THURSDAY, 16 FEBRUARY, 2012
Yacouba Sawadogo
THE MAN WHO
STOPPED THE DESERT
The Man Who Stopped the Desert is a full HD, one hour feature documentary telling the story of Yacouba Sawadogo, an illiterate African peasant farmer who has transformed the lives of thousands of people across the Sahel.Soil is essential to life on earth. But much of the world's soil has become degraded and useless. As the global demand for food grows, millions of pounds and the latest technological advances have been invested in attempts to improve soil quality. Leading scientists and agriculturalists from around the world strive against growing world hunger to find the means to bring exhausted soils back into production, but it seems that a peasant farmer from one of the poorest countries on earth has finally achieved what these experts dreamt of; halting the desert.During the 1970's and early 80's this vast region was hit with drought after drought. Families abandoned their villages in search of food and water, but Yacouba Sawadogo remained and pioneered a technique that battled the approaching desert.This is not simply an agricultural story. Yacouba Sawadogo's twenty year struggle is pure drama. It is about one man's conviction that now has the potential to benefit many thousands living in the Sahel region of Africa .Through cinematic reconstruction, Yacouba narrates his own back-story; how as a small child he was sent away to a Koranic school in Mali where he endured an endless regime of physical labour and the arduous task of memorising the Koran.Then, as a young man he fights the accepted wisdom of the traditional land chiefs who are opposed to his new farming techniques. Opposition turns to anger when jealous neighbours burn down Yacouba's newly planted forest and millet fields.But Yacouba is undaunted. He perfects his technique, and today his name is synonymous with reversing the process of desertification. So much so that in November 2009 he was invited to Washington DC to share his story with policy-makers on Capitol Hill.It is an incredible climax to a gripping and timely story.In late 2009 the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation declared small farmers (like Yacouba) as key to helping alleviate famine and poverty amongst the world's poorest, launching a multi-million dollar research and investment programme into local solutions for Africa.
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The Man Who
Stopped the Desert
- How One Man
Saved the Soil (Video)
Now available on DVD and Blu-ray from:
From a harsh, uncompromising land comes a story of hope...
www.1080films.co.uk/yacoubamovie
Yacouba Sawadogo, a peasant farmer from Africa has succeeded where international agencies failed. Over the last twenty years he has successfully battled against nature, and man, to become a pioneer in the fight against desertification. But Yacouba's struggle is not simply an agricultural story, it is pure drama. It is about one man's conviction that now has the potential to benefit many thousands living in the Sahel region of Africa. "Yacouba's story is both incredibly timely and important given the current crisis in many parts of the world with desertification. It is also rare to find a conservation story with such an upbeat and inspirational ending".
National Geographic Channels, International The Man Who Stopped the Desert is a beautifully filmed, emotional roller coaster that will leave you moved and inspired.
DVDs and Blu-ray versions are available by visiting:
www.1080films.co.uk/Yacoubamovie
Click on SHOP Une version française de L'Homme Qui Arrêta Le Désert est actuellement disponible en DVD. Il s'agit de la version intégrale du film qui n'a pas encore passé à la télévision. Veuillez visiter
http://www.1080films.co.uk/Yacoubamovie/shop-fr.htm US and Canadian educational institutions can purchase DVDs here:
http://www.videoproject.com/manwhostde.html
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Regreening Africa
November 19, 2009
PETER O. ZIERLEIN
The sun is setting on another scorching hot day in the western African nation of Burkina Faso. But here on the farm of Yacouba Sawadogo, the air is noticeably cooler. A hatchet slung over his shoulder, the gray-bearded farmer strides through his woods and fields with the easy grace of a much younger man. "Climate change is a subject I feel I have something to say about," he says in his tribal language, Moré, which he delivers in a deep, unhurried rumble. Though he cannot read or write, Sawadogo is a pioneer of a tree-based approach to farming that has transformed the western Sahel in recent years, while providing one of the most hopeful examples on earth of how even very poor people can adapt to the ravages of climate change.
