Fighting hunger one tree at a time

For 17 years, the Sweden-based non-profit Eden Foundation has been working with hundreds of farmers in one of Niger’s most arid zones to disprove the reigning logic that the desert is a tough place to nurture plant- and human- life through its research and free seed distribution. Coordinator Josef Garvi told IRIN nature has abundant answers to Niger’s perennial food insecurity problems, but “people are not looking close enough. They look for quick answers, handouts from international aid agencies, big expensive hard-to-maintain irrigation projects, or programmes that help politicians look good, but do little to help farmers.” On a budget of about US$100,000 a year, the 13-person Zinder-based team in eastern Niger, about 900 km east of the capital Niamey, travels a few times a week to its testing station more than 100 kilometres away to check on plots of plants, divided by varieties, and years planted. They have been monitoring these trees in a two-decade-long desert planting experiment.

http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=80601