This document discusses the alarming trend of land degradation in Southern Africa and the challenges it poses. It proposes adopting sustainable land use practices like agroforestry, farmer managed natural regeneration, and conservation agriculture to restore degraded land. These approaches integrate trees into agricultural systems, improving soil fertility, microclimate buffering, and food security. The document calls for commitments to scale up these climate-smart agricultural practices across Africa to restore degraded farmland and meet development goals.

1. Transformational Opportunities in
Landscape Regeneration in Southern
Africa: Setting the Stage
Dennis Garrity
Drylands Ambassador, UNCCD
Distinguished Senior Fellow,
World Agroforestry Centre

2. Alarming Trend in Land Degradation in Southern Africa

3. A Perfect Storm of Challenges
•Soil fertility is further declining in many regions.
• Rainfall is becoming more erratic and extreme.
• Temperatures are increasing, intensifying
crop stress.
• Inorganic fertilizers are increasingly expensive
and risky to use.
• Population growth rates remain very high and
farm sizes are rapidly declining.

4. “All but four of the 17 Sustainable Development
Goals are directly linked to the use of the land.
“It will require bold action to turn from the current land
use practices and to restore more degraded land for
our use.
“We need to adopt land use practices that are
sustainable. And we have to restore more of the
degraded land to meet our future growth.”
-- Monique Barbut
UNCCD Executive Secretary

5. “A lot of these agricultural practices are well
known and surprisingly cheap. They include:
– No-Till agriculture,
– EverGreen Agriculture,
– Agroforestry,
– Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration, and
– Holistic Management and many more.
They are underutilized because we have not
mustered the courage to make them competitive
through incentives that stimulate their adoption.”
-- Monique Barbut, UNCCD Executive Secretary

6. The Farming Systems of Africa

7. Malawi Maize Lands
Farmer Managed Natural
Regeneration Expanding
Widely

9. The Parkland Renaissance on Niger farmlands

10. The albida effect
• Microclimate buffering
• Soil fertility improvement

11. Microclimatic buffering:
Crop Canopy Temperature
(CIMMYT, 2013)

12. Aerial view of a parkland dominated by Faidherbia in Niger

13. The 2nd
Africa Drylands Declaration
African Union (August 2014)
«WE RECOMMEND AND PROPOSE that the drylands
development community commit seriously to
achieving the goal of enabling
EVERY farm family and
EVERY village across the drylands of Africa
to be practicing Farmer-Managed Natural
Regeneration by the year 2025."

14. Evergreen agriculture with Faidherbia albida in Zambia.

16. DroughtDroughtFlood
P addition
resumed
Long-term maize yield without fertilizer
in a Gliricidia system
P stopped

17. Impact of fertilizer trees on maize yield
under farmer management
_______________________________________
Plot management Yield (t/ha)
Maize only 1.30
Maize + fertilizer trees 3.05
____________________________________________________________
2011 Survey of farms in six districts (Mzimba,
Lilongwe, Mulanje, Salima, Thyolo and Machinga)

18. Malawi National Agroforestry Food Security
Programme

19. FaidherbiaGliricidia
Maize
stubble
Faidherbia
Gliricidia
Maize
DRY SEASON
WET SEASON
Fertilizer-Fodder-Fuelwood Trees
in Food Crop Production Systems

20. What would be the impact if African farmers
deployed Evergreen Agriculture on a larger scale?
If practiced on: 5 m ha
______________________________________________
Value of nitrogen fertilizers
produced by farmers $ 500 million
Amount of additional maize produced 5-10 m tons
Value of additional maize produced $ 1-1.5 billion
_______________________________________________________________________

21. New COMESA-ICRAF platform
To assist the 19 member countries to
link the scaling-up of fertilizer tree
technologies to their input subsidy
programs.

22. What is Evergreen Agriculture?
A VISION of a more agroecologically
intensive farming that integrates trees
directly into crop and livestock
production systems.

23. Types of Evergreen Agriculture
1. Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR)
on cropland
2. Conservation agriculture with trees (CAWT)
3. Conventional agriculture interplanted with trees

24. 17 Countries are engaged in EverGreen Agriculture
Farmer Managed Natural
Regeneration
Conservation Agriculture with trees
Trees interplanted in conventional
tilled cropland
Farmer Managed Natural
Regeneration +
Trees interplanted in conventional
tilled cropland

25. African Climate Smart Agriculture Alliance
Vision 25by25
25 million farmers practicing CSA by 2025

27. Four African countries have
established their own
restoration targets
Ethiopia has committed 15 million
hectares,
DRC -- 8 million hectares,
Uganda -- 2.5 million hectares, and
Rwanda -- 2 million hectares.

28. Creating Action Plans
1. Achieve the Africa Union Target:
Reach every dryland farm in Southern
Africa with Farmer Managed Natural
Regeneration.
2. With COMESA: Link national input
subsidy programs with the massive
upscaling of fertilizer-fodder-fuelwood
trees supported by ICRAF.

29. Creating Action Plans
(cont’d)
3. With NEPAD: Create national
programs to scale-up Climate Smart
Agriculture practice to reach 25 m farms
by 2025.
4. With the Global Restoration
Initiative: Make national commitments to
the global target of restoring 350 m ha by
2030. Restored farmland, forests, grazing
land.

30. “There is no shortage of productive land.
“Only poor land management and the lack
of political will to stir up land users and
consumers into effective land stewards.
“The proposed SDG are ambitious — as
they should be. They have the seeds to turn
us into better users than any other
generation before us. But only if we are
bold enough to adopt sustainable land
use practices, and to restore degraded
land to meet future growth.”
-- Monique Barbut
UNCCD Executive Secretary