How 200 Million Trees Are Reversing Niger's

This is southern Niger, in the middle of the 1980s. The rains have stopped coming, the crops are dead in the fields, and every year, more of the farmland crumbles into bare desert. People here are starving. Now, jump to today. That same dead land is covered in 200 million trees, spread across 5 million hectares of farms. The change is so big, you can see it from space. For decades, stopping this desert looked impossible, and expensive. Governments and aid agencies spent millions planting trees across the Sahel, and watched almost everyone shrivel back and die. Then, one man brought the whole forest back, and it barely cost a thing. So how do you grow 200 million trees without planting a single one? To pull that off, you first have to understand how the land got this broken in the first place. So, let's start with where Niger actually sits. It's wedged on the southern edge of the Sahara, in a band of dry grassland called the Sahel. Out here, rain only falls a few months a year. The rest of the time, the sky stays empty, and the ground stays hard. So farming here was always hard, but for a long time, people made it work. Then, the 1970s and 1980s hit. The rain started falling, year after year, and the droughts dragged on and on. Crops shriveled in the fields, livestock dropped dead in the dust, and the famine that followed killed people across the whole region. But droughts come and go. What made this one deadly was a problem decades in the making. The land had lost its trees. For generations, Niger's trees had been cut down, and for good reasons at the time. People needed fields, so they cleared the trees to plant millet and sorghum. People needed to cook, and wood was their only fuel, so they cut trees faster than any could grow back. And the goats and cattle finished the job, chewing down whatever green tried to return. Tree roots are what hold soil together, so once the one of those rare hard rains finally came, it ran straight off, dragging even more soil with it. On top of that, with no trees throwing shade and no leaves rotting back into the ground, the sun baked the dirt rock hard, and the soil lost whatever life it had left. So every year, the ground that millet needs to grow got thinner, drier, and deader. And the harvest shrank right along with it. This left Niger as one of the poorest countries on the entire planet. For up to six months out of every year, the food simply ran out, and families just waited on the next harvest. They had a name for it, the hungry season. And the whole thing fed on itself. Worse soil meant worse harvests. Worse harvests meant people clearing even more land to plant more crops, which tore out even more trees. The loop just kept tightening. So people fought back the obvious way, they planted trees. Governments and aid agencies spent years and serious money raising seedlings in nurseries and planting them out across the Sahel to hold the desert back. And it almost always failed. The seedlings dried out in the heat, they got buried in sandstorms, goats ate them, or people pulled them up for firewood. Out of every batch planted, barely a handful made it. And across these dry regions, trees were vanishing something like 300 times faster than anyone could plant new ones. By the early 1980s, one more of those tree planting projects was failing the exact same way, out in the Maradi region of southern Niger. Until the man running it stopped, looked down at the dead ground, and noticed something everyone else had walked right past. His name is Tony Renaudo, an Australian agronomist who showed up in the Maradi region of Niger back in 1981, sent there by a missionary group to fight the spreading desert. And his plan was the same one everyone used, plant trees. So he did, year after year, and watched them die in the dirt, same as everyone else. So one day he's driving out to plant another batch, and he stops the truck. He's staring at the empty land, and he notices these scrubby little bushes poking up through the dirt, all over the place. So he looks closer, and those scrubby things are actually tree shoots, growing straight out of the stumps and roots of trees cut down years before. And those stumps ran deep. Under the bare cracked dirt sits a giant network of tree roots, still alive, each old stump pushing up 10, 20, 30 new stems trying to grow back. There's a whole forest down there, just hiding under the soil. And that flips the entire problem. Renaudo had spent years trucking in seedlings to grow a forest that was already there, alive, under his own feet. All he had to do was protect the shoots already coming up, and let them grow. So that's what he does. He goes stump to stump. Each one, he picks the strongest few shoots and leaves them, then trims off the rest. Then he guards those shoots from the two things that kill them, grazing animals and fire. And fed by roots that have been alive for years, the shoots grow fast. They race up into real trees in a fraction of the time a planted seedling would take. The method is called Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration, FMNR. In 1983, it starts tiny. About 10 farmers in Maradi give it a try, and it might have stayed 10 farmers forever if not for what came next. In 1984, a brutal famine hit Niger. And to keep people fed, a food for work program started paying farmers in grain. The work they were paid to do was FMNR. So, almost overnight, around 