Wearing a brown cotton robe and white skullcap, Sawadogo sits beneath acacia and zizyphus trees that shade a pen holding about twenty guinea fowl. Two cows doze at his feet; bleats of goats float through the still evening air. His farm is large by local standards--fifty acres--and much of it has been in his family for generations. The rest of his family abandoned it after the terrible drought of 1972-84, when a 20 percent decline in average annual rainfall slashed food production throughout the Sahel, turned vast stretches of savanna into desert and caused hundreds of thousands of deaths from hunger.
For Sawadogo, leaving the farm was unthinkable. "My father is buried here," he says simply. In his mind, the droughts of the 1980s marked the beginning of climate change, a term most people here do not recognize. Sawadogo, however, says he has been adapting to a hotter, drier climate for the past twenty years.
"In the drought years, people found themselves in such a terrible situation they had to think in new ways," says Sawadogo, who prides himself on being an innovator. In this case, he revived a technique local farmers had used for centuries, but he adapted it to the new climate conditions he faced. It had long been the practice among Sahelian farmers to dig zai--shallow pits--that concentrate scarce rainfall onto the roots of crops. Sawadogo increased the size of his zai to capture more rainfall. But his most important innovation, he says, was to add manure to the zai during the dry season, a practice his peers derided as wasteful.
Sawadogo's experiments worked: by concentrating water and fertility in pits, he increased crop yields. But the most significant result was one he hadn't anticipated: tiny trees began to sprout amid his rows of millet and sorghum, thanks to seeds contained in the manure. As one growing season followed another, it became apparent that the trees--now a few feet high--were further increasing crop yields while also restoring soil fertility. "Since I began this technique of rehabilitating degraded land, my family has enjoyed food security in good years and bad," Sawadogo says.
Sawadogo's struggle may seem small, but it is part of the most important test humanity now faces. No matter what happens at Copenhagen or beyond, the world is locked in to decades of temperature rise and the associated climate impacts: deeper droughts, fiercer floods, more pests. How populations in the global South adapt to these changes will help decide whether millions of people live or die.
The tree-based farming that Sawadogo and hundreds of thousands of other poor farmers in the Sahel have adopted could help millions of their counterparts around the world cope with climate change. Already these practices have spread across vast portions of Burkina Faso and neighboring Niger and Mali, turning millions of acres of what had become semi-desert in the 1980s into more productive land. The transformation is so pervasive that the new greenery is visible from outer space via satellite pictures. With climate change, much more of the planet's land will be hot and arid like the Sahel. It only makes sense, then, to learn from the quiet green miracle unfolding there.
"This is probably the largest positive environmental transformation in the Sahel and perhaps in all of Africa," says Chris Reij, a Dutch geographer who has worked in the region for thirty years. Technically, these methods are known as "agro-forestry" or "farmer managed natural regeneration" (FMNR). Scientific studies confirm what Sawadogo already knows: mixing trees and food crops brings a range of significant benefits. The trees shade crops from overwhelming heat, act as windbreaks that protect young crops and help the soil retain moisture. When their leaves fall to the ground, they act as mulch, boosting soil fertility and providing fodder for livestock. In emergencies, people can even eat the leaves to avoid starvation. "In the past, farmers sometimes had to sow their fields four or five times because winds would blow the seeds away," says Reij, who advocates for FMNR with the zeal of a missionary. "With trees to buffer the wind and anchor the soil, farmers need sow only once."
Equally important, the zai and other water-harvesting techniques have helped recharge underground water tables. "In the 1980s water tables were falling by an average of one meter a year," Reij says. "Since FMNR and the water-harvesting techniques began to take hold, water tables have risen by five meters, despite a growing population." In some areas, the water table has risen by as much as seventeen meters. Some analysts have credited increased rainfall beginning in 1994. Reij says that can't explain it: "The water tables began rising well before that. The effect is felt within one or two years' time." Studies have documented the same replenishing effects in Niger.
