I see regular promotional articles passing on the initiative called Great Green Wall that should save Africa from desertification and even stop (or at least slow down) the flow of migrants to Europe.
I don't want to waste time explaining the initiative because a small search on the net is enough and you will find hundreds of articles that explain it in detail and exalt it. That the project, as it was conceived, did not have many chances of success, has become evident even to the most ardent supporters. And here since 2012 the initiative has been radically changed, "no longer just new trees planted, but also a richer and more complex plant variety, encouraging the spread of native species and psammophilous, or adaptable to the dry climates of the desert, with the further intervention of the fauna in the sowing. In this way, the soil is helped to recover its ecological memory," https://oggiscienza.it/2019/03/08/great-green-wall-africa/).
The main problem remains, which we have never wanted to see and which we continue to ignore. Apart from the considerations on the importance of climate change in the advancement of the desert, if we remain at a more practicable level and not of dreams, the centrality of man in these interventions remains. To promote the replanting of trees or bushes in arid areas with low population density and without having dealt in any way with the problem of the land rights of the populations concerned, whether sedentary or, more often, nomadic, means to go face to face with an announced failure.
An FAO study in 2007 insisted on the need for "Protecting the rights of land under customary tenure" (http://www.fao.org/3/a-ax353e.pdf) but nothing has been done since then. The local populations, as everyone who has worked there knows, have a very high distrust of their own rulers, a caste of corrupt people who do only their own business and who have never been interested (apart from the case of Thomas Sankara's Burkina) in the real problems of the peasants and farmers.
Men's relationships to natural resources, land and water, are governed by centuries of customary relationships, not necessarily written, which enjoy good credibility in the eyes of the people concerned. They are not fixed relationships, which can evolve over time and with appropriate stimuli, so we do not call them "traditional" because, in many cases, they are much more modern than the systems that we Westerners would like to impose.
The governments of those countries' unwillingness to recognise customary rights must also be understood in the light of the insistence of international investment banks, such as the World Bank, the Monetary Fund and all the major UN agencies, to insist on the backwardness of those agricultural systems and on the need to "modernise" them and certainly not to "recognise" them.
Experiences on the ground (in other African countries) have led us to insist a lot, both within the FAO and with other UN agencies and with the Bank, on the need to rebuild the social pact that had been broken since the local populations and their institutions were never considered as an active part of the "Development" agenda. Beginning to better understand those systems, recognizing ancestral land rights, strengthening local institutions to resolve conflicts and more, those were the paths to take. We did it a bit, with positive results, showing that such an approach, which aimed to put the issue of trust at the heart of the proposal, and thus to restore channels for dialogue and consultation within a vision that wanted to reduce the central issues of the asymmetries of power existing between the poor local populations and those intervening from outside, be it government, UN agencies or development banks, such an approach I was saying, was key to restart the local social, environmental and economic dynamics. In addition to this, such an approach was key to working on the issue of conflicts over natural resources.
The outgoing Director-General of FAO, Ayatollah Grazianhi, did everything in his power to oppose this vision, but in doing so he was helped by many colleagues from the technical units working on these countries, in particular the Department of Forests and the Department of Agricultural Production. Years of attempts to explain to them, perhaps even leading them to talk to the communities, that they needed to attack the heart of the problem and not just the technical periphery, and no results.
They didn't do it because working on issues of land (and water) rights and asymmetries of power, meant risking to go against the top levels of the organization and thus preclude any career opportunities. That's why they developed an impressive rhetorical ability, what we would call "fuffa" in Italian, to turn around problems without ever facing them. Now many of them have retired, so their goal has been achieved. Some of them have become Senior Officers, others Service Chiefs and some even Division Directors. Even higher up, there was a Frenchman who knew these things but never wanted to risk his career, who became Assistant Director-General and, to complete the circle, an American, whom we had met in Mozambique in the roaring years of our work on behalf of community land rights, silenced and absent, came to be FAO number two.
That's why, after almost 30 years of work on these issues, I wanted to leave a written memory, a book where I tell you more calmly about this post. So that we don't forget, and to encourage the new generations to be less afraid and fight the internal enemies of development (provided that this word still makes sense).
The African Great Green Wall, like the Chinese one, will not stop the desertification and even less the arrival of migrants. I can assure you of that.
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