Case Study: The Paradox Of A Green Sahel

The Sahel zone is a desert area in Africa at the southern boundary of the Sahara desert that includes parts of 11 nations (Godoy). In the African drylands, there is a huge problem of land degradation, called desertification. This comes from poor care of the land, such as overfarming or overgrazing, or global warming such as climate change and extreme weather. This desertification affects the 500 million inhabitants of the Sahel region, with consequences such as poor agriculture, food shortage and bad economy and lifestyle (Schleeter).

To solve this problem of desertification, the idea of planting trees in the Sahel was originally voiced in the 1980’s, and then again 2005. The idea is to plant a 15 km wide and up to 8,000 km long wall of trees

Firstly, the things that were done badly regarding what lead up to the GGW initiative were mainly poor planning and policies regarding land and population management. The people in the Sahel region are facing a 3% increase in population growth every year while the food production is only growing by 2% each year (Stewart). This means that for every year the population gets closer to its carrying capacity which could lead to starvation when the food shortage arrives. Along with the poor policies of sustainable land management the amount of cultivated land will decrease even further due to land degradation. So what can be learnt from this is that the government and the people need initiatives and knowledge in order to optimize food production and decrease land degradation, but that sustainable solutions are

It is important to know how to treat the environment before changing it since the damage left by us can be irreparable. In 2014, The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations actually started a program called Action Against Desertification which focuses on aiding governments, and communities in Africa, within sustainable management and restoring the dryland forests. They also aim to educate farmers by teaching them the affects and causes of desertification and how to avoid it. This is a great example of something similar the Niger’s government could have done in the 1980’s before the problems