Yacouba Sawadogo, a farmer known as “the man who won the desert” in Burkina Faso for revolutionizing farming methods and creating a 75-hectare forest on barren land, died on December 3 in Ouahigouya, a capital of the country’s northern province West African country. . It was 77.
His death, in hospital after a long illness, was confirmed by his son Luqman Sawandogo.
Mr Sawadogo, a thin, taciturn man who never learned to read or write, received a hero’s welcome when he returned home to mainland Burkina Faso in 2018 after winning the Right Livelihood Award in Stockholm, created in 1980 to honor social and environmental activists. A large crowd greeted him at the airport in Ouagadougou, the country’s capital, and he was received by the country’s president.
Years before, his fellow villagers in his arid, windswept country to the north had called him crazy for implementing a simple improvement on an age-old water-saving technique. But Mr Sawadogo had the last laugh: forestry experts said the forest he created, with more than 60 species of trees and shrubs, was unmatched in the Sahel, the semi-desert region that stretches across the upper third of Africa.
The encroachment of the Sahara, aided by decades of indiscriminate logging and now by climate change, with reduced rainfall, is a major threat to an already fragile region. Large tracts of land have been stripped of trees, from the Gulf of Guinea to the desert.
By the end of his life, Mr. Sawadogo was recognized as one of the few who had successfully pushed back. Farmers using his techniques have more than tripled their grain yields in an area where agriculture must depend on sparse rain. Burkina Faso, the 22nd poorest country in the world, has an average life expectancy of less than 63 years.
Chris Reij, a Dutch geographer and senior fellow at the World Resources Institute in Washington, said in a telephone interview that Mr. Sawadogo “single-handedly had more impact on soil and water conservation than all the experts combined.” He added: “He managed to build a forest from nothing, a 30-hectare forest with the greatest biodiversity in the Sahel. In the end, he became a kind of national hero.”
Mr. Sawadogo won the 2020 United Nations Champions of the Earth award. Luc Gnacadja, former head of the UN’s anti-desertification program, said in an interview from neighboring Benin: “He was outstanding. A whole zone that had been deserted was transformed.”
Mr. Gnacadja invited Mr. Sawadogo to be the keynote speaker at a high-level conference in Switzerland. “He explained, with all humility, what he had done,” he said, “and left us a legacy that shows that the degradation of ecosystems is not inevitable.”
Mr. Sawadogo had an almost mystical relationship with the trees he created — the lettuce, the acacia, the gum arabic, the desert date tree — treating them “like people,” his cousin Aruna Sawadogo said in an interview from Burkina Faso. When arsonists, jealous of Mr Sawadogo’s success, burned his forest several times in the 2000s, Aruna Sawadogo said, “he was an old man with a sad face. He remained in the ashes for several days.”
But he always bounced back, telling his son Luqman, one of his 27 children from three wives, “Even if I have little strength left, even for a minute, if there is a tree to plant, I will do it. “
It took years of hardship – drought, famine and shifting political winds in a country where powerful leaders are rotated through coups – for Mr Sawandogo to transform himself from a suspicious outsider to a figure of respect sought by farmers across the Sahel. his advice.
“Some people are doing what they want with our forests,” Mr Sawandogo said in a 2010 film.The man who stopped the desert“, by British producer and director Mark Dodd. “When you are serious and start work that other people don’t appreciate, then you are treated as crazy.”
He recalled: “People wouldn’t even talk to me. They said I was crazy.”
Mr Sawadogo’s sect revolved around transforming the practice of what local farmers called zai – digging small pits to capture precious rainwater. These farmers usually waited until the onset of the rainy season, in early summer, to dig the zai.
But Mr. Sawandogo started much earlier, when the land was bone dry. And dug the pits deeper and deeper. He put manure and stones in their bottoms. He used termites to help break up the earth. The manure contained seeds. When the rain came, the rocks helped hold the water, and the water turned the seeds into seedlings, which it nourished. The soil will remain wet for several weeks after rainfall.
“The results were impressive. the soil improved along with the yield of its crops,” the UN said in announcing its award. “He was able to grow trees in the arid soil.”
Mr. Sawadogo eventually helped the process by planting trees himself. The trees protected the crops from the wind.
“Once I realized how important the trees were, I started working on planting the forest,” he said in the film. Mr Reij of the World Resources Institute said: “To him trees became more important than wheat.”
Yacouba Sawadogo was born on January 1, 1946, in Gourga, a village about 110 miles north of Ouagadougou, to Adama Sawadogo, a farmer, and Fatimata Bilem. When he was very young his parents sent him to a Koranic school in Mali, where, he recalls in the film, the headmaster told him he was destined for great things.
When he returned home as a teenager, he opened a stall selling motorcycle parts at the market in Ouahigouya, the provincial capital. It was successful, enabling him to put money aside. But, he later said in interviews, he was restless and longed to return to earth. The odds against him were the looming drought that ravaged the Sahel from the mid-1970s, when he left the market, to the mid-1980s.
Rainfall decreased by 30 percent. Entire villages were abandoned because farmers could no longer feed their families. “It was a bit of an environmental disaster,” Mr Reij said. It became urgent to conserve the little rainfall and use it productively. Mr. Sawadogo began to experiment.
The improved zai — he also put millet seeds in the kernels — led to a tripling of his grain yield, allowing him to feed his family for three years, he told a interviewer in 2011.
By the 1990s, researchers as well as farmers were coming to study his methods. Niger alone sent 13 farmers. Fame for Mr. Sawandogo and trips abroad followed. He attended a United Nations conference on climate change and testified before congressional staff in Washington.
“He was a bit like the trees he wanted to protect, simple and approachable,” Luc Damiba, a honey producer and film festival director in Burkina Faso, said in an interview.
After the latest fire, at the urging of Burkinabe citizens, the government built a fence around Mr. Sawadogo’s forest, Mr. Reij said.
In addition to his son Luqman, Mr Sawadogo’s survivors include his three wives, Shafiata, Hadar Soo and Raketa, and his other 26 children.
“He managed to find resources to withstand the drought,” Mr Gnacadja said. “That’s called adaptation.”
Herve Taoko contributed to the report from Ouagadougou.