Over time, Sawadogo grew more and more enamored of trees; now his land looks less like a farm than a forest, albeit one made up of trees that, to my California eyes, often seem rather thin. "In the beginning I mixed trees and crops," he says. "But later I came to prefer trees, because they provide other benefits." Trees can be harvested--their branches pruned and sold--and then they grow back, and their benefits for the soil make it easier for additional trees to grow. "The more trees you have, the more you get," Sawadogo explains.
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19 Oct 2011
"The Man Who
Stopped the Desert''
An individual in Burkina Faso has given a real meaning to the expression 'one person can make a difference.'
He's not a politician or a rich businessman but an illiterate peasant.
Meet Yacouba Sawadogo, a man who has transformed the lives of thousands of people across the Sahel region by stopping the expansion of the desert.
Sawadogo's work inspired Mark Dodd, a British filmmaker to produce a documentary entitled, "The Man Who Stopped the Desert".
Jerome Longue of UN Radio met with Mr. Dodd during this week's UN conference on combating desertification in Changwon, South Korea, to hear the story of this remarkable peasant from Burkina Faso.
>via: http://www.unmultimedia.org/radio/english/2011/10/the-man-who-stopped-the-des...
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In Depth Interview with
Multi-Award-Winnng Director
Mark Dodd
Mark Dodd is an award winning photographer-filmmaker who has worked world-wide for 20 years with the BBC. Visit his website at www.1080films.co.uk to view this and other projects
AH:What is the film “The Man Who Stopped the Dessert” about?
MD:The film is a documentary about Yacouba Sawadogo. He’s an illiterate African peasant farmer from Burkina Faso which is in kind of in, if you imagine Africa, it’s west in the center, just below the part of the Africa called the Sahel which is a big band of arid land below the Sahara Desert, which stretches to the west all the way over to the East. Burkina Faso is kind of on the left hand side in the west. It’s a landlocked country, and it’s one of the poorest countries on the planet.
And the stories is about, well it’s about his life story really. It wasn’t intended as a film about conservation. I was attracted to Yacouba’s story because of who he is, and what he’s achieved, and his humble beginnings. And that was really important to me in the film to show the story through his own voice. So if you see the film, there’s not much narration, and it’s really about Yacouba telling us about what he’s achieved. And what he’s achieved is amazing. He’s – over 20 years, he’s turned vast areas of dry, bone rock hard soil into fertile land, and he grows crops in it now, and the crops are feeding thousands of families. His techniques have been exported, and they’re feeding thousands of families. He’s grown a forest there from scratch. Certainly it’s got a large forest. I think it’s 20 acres or, or 20 hectares, I’m not sure what that is in acres. But it’s – he’s an amazing chap. Yeah, and that’s the story of the film.
Yacouba Sawadogo
AH:How did you come to learn about the work of Yacouba?
MD:That was pure chance. I had a friend, an English friend who happened to be living in Burkina Faso in 2007. I just went over there to visit him just to see what he was up to, and not a lot to do in that part of the world, and he suggested one day we go and visit this interesting farmer as he called him. So we went town to Yacouba’s land, and my friend actually speaks French. Yacouba doesn’t speak French; he speaks his indigenous language, which is Mòoré. So we had to bring with us someone who could speak Mòoré and French, and then actually translate it from French to English; it was quite a tortuous task. I didn’t know to expect, well I wasn’t expecting anything.
We turned up, Yacouba wasn’t around, so we kind of wait under the shade of a tree. And then after about a half an hour or so, we hear the sound of this moped coming through the bush. He must have been in his 60′s at the time, this gentleman arrived in a kind of long brand smock with a pick ax over his shoulder and got off, and that was Yacouba Sawadogo. He showed me around his land, around the forest, around the fields. And I thought, this guy’s done some impressive things. So we all sat down and interviewed him formally, and that took about, over an hour or two. And that – by the end of the interview, I thought this story has to be told. And at that point I decided I wanted to make a film about Yacouba and his life. I had no idea how I was going to do. But at the time, I was a BBC staff cameraman, so I thought I’ll take this story home and offer it to BBC to be made into a film.
