the same way prescribed drugs are sometimes forbidden because after some years people find out that they have side-effects.

Suppose we find out that the chemicals produced by GMOs cause human diseases, for example if they slowly build up in your body. By then the genes will have spread to all crop populations – including organic and wild ones. Then it will be too late to decide and say: let’s do away with the GM crop. That’s what scares me most: that we have entered this path but do not know where it will lead us, and there is no way back.

Companies are not applying precautionary principles. Luckily, the American Society of Medical Doctors recently supported a ban on GMOs – years after organisations in Russia, England and Germany did the same.

Q: What would you advise to farmers and policy makers in developing countries?

First I would say: don’t let GMOs enter your country. It’s a one-way track. Second, be careful about farmers’ rights vis-à-vis seed companies. The company that introduced GM canola to our area did so with one goal: to gain control over farmers’ fields and make huge amounts of money. They do not develop new seeds to reduce pesticide use. They have shareholders, whose goal is to make as much money as possible, so companies are never motivated by developing technology that will be cheaper or more efficient to farmers.

Thus, it is very important that farmers keep control over the crops they grow in their fields, based on the material of their choice. So let the Lord help us to avoid companies getting control over the seeds that farmers use.

Interview: Frank van Schoubroeck

The post The GMO invasions: We’re losing our local breeds appeared first on Ileia.

Holland is famous for its polders, or reclaimied land below sea level. The shaping of the Dutch landscape goes back to the 12th century, when rising water levelsthreatened agricultural land.

In response, farmers formed water committees that constructed channels, dykes and windmills to keep land arable and inhabitable. Even though the Netherlands is now an industrialised country, society is firmly built on the traditional water governance practices.

The Netherlands is a country shaped by the Rhine and other rivers flowing into the North Sea. A thousand years ago this area consisted of swampy lakes with an occasional dune or sand bank. People settled on the sandy land, and drained the swamps so that they could grow crops. But water was a permanent threat, both from the rivers and from the sea. As a response, farmers formed water committees to put up small dykes. This worked out well for a century or so, but as soil levels lowered further (peaty soils compress easily when dry), these small committees could not manage the threats anymore.

In the 13th century, Count Floris the Fifth ordered the building of larger dykes – along with strict rules to keep people responsible for their maintenance. At the time, windmill technology for grinding flour had already been developed. This technology was modified so as to use wind power for pumping water, allowing larger stretches of land to remain dry and arable. This is how the large, flat polder landscape with an occasional windmill was formed – which you can still see in Holland.

Many of the features of the modern industrialised state of the Netherlands can be traced back to these early farmers’ innovations. One of these, for example, is the milk value chain. Farmers noticed long ago that the peaty wet soil was not fit for crops but good for cows, and started to produce milk for the nearby cities of Amsterdam or Utrecht. They figured out that you could prepare cheese with the help of fluid from the cow’s stomach, and keep the nutritional value of milk for much longer. The process first took place on individual farms, but more than one hundred years ago the first co-operatives took over the processing of milk and the production of all sorts of cheese.

Now, cheese manufacturing in the Netherlands is one of the richest aspects of the country’s food culture. Every town has a weekly market with cheese stalls, and supermarkets sell more than a hundred different kinds of milk products, with new kinds of cheese being developed every year. The dairy sector today has an annual turnover of almost a billion euros, employs more than 60,000 people, and sells its products all over the world.

Old and modern

The early water control committees became permanent water boards, with responsibility for keeping the land free from flooding. The water boards are the oldest form of governance in the Netherlands, and compromise all the institutions that have an interest in maintaining the water level. Low water tables are good for grass, and thus for farm production. But they also cause the oxidation of peat, causing it to compress and thus lowering the soil surface.

High water tables are good for minimising this and also for biodiversity, as most wild field species are water-loving. The water boards weigh these interests and regulate water tables accordingly. They have helped develop a large-scale market driven agriculture, as well as a small-scale multi-functional agriculture with diverse economic activities.

Water boards were organised in a similar way to many water user committees in Asia today: richer farmers took the lead in setting up and maintaining the necessary water regulation infrastructure. Since their establishment, these boards have been handed to the local population – in clear contrast to the country’s political structure. While they are still functioning, they often clash with the local governance structures (such as municipalities).

For example, the provinces regularly propose to take over the water boards themselves; but the water boards in turn want to take over water regulation functions from the provinces and municipalities. Dutch people experience a regular tug-of-war between traditional and modern governance structures.

Similar options

The Dutch approach to managing water shows that traditional governance structures can be vibrant drivers of technological and institutional development – if they adapt to new circumstances. In much of Africa, traditional chiefs continue playing an important role, even when ministries and local governments have taken over power. Is it possible that traditional chiefs play a role in the development of the farming sector in Africa? In many cases they already do.

Chiefs can develop constructive working relations with locally elected governance bodies and develop accountability to their people. For some tasks, traditional forms of governance are better equipped than elected governments, as in principle they can serve the interests of all people – men, women, rich and poor – in the area under their authority. The history of the Dutch water boards shows that this is a real possibility.

Text and photo: Frank van Schoubroeck

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