Ecosystem Services-Based Farming in Ethiopia Increases Crop Yields & Empowers Women
Building the Green Economy, Food Security: Africa, Quipu Economic Forum, Zero-combustion paradigm ::
FEATURE FROM SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT UPDATE, ISSUE 6, VOLUME 7, 2007
Fredrik Moberg/Jakob Lundberg, Albaeco :: The Tigray Project in northern Ethiopia sounds too good to be true. It is said to demonstrate how sustainable agriculture can lead to increased crop yields, raised water tables, improved soil fertility, increased incomes and empowering of women. The government has now adopted the project’s approach for combating land degradation and poverty in the whole country. SDU went there to check out if the project is as good as rumour has it.
Dr. Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher, “The godfather of the Tigray Project” Photo: J. Lundberg
Tigray, with the state capital Mekelle town, is the Northernmost of Ethiopia’s federal states. Here something unique is said to have taken place, a project called The Tigray Project — an experiment in sustainable development and ecological land management.
It all started when some people in the region started to ask the question whether industrial agriculture could continue feeding the world for the coming 10,000 years and more.
This question emerged from a growing realisation that the green revolution might not have been so green after all. A large proportion of the world’s agricultural landscapes has become steadily degraded through the pressure of intensive, pesticide- and chemical fertiliser based monocultures that produce agricultural commodities and industrial livestock for global markets.
On the other hand, the question of whether organic agriculture can produce as much food as industrial agriculture is also legitimate. Visionary environmentalist Dr. Tewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher, “the godfather of the Tigray Project”, says it can:
— Organic farming, I am sure, will feed the world. I am also sure that unless organic farming re-expands, the human component of the world will eventually shrink.
Interestingly, the Tigray project has taken place in the place where a “biblical famine” occurred only a generation ago. This is one of the poorest regions of the country with depressing figures for child mortality, education, access to healthcare and life expectancy. In the midst of all this a group of people in 1995, lead by Dr. Tewolde, started to design the unique project in order to improve the productivity of the land and rehabilitate the environments of poor farmers in marginal areas. For his work to promote sustainable agriculture, Dr. Tewolde has been awarded many prestigious prizes, like the United Nations’ Champion of the Earth Award and the Right Livelihood Award.
Eight positive outcomes reported from the Tigray Project
- Increased yields and productivity of crops
- Decreased vulnerability to droughts/pests
- Decreased dependence on fossil fuel input
- Raised water tables
- Improved soil fertility
- Rehabilitation of degraded land
- Increased incomes
- Empowerment of women
Promising for poor farmers
Today the project is run by the Institute for Sustainable Development (ISD), the Bureau of Agriculture and Natural Resources (BoANR), the Mekelle University, the local communities and the local administration. As Tewolde himself expresses it, the project’s intention is to “bolster rather than shunt the natural cycles that improve the functioning of the ecosystem as a whole, including those parts of it that are not cultivated”.
This is because wild species in and around fields provide ecosystem services like pollination of crops, control of pests and cycling of water and nutrients.
When people ask Tewolde if this can really be done, he simply answers: “Previous farming communities have been doing it for thousands of years. With our increased knowledge, we should do better than they had done”.
The poor farmers in the project have obtained very promising results by applying a number of sustainable farming techniques, including composting, crop diversification and rainwater harvesting. Among the positive outcomes are increased yields, raised water tables and empowerment of women (see box).
These management changes would not have been possible without reviving the local community organisation, says Sue Edwards, the current Director of the ISD in the capital city Addis Ababa:
Mama Yuannisu with her fruit garden is one of the women who have benefited from the Project. Photo: J. Lundberg
— Removing small-holder farmers from the production system is not the way to go. If you are going to go organical small-holders are much more sophisticated than the large-scale systems.
Sue Edwards is a taxonomic botanist, teacher and science editor by profession, and one of the key stewards of the project today.
She often emphasises another key aspect to understand the success of the Tigray project: the role of women. The region has an unproportionally large number of women-headed families as a consequence of the many years of civil war. As women are traditionally not allowed to plough their own fields and have to wait for a male neighbour or relative to handle the plough oxen they often suffer from delayed sowing and shorter growing periods. The project has therefore worked to empower women and has in particular encouraged them to raise seedlings of long season crops (finger millet, sorghum, maize) to be planted out when the rains start, rather than sowing seeds in the field that require a longer growing season. This is also beneficial from another perspective: to meet the challenge of a steadily more unpredictable rainy season due to climate change.
Use of compost key aspect
The use of compost is, however, by many seen as the most crucial aspect behind the success of the project. The yields from compost have been shown to be comparable or higher than those from chemical fertilizers. The ISD staff have identified a number of other positive effects of using compost, including: increased biodiversity; reduced weed loads; decreased vulnerability to droughts; increased resistance to pest and lower costs for farmers than buying chemical fertilizers. Altogether, the Tigray Project clearly shows that organic farming can indeed give better yields than chemically based farming, even in a degraded mountainous environment.
More at:
http://www.twnside.org.sg/title/end/ed04.htm
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/TTP.php
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