Team with PM
AH:What exactly is the Sahel and what are some of the ways his work has impacted the people living there?
MD:The Sahal is a huge band of land between West Africa, and all the way over to the eastern side. It’s below the desert, below the Sahara desert, it’s beyond the fertile zone. So it’s kind of a semi-arid area. And it’s a very unforgiving part of the world. It’s very dry, and not a lot grows there, and they have extended periods of drought. And through the 1980′s, there was very serious droughts across that part of the world. But at that time, Yacouba was just starting on his kind of investigations into trying to do something into reverse the process of desertification, which was going on long, where you had areas of land which was being cultivated, which was being degraded both by the climate change, and also human intervention, cutting down trees for firewood, that kind of thing.
Once you’ve lost the ability to feed people, and villages start to close down, people leave villages in great numbers. And Yacouba was trying to find a way to stop all this. And what he did was he kind of reinvented an ancient farming technique called the Zai, which is Zed-a-i in the local language. And what that technique was at the time was just kind of scratching small shallow holes in the ground during the rainy season, and planting seeds in the holes. And that was getting limited results, but it wasn’t very effective. What Yacouba did was he resigned the pits; he made them much wider, made them a lot deeper. And he started to add compost in the pits, organic matter, and then he planted the seeds in the Zai pits.
But probably one of the most important things he did was he started preparing the land during the dry season which was actually a bit of a gamble for Yacouba because you weren’t allowed to do that. Local tradition said you’re not allowed to touch the earth in the dry season, and there’s no kind of rational behind it, it’s just that’s how it was done. So by doing this, he caused big problems, he got a lot of people’s backs up, and he suffered for that. People thought he was a mad man doing that kind of thing digging holes in the dry season. But he continued doing it. But he had a lot of opposition from people; the village elders didn’t like what he was doing. And one day when he was off his farm, he went to town into the local city to have a meeting there. And while he was there, some people, we don’t know who it is burnt down his newly planted forest and his crops. So he had a lot of opposition at the time. But he continued doing what he’s done, he’s worked through it, and his techniques have now been communicated through other families in the area, and he’s just had an amazing success with what he’s doing. And of course now since the films been made, he’s on the radar of the, well a lot of the top level. UN Secretary General Bank Ki Moon actually referred to Yacouba Sowadogo in a recent convention as the man who stopped the desert. So he’s kind of up there now. Listen to the Bank Ki Moon Speech at UN Radio here.
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AH:What is Zai and what are some of the challenges Yacouba has faced in getting people to adopt this technique?
MD:I guess what happened was they could see the results he was achieving. What happened was the year, the first year he did this Zai technique, the improved version where the holes were deeper, and with the compost. And the other thing he did was he planted trees amongst the crops as well, which has the effect of slowing down of land erosion when it blows, the trees slow down the wind, the trees also gather dust, and the dust settles underneath the trees. It helps – all these things added together help. He also puts termites in amongst them. Termites, if you have termites, they will actually break down the soil a lot. So that was termite’s help. He does all these little techniques, and they’re all little simple, little quite simple but when added together, they have these really effective results. And the – because it’s simple, the ideas are easily communicated, and that’s another idea to success that you got to be able to have simple ideas so people can just replicate the ideas. But I guess the reason why people, he’s a lot turned was they could see the results he was achieving the year, the first year he did it, it was a bad for rainfall. But even with the low rainfall, he achieved really good crops, and when he went into town to tell people about this, they didn’t believe him. They said, “Its been a drought year, what are you talking about?” So he had to battle the people in town, the kind of agricultural people to come and have a look. Say look – they couldn’t believe what they saw when they arrived there.
