Yacouba Sawadogo, a farmer often called “the person who beat the desert” in Burkina Faso for revolutionizing agricultural strategies and making a 75-acre forest on barren land, died on Dec. 3 in Ouahigouya, a northern provincial capital in that West African nation. He was 77.
His dying, in a hospital after an extended sickness, was confirmed by his son Loukmane Sawadogo.
Mr. Sawadogo, a lean, taciturn man who by no means discovered to learn or write, obtained a hero’s welcome when he returned house to landlocked Burkina Faso in 2018 after successful the Proper Livelihood award in Stockholm, created in 1980 to honor social and environmental activists. A throng greeted him on the airport in Ouagadougou, the nation’s capital, and he was obtained by the nation’s president on the time.
Years earlier than, fellow villagers in his arid, windswept nation within the north had known as him a madman for implementing a easy enchancment to an age-old water-conservation approach. However Mr. Sawadogo had the final snicker: The forest he created, with greater than 60 species of timber and shrubs, had no equal within the Sahel, the semidesert area stretching throughout Africa’s higher third, forestry consultants stated.
The Sahara’s encroachment, abetted by a long time of indiscriminate tree-cutting and now local weather change, with decreased rainfall, is a serious menace to an already fragile area. Giant swathes of land have been stripped of timber, from the Gulf of Guinea proper as much as the desert.
By the top of his life, Mr. Sawadogo was acknowledged as one of many few who had efficiently pushed again. Farmers utilizing his strategies have greater than tripled their grain yields, in an space the place agriculture should rely upon sparse rain. Burkina Faso, the world’s twenty second poorest nation, has a median life expectancy of beneath 63.
Chris Riej, a Dutch geographer and a senior fellow of the World Sources Institute in Washington, stated of Mr. Sawadogo in a cellphone interview, “He single-handedly has had extra influence on soil and water conservation than all of the consultants mixed.” He added: “He managed to construct a forest out of nothing, a forest of 30 hectares with the biggest biodiversity within the Sahel. On the finish, he grew to become a kind of nationwide hero.”
Mr. Sawadogo gained the United Nations Champions of the Earth award in 2020. Luc Gnacadja, former head of the U.N.’s anti-desertification program, stated in an interview from bordering Benin: “He was distinctive. A complete zone that had been desertified was reworked.”
Mr. Gnacadja invited Mr. Sawadogo to be the keynote speaker for a high-level convention in Switzerland. “He defined, in all humility, what he had finished,” he stated, “and he left us a legacy that reveals that degradation of ecosystems isn’t inevitable.”
Mr. Sawadogo had an virtually mystical relationship to the timber he introduced into being — the marula, the acacia, the gum arabic, the desert date tree — treating them “like people,” his cousin Arouna Sawadogo stated in an interview from Burkina Faso. When arsonists, jealous of Mr. Sawadogo’s success, torched his forest a number of occasions within the 2000s, the cousin stated, Mr. Sawadogo was “an previous man with a tragic face; he stayed within the ashes for a number of days.”
However he at all times bounced again, telling his son Loukmane, one in every of his 27 kids by three wives, “Even when I’ve a bit of little bit of pressure left, even for one minute, if there’s a tree to plant, I’ll do it.”
It took years of hardship — drought, famine and shifting political winds in a rustic the place strongmen rulers alternate by coups d’état — for Mr. Sawadogo to impact his transformation from suspect outsider to determine of respect, wanted by farmers all through the Sahel for his counsel.
“Some folks simply do no matter they need with our forests,” Mr. Sawadogo stated in a 2010 movie about him, “The Man Who Stopped the Desert,” by the British producer and director Mark Dodd. “When you’re critical and begin work that others don’t recognize, then they deal with you as a madman.”
He recalled: “Individuals wouldn’t even communicate to me. They stated I used to be a loopy man.”
Mr. Sawadogo’s heresy revolved round reworking the observe of what native farmers known as zaï — digging small pits to seize valuable rainwater. These farmers usually waited till the beginning of the wet season, initially of summer time, to dig the zaï.
However Mr. Sawadogo started properly earlier than, when the earth was bone-dry. And he dug the pits wider and deeper. He put manure and rocks within the backside of them. He made use of termites to assist break up the land. The manure contained seeds. When the rain got here, the rocks helped retain the water, and the water turned the seeds into seedlings, which he nurtured. The soil would keep moist for a number of weeks after the rainfall.
“The outcomes had been putting; the soil improved alongside together with his crop yield,” the U.N. stated in asserting his award. “He was in a position to develop timber within the arid floor.”
Mr. Sawadogo finally helped the method alongside, planting timber himself. Bushes protected crops from the wind.
“As quickly as I understood how necessary timber had been, I set to work on planting the forest,” he stated within the movie. Mr. Reij, of the World Sources Institute, stated, “For him the timber grew to become extra necessary than the grains.”
Yacouba Sawadogo was born on Jan. 1, 1946, in Gourga, a village about 110 miles north of Ouagadougou, to Adama Sawadogo, a farmer, and Fatimata Bilem. When he was very younger his mother and father despatched him to a Quranic faculty in Mali, the place, he recalled within the movie, the chief of the college instructed him he was destined for excellent issues.
When he returned house as a young person he opened a stall promoting bike components out there in Ouahigouya, the provincial capital. It was profitable, enabling him to place apart cash. However he was stressed and yearned to return to the land, he later instructed interviewers. Stacking the chances towards him was the looming drought that devastated the Sahel from the mid-Seventies, when he left the market, to the mid-Eighties.
Rainfall decreased by 30 %. Complete villages had been deserted as a result of farmers had been not in a position to feed their households. “It was a little bit of an environmental catastrophe,” Mr. Reij stated. It grew to become pressing to preserve what little rainfall there was, and to make use of it productively. Mr. Sawadogo started experimenting.
The improved zaï — he put millet seeds within the pits as properly — led to a tripling of his grain yield, permitting him to feed his household for 3 years, he instructed one interviewer in 2011.
By the Nineties, researchers in addition to farmers had been coming to review his strategies; Niger alone despatched 13 farmers. Fame for Mr. Sawadogo and journeys overseas adopted. He participated in a United Nations COP convention on local weather change and testified earlier than congressional staffers in Washington.
“He was a bit just like the timber he wished to guard, easy and accessible,” Luc Damiba, a honey producer and movie pageant director in Burkina Faso, stated in an interview.
After the final fireplace, on the urging of Burkina residents, the federal government constructed a fence round Mr. Sawadogo’s forest, Mr. Reij stated.
Along with his son Loukmane, Mr. Sawadogo is survived by his three wives, Safiata, Khaddar Su and Raqueta, and his 26 different kids.
“He managed to seek out assets to face as much as drought,” stated Mr. Gnacadja. “That’s known as adaptation.”
Hervé Taoko contributed reporting from Ouagadougou.
