How the UN is Holding Back the Sahara Desert

2 years ago before the work this was a Barren Wasteland nothing had been grown here for 40 years when the UN world food program told the villagers that they were going to bring this land back as part of the Great green wall they said it was impossible but here we are in Africa in the desert at the northern edge of Sagal and life has returned and the stakes couldn't be higher because when the soil washes away and land becomes a desert then people leave they head to the cities and places like this just fall apart

but thanks to the work of the villagers and the world food program using techniques and systems that I'm going to tell you about in this video The Tides have changed and natural wealth is growing back and growing the livelihoods of the people here welcome to senagal I'm here during the rainy season to see the work of the great green wall of Africa [Music] my wife and I we started in darar a city of about 4 million people it's the biggest city in Sagal it is the Western most point of the entire continent of Africa I

met with the world food program there in Dar to discuss our trip so then we drove with the world food program it was about a 7our drive through the Sahel the ecosystem really changed a lot in the southern part the trees were larger dispersed amongst the Millet Fields as we drove North the trees became smaller and smaller this is late in the rainy season this land is as green as it gets right now for the whole year I've never seen this many grazing animals the entire Sahel is like one big free range pasture so we

drove up to the point where it transitions to the Sahara Desert which is the Sagal River we are here at the Sagal river which is the border between Sagal and this side morania on the other when you look from space you can actually see the lateral sand dunes of morania where they hit the senagal river the senagal river is really the Divide between the Sahara and Sahel in many parts of the river so the Sagal River here it serves not only as the border between Sagal and morania and not only as the border between the

Sahel and the Sahara but if this River zone is vegetated it could represent the first line of defense of the great green wall of Africa the great green wall of Africa is a vision the project to plant a barrier of trees across the entire width of the continent of Africa from senagal to jouti and the purpose of this great green wall is to stop stop the southern expansion of the Sahara Desert the Sahara Desert has expanded about 10% in the last 100 years so we have the Sahara Desert then we have the Sahel then we

have the Savannah and then we have the rainforest the design is to actually have a barrier of trees to stop the expansion of the desert Southward so I'm here on the ground at the great green wall to show how we can restore degraded Landscapes we can keep the Sahara at Bay create abundance have people living here and thriving we are here at wfp project site we are in a very degraded land area in the early beginning when we presented the process and the idea the community didn't believe they said no this is not true this

is not feasible we cannot recover this land more than 40 years we are here nothing is growing on this side the process started with the community based participatory Planning by the end of this process it was agreed that one of the major action in the land reclamation or land recovery project this is a sort of school they come to learn how to imp prove learn the people believe and they are convinced and they are also committed you can see at wfp we have planted and rehabilitated some 300,000 hectar of land over the past years and

what you see here is 30 hectars out of those 300,000 this is a contribution to the great green wall because the great green wall is like a patchwork a mosaic of forests that together create this wall that will protect the Sahel from being encroached by the Sahara Desert we are working on degraded land and bringing it back to life and that takes a few stages when we start with a soil like this one that we see right here okay that is crusted that is sunbaked uh that is that cannot support any kind of life because

it is literally hard as cement there's no way seed or any plants can actually take root here we bring it back to life and we bring it back to production so that it can feed people and it can feed the communities and communities can start thriving again wa wait we need to create water harvesting structures that maintain the water on site if we look at the soil the way it is right now the water cannot stay here so it drains and it flows away so these half Moons they are the first step in this Rehabilitation

process in this soil buildup process on this side here we have 7,500 half Moons Each of which has a 4 M diameter this takes one person to dig one half moon per day this site has been dug by a team of 150 people so how does the half moon work the rain basically comes here and we have put the half Moons on contour lines which means the rain when it falls to the ground it flows into this area here which is a little bit lower so that it retains the water and we create this embankment

okay that's a little bit higher up and make sure that the water doesn't overflow okay and it stays here and it feeds these plants so we are mainly using local local species like the Sorghum and the Millet that actually has been domesticated here many thousands of years ago so it actually comes from the Sahel and produce a maximum quantity of biomass as well so they are perfect to rehabilitate the land while feeding the people at the same time this is nothing new we have not invented a technology here the half moon technology is actually an

endogenous technology to the Sahel and has been forgotten over time we have rescued it from the past so the serum that you can see behind us actually grew only with rain water around 10 to 15% of water that will be caught here will enter the ground and will recharge the groundwater tables that way we actually achieve a balance of water so we are not depleting the Water Resources but we're making sure that we keep enough water in the ground for future Generations then we have another system that mainly consists of planting lines we have horiculture

beds where we can plant tomatoes okra and so on here we have trenches where we have planted Moringa we have planted pigeon pea and we have planted also some some okra that has has grown wildly here and the idea here is that we have biomass trenches that will provide biomass us as the system grows in between these trenches we have planting pits where we have planted fruit trees we have guava Citrus this is just a very first step in this pilot we'll also be using other native species that will be planting in the pits that

will drive the Rejuvenation of the soil and the protection of the soil as the system starts growing into abundance and producing food and life for the people here in its mature State this system will look like a forest okay Forest lines that will be producing biomass and fruit and we'll have other lines in between where we'll be producing horiculture vegetables this is exactly the way nature works we came across Copic farming which is a type of conservation agriculture that has been developed in Brazil based on global indigenous knowledge in the whole world many indigenous populations

have a similar way traditionally to do agriculture that is different from conventional Agriculture and which mimics Forest Dynamics in The Next Step we'll be growing trees here so if we look at the vastness of this area here we can plant 10 thousands of trees into these [Music] structures sometime you come in The Villages you don't see nobody you can just see some animals to say okay I think people are here usually every year after the rainy season most of the young people migrate to Dak and other big town in Sagal this is the internal or

the local migration some leave Sagal to go to Spain what they are going to do the agriculture that they leave behind they go to harvest Apple there why they leave the same activity here before they were thinking about how to migrate but they Tau me now they don't think about that with this B Hall we put in place now we are going to work 12 month on vegetable production now these young boys who are very key for the village security for the Village Development now don't need to go to leave just old people in the

village now will contribute to the local Dynamic of the community now they are together they have social [Music] cohesion now this project was really really interesting cuz the world food program wanted to demonstrate how you could take the most devastated areas and turn them back into resilient food producing locations and they specifically plac their project on a very degraded landscape that had been taken down to Bare compacted Earth this is actually the front line of the great green wall of Africa the Sagal River at least for this region that's where you're going to have your

real true dividing line between the Sahara and the Sahel so the work of the wfp is solving this problem directly here on the ground with the great green wall of Africa