AH:He has developed such an incredible technique. I think the beauty behind it is the simplicity in the fact that aside from labor, there are no costs…
MD:That’s right, and this is important. And prior to that, what happened, all foreign agencies would come in, and they’d kind of impose technical solutions to the problems that required plant, and machinery. And machinery requires maintenance, and requires fuel, and it also, these techniques were imposed, they weren’t to build on anything that was indigenous. And the thing about Yacouba’s technique is that it’s a homegrown solution, and the people, the farmers feel ownership of the solution. And once you have ownership of the solution, then you’re kind of halfway there. And of course it’s a simple solution, it doesn’t require lots of skills, obviously there’s a certain amount of training required, and Yacouba does train people. He does, he has people visiting his farm where he trains people in his techniques. And what he’s doing now is he’s going out of his farm to other villages and teaching people in other villages because obviously this certainly can go, and go, and go.
AH:Have policy-makers taken notice of this work?
MD:That’s a hard one to gauge because what policy policymakers have taken note – I think they have now, I think they have. I think the thinking now from policy makers, they learned the lessons of the past, they know that parachuting in ready-made solutions doesn’t really work. And what does work is engaging the local people. Dr Chris Reij, the Dutch scientist is a real baton holder for this kind of process, he’s the Dutch scientist that you saw in the film, and he’s really backing a large movement in that part of the world called the “African Re-Greening Initiative“. And this African Re-Greening Initiative is based on local solutions, what local people have done, and it’s – what the outside aide does now is it really helps the local people with the solutions that they’ve already produced. It just helps them develop those solutions, and communicate them.
Mark Dodd filming Yacouba as a boy
AH:The music was fantastic, can you tell me about the music in your film?
MD:The music was a mixture of – well actually to me the music is absolutely crucial to any production. I wanted the music to feel not like a documentary, I wanted the documentary to feel more like a cinema experience than a documentary which is why its been, I think its been screened so many times in cinema’s. But the brief to the person who wrote the music was I wanted it to feel like a cinema experience. And I kind of, I think he did it, I think he did it.
Children running in village
AH:How has this film changed you personally Mark?
MD:It’s – oh my – how has it changed me personally? I guess its made me more willing to take risks because at the time when I first started the project, I had a safe job at the BBC, I was a staff cameraman, I had a regular income. And in order to make the film, I had to quit my job, and that was a bit scary because that was in 2008. And about a month afterwards, the world collapsed financially. So that was a bit of a worry. But Yacouba, his example is very inspiring not only in obviously what he’s done for the people there, but his whole attitude towards life, and about how he just gets on and does it. So I guess yeah, it’s probably made me a bit more happy to take risks.
AH:Where is the film screening next and what lies ahead?
MD:The next film screening as I understand that there’s two film screenings coming up in Austria. It’s in film festivals – it regularly appears in film festivals all over the world. I get emails all the time from film festivals asking to screen the film, which is fantastic. Normally you have to submit your films, and they’re actually coming to me and saying, “Can we screen it?” And so that’s great. And that’s happening all the time. So the next ones in Austria. But we actually went back – talking about screenings, we went back – I don’t know if you’ve seen the clip on the website. We went back last year to screen the film in Yacouba’s village.
AH: I loved that clip!
MD:Yeah, wasn’t that amazing? To me, it was the highlight of the whole process going back there. I mean, obviously this is my first film as a producer. Prior to that I was just a cameraman, so at the end of the day I would hand over the rush of the tapes and kind of wave goodbye. So this is my first film I’ve kind of written. So obviously, it was a huge amount of emotional attachment to it. And it was such a relief when we screened the film in his village and everyone went mad for it. And it was just such a privilege. Yacouba loved the film, and I think we did his story justice, he seemed to think so.
To learn more and to purchase the film visit: www.1080films.co.uk/yacoubamovie
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