Let us support our farmers to plant trees
Tree planting also helps reduce on chances of soil erosion. PHOTO/SHABIBAH NAKIRIGYA
What you need to know:
- The irony is that it is the world’s leading food producers --the smallholder farmers---that are the key players in forest and wetland destruction.
Nearly everywhere in Uganda nowadays it is common to see crop gardens in areas officially known to be wetlands. The water is intricately channelled out to create space for farming and human settlement. Yet every year we lose thousands of hectares of forest.
Late last year, Dr Agnes Kalibata the president of Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and the UN special envoy for the Food Systems Summit, wrote: “Land degradation already affects 65 per cent of Africa’s land area, and every year the continent loses about four million hectares of forest.”
The irony is that it is the world’s leading food producers --the smallholder farmers---that are the key players in forest and wetland destruction.
According to Kalibata small scale farmers across the world produce as much as $1.5 trillion worth of food, fuel and timber every year. They struggle hard to make such a big contribution to the economy but attention must be paid to what they do to make that contribution.
They need direction and support, otherwise their methods which involve acts such as wiping out forests and wetlands particularly at the onset of climate change can only lead to self-destruction.
They need more education on what farming practices aggravate climate change and those that mitigate it.
Population explosion is partly responsible for their increased struggle to find space on which to practice agriculture. Hence their invasion of areas traditionally reserved for wild life and other ecosystems.
Others choose to grow crops in wetlands because it is not raining enough in the areas uphill.
The gardens up there are not only fragmented but they are also degraded due to continued cultivation of the same crops on the same plots without sufficient soil nutrition replenishment. They don’t plant any trees to use as firewood.
Our farmers must be supported to realise the importance of forests and wetlands in climate change mitigation or else we could be inviting long droughts and other calamities.
Yet, as Dr Kalibata has warned, climate-related disasters and risks could push more people into extreme poverty many of whom are already struggling.
Mr Michael Ssali is a veteran journalist,
[email protected]