70,000 people were out pruning stumps across 12,500 hectares of dead farmland. The method was in tens of thousands of hands at once. And from there, farmer taught farmer. Through the rest of the 1980s and into the 1990s, it kept spreading. One village showing the next. But a cheap trick, passing between villages, is one thing. Whether all that pruning actually added up to something you could measure across millions of acres was a completely different question. It added up for sure. And to understand why, you have to look at the one tree the farmers protected above all the others. It's called Phyderbia albida, the gout tree. And it pulls off two tricks almost no other tree can. First, it's a legume. The same family as beans and peas. And like those, it pulls nitrogen straight out of the air and feeds it down into the soil through its roots. And nitrogen is the exact thing crops need to grow. So every gout tree standing in a field is quietly fertilizing the ground around it for free. Second, it runs its seasons backwards. Most trees grow their leaves in the wet season and drop them in the dry. The gout does the opposite. When the rains come and the millet starts growing, the gout drops all its leaves. So the crop below soaks up full sun. And those fallen leaves rot down into the soil right as the millet needs feeding. Then in the dry season, when the fields are bare anyway, it leafs back out and feeds the goats. So what happens to a millet field with gout trees scattered through it? The yields climb up by up to 150 percent. And the land that used to hold about four trees a hectare was suddenly holding 40 or more. But all of this was happening quietly, one farm at a time, with nobody adding it up. Until 2004. That year, a Dutch geographer named Chris Reijs from the World Resources Institute drove out into the Marathi countryside. He'd been there before in 1988 when the place was bare and desolate, written off as good as dead. Now there were young trees everywhere he turned. The scale of it stopped him cold. So he brought in Gray Tappan, a geographer at the U.S. Geological Survey. And they pulled satellite photos of the region going back to the 1970s and laid them against the new ones. So they compared the pictures, and across Marathi and Zinder regions, around 5 million hectares had gone from bare dirt to tree-covered farmland. Roughly 200 million trees. About half of all of the farmland in Niger. A change so big you could see it from orbit. The bare ground from those 1970s photos was gone. So a knife and some pruning had quietly grown back a forest the size of a small country. But it had spread one farm at a time. For it to cover half a nation, one more thing had to give. And that thing was the law. The method worked, and it spread among the farmers who saw it with their own eyes. But it kept running into the same wall. Because, by law, every tree on a farmer's land belonged to the government. A forester could walk into your field and fine you for your own tree, or cut it down. So across most of the country, farmers played it safe. They cleared the regrowth and planted their millet the way they always had. And the green stayed stuck in scattered patches. Then in 1993, Niger rewrote the rule. Trees on a farmer's land now belonged to the farmer, and suddenly protecting one paid. The wood was his to sell. The fodder was his. The fruit was his. So every farmer in the country finally had a reason to walk his fields looking for stumps to save. And it went national. One farmer showed his neighbor, the neighbor showed the next village, and the green spread out across the country at something like 250,000 hectares a year. So what did all those trees add up to? An extra 500,000 tons of cereals every single year. That's enough food to feed two and a half million people. And in village after village, the hungry season shrank from six months down to one. And the trees paid in more than grain. A farmer with gau and other trees on his land now had firewood to cook with and sell. He had pods and leaves to fatten his goats. He had fruit to eat and carry to market. The same plot of dirt that once grew one thin crop was now throwing off three or four different things to live on. And the land itself got tougher. Roots held the soil down so the wind couldn't strip it. The shade and the fallen leaves locked in moisture into the ground. So when a dry year rolled in, the kind that used to wipe a harvest out completely, these fields held on and still produced. What started with one man and ten farmers in Maradi had spread clear across Niger. And people far outside the country were starting to notice. Chris Rage, the man who first measured it, called it probably the largest positive environmental transformation in the Sahel, and perhaps all of Africa. And the idea spread far past Niger. The same method now runs in more than 18 countries. It's built into the Great Green Wall, Africa's plan to hold back the Sahara across the whole continent. And in 2018, Tony Renaudot, the man whose seedlings kept dying back in 1981, was given the Right Livelihood Award for it. So today, across southern Niger, gout trees stand over the millet. The soil stays put. The harvests come in. And underground in fields all over the Sahel, those old roots are still sending up fresh shoots. Waiting for a farmer to walk by. Pick the strongest and let it grow. That's it for this one. Drop a like and I'll catch you in the next.