Soil-Saving Farming Takes Root in Tropics
10/26/99
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Title: Soil-Saving Farming Takes Root in Tropics
Source: Reuters
Status: Copyright 1999, contact source for permission to reprint
Date: October 26, 1999
Byline: Charles Abbott
WASHINGTON - Income-boosting, soil-saving farming techniques could
take root in tropical hillsides - home to some 200 million
impoverished people - under a program that melds local knowledge with
international research, scientists said.
The hillsides, covering 9 percent of the world's land mass, contain
20 percent of its fresh water but lose 10,000 square miles (25,898 sq
km) to deforestation and 13 billion tonnes of topsoil to erosion each
year. Forty percent of the areas' 525 million inhabitants live in
poverty.
In a report released on Sunday, the International Centre for Tropical
Agriculture (CIAT) described a promising test project to conserve
soil and water at the same time local farmers earn more money.
"When poor people can't make a decent living, that poverty becomes a
crucible for violence," Jacqueline Ashby, research director at CIAT
and chief author of the report, said in an interview on Friday. It
also can push people off the land and into shantytowns outside
cities.
Soil erosion or water degradation on the hillsides can affect people
for hundreds of miles (kilometers) downstream, she said. "It's a
chain effect on the ecology."
The report said 60 percent of the hillside area in the Central
American and the Andean zone showed signs of serious soil erosion.
Africa holds 40 percent of the tropical hillsides, Asia and Latin
America about 30 percent each.
CIAT, based in Cali, Colombia, began work in 1993 in the Cabuyal
watershed of Colombia on a programme that utilizes the higher-
yielding plants developed by agricultural researchers with the
knowledge and manpower of local farmers and communities, and
computer-based geographic information systems that simplify the tasks
of monitoring use of farmland and potential alternative courses of
action.
As a first-hand example, the report described how one farmer gained
access to better seeds and expert farming advice through the project.
He put fences around springs on his land, assuring clean water would
flow into aqueducts for downstream households.
In exchange, local coffee growers paid for water tanks for the
farmer's cattle, who used to muddy the streams. The farmer, Pedro
Herrera, planted trees in the buffer zones and harvests a native
fruit, called lulo, from the woods.
Two more locations have been added to the project since 1995, a
watershed of the Tascalapa River in Honduras and a watershed in the
Calico River in Nicaragua.
Partners replicated the approach in three more locations and with
CIAT trained more than 1,000 professionals from community, local
government and nonprofit organisations. They are introducing elements
of the approach into watersheds and municipalities elsewhere in
Central America.
Ashby said "hillsides" projects in Central America and Africa spend
about $1 million a year. "It's amazing how far an initiative like
this can go with very little outside financing," she said.