When I wrote a little post about trees earlier this year I was basically just talking through my hat. What I know about trees would fit on the back of a postage stamp. However, I just read a book by someone who knows lots more about trees than I do, and he surprisingly confirmed what I was saying.
In 1981 Tony, his wife Liz and their infant son headed off from Australia to join what was then known as the Sudan Interior Mission in Niger. After a few months language learning and cultural orientation they took up management of a farm school and associated Bible College in the town of Maradi.
Along with his other responsibilities, he took over leadership of a reforestation program that aimed to plant trees throughout the district. There was no doubt that the project was much needed. Over the decades since the Second World War the landscape of Niger had been heavily deforested in the name of 'modern' agriculture, leaving the land vulnerable to erosion and its people, who depended on timber for a wide variety of uses from firewood to building, needing to travel miles on foot to access the nearest wood supply. Land clearing was meant to make farming more productive but instead it denuded and exhausted the soil, left it loose to blow away in drought or wash away in flood, and left farmers increasingly struggling with falling crop yields and declining food security.
However, the reforestation project he managed was labour intensive and largely unsuccessful. Like many similar programs around the world, it worked by raising saplings in nurseries then distributing them to farmers to plant. Saplings require a lot of care and take decades to turn into mature trees, but poor farmers have too much work to do already producing enough food to survive so many of the trees died. Those that did take hold rarely survived to maturity because people needed wood now, not a tree in a couple of decades time. Besides, the law of Niger made trees government property, not the property of the farmer on whose land they were growing - this meant the farmer had no stake in the tree's survival and if they didn't cut it down themselves someone else would steal it for firewood.
After a couple of years of this futile effort two things happened which changed the course of his work and, ultimately, his life.
The first was a fortunate discovery. While he was driving between villages one day with a trailer load of saplings and a heart full of the futility of it all, he stopped to change a tyre and noticed that the land around him was dotted with shrubs. He took a closer look and realised they were not shrubs at all, but resprouting trees, growing from the roots that remained in the soil after the trees had been cut down. Armed with this realisation he began looking at the farms he visited with new eyes and realised that most of them had similar regrowth, which the farmers removed each year before planting their fields.
The second was a major disaster - in 1983 Niger suffered from a devastating drought-induced famine. Tony, Liz and the team spent the year distributing food aid throughout their region, using donations from supporters around the world and grain supplies from the World Food Program to help subsistence farmers survive. The time and the work were devastating as, despite their best efforts, they were forced to watch children die of malnutrition.
The one good thing to come out of this horrible year was this: global aid practice tells you that people should not be given food aid for nothing, because nothing harms a person's dignity more than a free handout. So people are asked to work in exchange for food aid. The task Tony and his team set many poor farmers was this - nurture the tree regrowth on your land.
It proved to be a much better strategy than planting new saplings. Because the root system is already mature, the part of the tree above the ground grows rapidly with minimal care and few tree deaths. Within a year, even in drought conditions, the regrowth was often quite substantial. Of course as soon as they didn't need the food aid any more many farmers cut down the trees as they had always done - after all, this was what they had been taught was good farming practice. But many farmers could already see the benefit of the regrowth and kept the trees in place. Over time these farmers had better soil and water retention in their fields, more shade sheltering their crops, their animals and themselves and better yields.
Of course this is what every farmer wants, so over the subsequent years the practice spread, first through the province, then more widely across Niger. By the time the Rinaudo family left Niger in the late 1990s to return to Australia there was a thriving movement across Niger of what came to be called Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR) which helped rehabilitate thousands of hectares of denuded farmland. Back in Melbourne, Tony went to work with World Vision and before long was helping to spread the movement elsewhere, firstly in Africa and then in other parts of the world. By the time he wrote his book the movement was estimated to have regrown trees on around 17 million hectares of farmland.
This work has led to Tony Rinaudo being called 'The Forest Maker', but this title is a misnomer. What is involved is not forests but farms with trees growing on them. Lots of farms, with lots of trees. These trees belong to the farmers and they don't simply look at them and think about what a good thing they are doing for the environment, they use them. Part of the use is passive - they prevent erosion, keep moisture in the soil, provide cooler and damper micro-climates, provide habitat for birds and lizards which eat insect pests. All these things aid farm yields, crucial to poor farmers who struggle with food security every year. But they also use the trees in a more active way - they may prune them periodically to use the timber without removing the tree, their livestock might feed on them, the trees themselves may yield edible crops.
Neither Tony nor anyone else 'makes' the tree covered landscape. The folly of thinking you can 'make' a forest was what he managed to escape from back in the early 1980s when he was starting out. What he did, and persuaded others to do, was to simply allow the trees to be.
This is classic example of good development work. It looks for what is present in the environment and the people, not what is missing, and starts by building on that. It assumes that the people being 'aided' are rational people who know what they need to thrive and are doing their best to achieve it. It then tries to build on this in a way that people can clearly understand and work with, ensuring that the people can see and experience the benefits for themselves.
Tony Rinaudo is justly celebrated for his role in FMNR, but his role is very specific. It is to be a catalyst. It is to introduce people, not so much to some key ideas, but to other people who have put them into practice. If it were not for the perceptive farmers in Niger who realised in the 1980s that letting the trees regrow improved their land, and showed their neighbours the results, FMNR would have died in the 1980s. It is just what is says on the box - farmer managed. Sure, people with fancy degrees can research it, advise about it, write papers about it which convince funders to put resources into it, but it only grows and spreads because farmers see others benefiting and try it for themselves, and then benefit in their turn.
The other reason I love this story is that it highlights so clearly how much human life is interwoven with the life of trees, animals, the soil and the water cycle. A healthy ecosystem is not simply a nice thing to have, much less a tradeoff with economic development, because we ourselves are natural living beings. In wealthy nations we are apt to forget this because we have been growing richer as ecosystems decline, but this is merely short-sightedness. We have achieved this result by exporting the resulting poverty as we import the riches. The Nigerian farmers destroyed their soil to grow peanuts for the Western market. I have a plentiful supply of peanut butter, but one dry year plunges them into famine.
Just as Tony Rinaudo had his eyes opened by the trees growing all around him, and in his turn opened the eyes of others, we all need to open our eyes and see what is happening in our world. It doesn't have to happen this way. Our received wisdom about what makes for prosperity and a good life is mistaken, just as was the received wisdom of the Nigerian farmers about tree clearing. But the solutions are not in some amazing new tech, or some massive injection of outside resources. They are here, all around us, waiting to spring up if we would just stop chopping them down before they have a chance to grow.
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