Reforestation Dreams

Aly standing over young moringa and jatropha saplings.



Oumarou chopping off neem branches to construct a hangar.



Maurice, Julbert, and Oumarou in the tree nursery.



The future of Burkina Faso depends on trees. They provide food, fuel, construction material, medicine, shade, soil preservation, and a host of other services. They are also disappearing at an alarming rate. Deforestation is an enormous problem country wide. Some 90 percent or more of families rely on wood alone for cooking fuel, and as the population continues to grow the harvest rate is nowhere close to sustainable. Without tree roots to aerate and anchor the soil in place, erosion from high winds and heavy seasonal rainfalls carries away what little topsoil there is, making it more and more difficult for anything at all to grow, including food crops. The prospect of the vast, barren Sahara desert, looming across the borders of Mali and Niger, extending its reach into Burkina is an ever growing possibility.

I’ve participated in a number of reforestation projects at the village level, helping to plant thousands of trees over many hectares of land. What should feel satisfying, however, is instead more like trying to sprint up a down escalator with cinder blocks attached to my feet, considering the number of donkey carts laden with wood that pass along the road to Ouahigouya every day for consumption by city dwellers. People are generally aware of the problems of deforestation, but they need to cook every day, and planting and caring for trees is a lot of work, so the problem continues to worsen without respite. Every little effort does help, however, and in that spirit I describe some of the trees in my courtyard that illustrate the challenges and hopes they hold for the country.

The largest tree in my yard, its wide crown giving some much needed protection from the midday sun, is a neem tree. Though not native to Burkina, the neem is by far the most commonly planted tree as part of reforestation efforts. It has a number of advantages which make it suitable for the climate and terrain: It grows remarkably quickly, can live in sandy, rocky, infertile soils, doesn’t require a lot of water, and is resistant to insect attacks. If you water it and protect it from goats for the first year, you will have a reliable producer of wood and shade for the rest of your life. The branches of a mature neem continue growing quickly enough that you can hack off a large percentage of them to use for fuel and construction, only to see them replace themselves within a year. The leaves, as well, are useful, as an organic pesticide when mixed with water. About four out of every five trees in my village are neems, as a combination of deforestation and increasing temperatures has decimated the native species, and the neem has proven itself the most durable replacement candidate to survive the harsh conditions of Northern Burkina.

Growing along the east wall is a young papaya tree. Though only a few months old, it is already three feet tall with a thick trunk. The papaya grows in the curious manner of sprouting new leaves out of the very top of the trunk. The infrastructure of the leaf stems becomes part of the trunk, and in that manner the tree grows taller, while the older leaves wither and fall off, making for an ever ascending crown with no branches below. The papaya bears fruit in under a year, and only lives for a few years total. For those with the motivation to water it regularly the fruit is a decent means to make some pocket change.

Next to the papaya is a mango seedling, which despite being planted before the papaya, is barely six inches tall. Mango trees grow as slowly as papayas do quickly, taking between five and ten years to bear fruit. However, what the mango lacks in speed it makes up for in productivity: A healthy tree will grow huge, live for generations, and produce hundreds or even thousands of fruits each year. From March through July, the markets stalls are piled high with mangoes harvested by those who had the foresight to plant the trees years or decades in advance.

After the mango comes another useful tree, the moringa. Named “Arzentiiga” or tree of paradise in Moore, it has a staggering variety of uses, from roots that act as a mild stimulant, to seeds that purify water and produce an oil useful in soap making, to flowers that have abortive properties. Every part of the tree is edible, but by far the most important are the leaves, which are nature’s answer to the multi-vitamin pill. They can be eaten straight off the tree, or ground into a powder for addition to nearly any meal. The effects of malnourished children are easily visible to the naked eye, from slow growth rates to bloated bellies to discolored hair. Many families do not have access to or can not regularly afford high vitamin fruits and vegetables such as carrots and oranges, but the Moringa is a more than viable backup: Gram for gram, the leaves contain seven times the vitamin C of oranges, four times the calcium of milk, four times the vitamin A of carrots, three times the potassium as bananas, and two times the protein of milk. Tellingly, though, I am on my third Moringa tree, after two failures. Despite a strong ability to grow in Burkina’s climatic conditions and soils, the Moringa is hampered by a susceptibility to termites, which eat out the trunks from the inside. The matter calls for a more faithful application of the neem leaf pesticide.

Jatropha curcas, the final tree growing in my courtyard, is also the one with the most potential. It grows quickly and intertwines its trunks amongst itself, and has long been used sporadically as a living fence. The seeds are toxic to humans and animals alike, hence its name in Moore, “Wabe n Bangba”- if you eat me, you will know me. Oil from the seeds in tiny qualities has been used traditionally as a laxative, or, more curiously, in soap making. Now, however, a much more exciting use for the oil is being investigated: bio-fuel. With no alteration, the oil is flammable and can be used in certain kinds of diesel motors.

The jatropha tree seems ideally suited for a source of bio-fuel for a number of reasons. It bears seeds after only two or three years, and continues to do so for another fifty. It does not require much energy input in the form of fertilizers, nor does it require much to convert to fuel, a problem that plagues the efficiency of other bio-fuel efforts such as corn based ethanol. In another advantage to corn based fuel, jatropha is not a food crop that could drive up prices in supermarkets. It grows in such poor soil, marginal for other kinds of farming, that it doesn’t even need to replace food production in the areas it is grown. And finally, the tree is supposedly inedible to animals, making unnecessary the relatively huge expense of metal fencing that hampers other reforestation projects. Large scale plantation projects are already underway in the Philippines, India, Tanzania, Mali, and other countries.

Challenges remain, of course, in how to efficiently harvest and press the seeds, how to provide the right type of motor, or modify the fuel to work with other diesel motors, how to manage irrigation- while the tree can live nearly a year without rain, seed productions is much more abundant with regular watering. And, perhaps most disturbing, nobody told the goats of Zogore that they aren’t supposed to eat the tree, and they have been defying conventional wisdom and wrecking havoc with our nascent plantation.

The Jatropha trees in my yard are just beginning to sprout. Like the Jatropha fuel industry, it is yet unknown whether they will succeed or fail, whether they will succumb to the challenges facing them, or flourish and fulfill their promise. The path ahead is unclear, but the mere prospect of a fuel that can be locally produced and used, in a part of the world with so few other commodities to offer, is enough to inspire some hope and confidence for the future.