Rice Today, October 23 2017

Conservation agriculture has a vital role to play in sub-Saharan Africa’s food security for a population projected to rise to 2 billion by 2050.

Figure: In West Africa, many farmers lose their crops every year to bushfires that occur in the dry season. (Photo by R.Raman, AfricaRice)

It is the harmattan season when dry, dust-laden winds from the Sahara Desert sweep across West Africa.

“As you can see, we had almost no rainfall here,” said Kouakou Ali, a technical assistant at the Africa Rice Center (AfricaRice), pointing to a landscape of devastation caused by bushfires, near the rice fields in M’bé in Côte d’Ivoire. In 2016, Côte d’Ivoire experienced the worst harmattan in three decades.

Farmers in rainfed drought-prone areas are increasingly vulnerable to agricultural risks from a changing climate. According to environmental experts, climate change threatens to turn vast areas of productive land in Africa into dust bowls, leading to widespread hunger and migration of rural populations on a much bigger scale than the Dust Bowl that devastated North America in the 1930s.

Lessons from the Dust Bowl

Caused by severe drought and unsustainable dryland farming practices, the Dust Bowl taught hard lessons that motivated a fundamental change in the mindset of some agricultural experts to move away from intensive tillage-based agriculture, which was found to accelerate soil erosion in dryland systems, to an approach called “conservation agriculture.”

Conservation agriculture is a set of soil management practices that are based on three principles: (1) maintaining organic matter cover over the soil throughout the year using cover crops and intercrops and/or mulch provided by crop residues, (2) minimizing soil disturbance by tillage and seeding directly into untilled soil, and (3) diversifying crop rotations and associations, including nitrogen-fixing legumes.

See more: http://ricetoday.irri.org/from-dust-bowl-to-rice-bowl/