Farmer-managed restoration of agroforestry parklands in Niger
Land rehabilitation enables sustainable intensification of agriculture and more resilient food production systems. Despite severe development challenges, Niger is the site of successful, farmer-managed efforts to counteract the global trend in land degradation that was supported by policy change. The vast majority of Niger’s land is located in the Sahara. Following a series of severe droughts during the 1970s, it seemed as if the harmattan would blow drought-stricken Niger from the map. In 1993, an enabling policy change in government regulations transferred the ownership of trees from the state to farmers. Even before the policy was enacted, farmers had begun restoring agroforestry parklands on the heavily populated, agricultural plains of south-central Niger. By 2005, the sparse tree cover of the 1970s was replaced by young and fastgrowing parklands, with a high density of trees, often in the inner fields around a village. Village sizes continued to swell, with fallow continuing to disappear. Yet, comparing 2005 to 2013, high resolution imagery in 2013 showed almost no change in most sample plots, increasing tree density on nearly a quarter of them, and decreasing density in less than 2%. In 2017, an estimated 7 million ha are affected by the process of farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR) – a scale and longevity that attests to the economic viability of the approach.