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Yacouba Sawadogo, a farmer generally known as “the person who beat the desert” in Burkina Faso for revolutionizing agricultural strategies and making a 75-acre forest on barren land, died on Dec. 3 in Ouahigouya, a northern provincial capital in that West African nation. He was 77.
His demise, in a hospital after an extended sickness, was confirmed by his son Loukmane Sawadogo.
Mr. Sawadogo, a lean, taciturn man who by no means realized to learn or write, obtained a hero’s welcome when he returned residence to landlocked Burkina Faso in 2018 after profitable the Proper Livelihood Award in Stockholm, created in 1980 to honor social and environmental activists. A throng greeted him on the airport in Ouagadougou, the nation’s capital, and he was obtained by the nation’s president.
Years earlier than, fellow villagers in his arid, windswept nation within the north had known as him a madman for implementing a easy enchancment to an age-old water-conservation method. However Mr. Sawadogo had the final snigger: Forestry specialists mentioned the forest he created, with greater than 60 species of timber and shrubs, had no equal within the Sahel, the semidesert area stretching throughout Africa’s higher third.
The Sahara’s encroachment, abetted by many years of indiscriminate tree-cutting and now by local weather change, with decreased rainfall, is a significant menace to an already fragile area. Massive swaths of land have been stripped of timber, from the Gulf of Guinea proper as much as the desert.
By the top of his life, Mr. Sawadogo was acknowledged as one of many few who had efficiently pushed again. Farmers utilizing his methods have greater than tripled their grain yields, in an space the place agriculture should rely on sparse rain. Burkina Faso, the world’s Twenty second-poorest nation, has a mean life expectancy of underneath 63.
Chris Reij, a Dutch geographer and a senior fellow of the World Sources Institute in Washington, mentioned in a telephone interview that Mr. Sawadogo “single-handedly has had extra impression on soil and water conservation than all of the specialists mixed.” He added: “He managed to construct a forest out of nothing, a forest of 30 hectares with the most important biodiversity within the Sahel. On the finish, he turned a form of nationwide hero.”
Mr. Sawadogo received the United Nations Champions of the Earth award in 2020. Luc Gnacadja, a former head of the U.N.’s anti-desertification program, mentioned in an interview from bordering Benin: “He was distinctive. An entire zone that had been desertified was remodeled.”
Mr. Gnacadja invited Mr. Sawadogo to be the keynote speaker for a high-level convention in Switzerland. “He defined, in all humility, what he had achieved,” he mentioned, “and he left us a legacy that exhibits that degradation of ecosystems isn’t inevitable.”
Mr. Sawadogo had an virtually mystical relationship to the timber he introduced into being — the marula, the acacia, the gum arabic, the desert date tree — treating them “like people,” his cousin Arouna Sawadogo mentioned in an interview from Burkina Faso. When arsonists, jealous of Mr. Sawadogo’s success, torched his forest a number of instances within the 2000s, Arouna Sawadogo mentioned, he was “an outdated man with a tragic face; he stayed within the ashes for a number of days.”
However he all the time bounced again, telling his son Loukmane, certainly one of his 27 kids by three wives, “Even when I’ve just a little little bit of power left, even for one minute, if there’s a tree to plant, I’ll do it.”
It took years of hardship — drought, famine and shifting political winds in a rustic the place strongmen rulers alternate by way of coups d’état — for Mr. Sawadogo to impact his transformation from suspect outsider to determine of respect, wanted by farmers all through the Sahel for his counsel.
“Some folks simply do no matter they need with our forests,” Mr. Sawadogo mentioned in a 2010 movie about him, “The Man Who Stopped the Desert,” by the British producer and director Mark Dodd. “When you find yourself severe and begin work that others don’t admire, then they deal with you as a madman.”
He recalled: “Folks wouldn’t even converse to me. They mentioned I used to be a loopy man.”
Mr. Sawadogo’s heresy revolved round reworking the observe of what native farmers known as zai — digging small pits to seize treasured rainwater. These farmers usually waited till the beginning of the wet season, in the beginning of summer season, to dig the zai.
However Mr. Sawadogo started properly earlier than, when the earth was bone-dry. And he dug the pits wider and deeper. He put manure and rocks within the backside of them. He made use of termites to assist break up the land. The manure contained seeds. When the rain got here, the rocks helped retain the water, and the water turned the seeds into seedlings, which he nurtured. The soil would keep moist for a number of weeks after the rainfall.
“The outcomes had been hanging; the soil improved alongside together with his crop yield,” the U.N. mentioned in asserting his award. “He was capable of develop timber within the arid floor.”
Mr. Sawadogo finally helped the method alongside, planting timber himself. Bushes protected crops from the wind.
“As quickly as I understood how vital timber had been, I set to work on planting the forest,” he mentioned within the movie. Mr. Reij of the World Sources Institute mentioned, “For him the timber turned extra vital than the grains.”
Yacouba Sawadogo was born on Jan. 1, 1946, in Gourga, a village about 110 miles north of Ouagadougou, to Adama Sawadogo, a farmer, and Fatimata Bilem. When he was very younger his mother and father despatched him to a Quranic college in Mali, the place, he recalled within the movie, the chief of the varsity informed him he was destined for nice issues.
When he returned residence as an adolescent, he opened a stall promoting motorbike elements available in the market in Ouahigouya, the provincial capital. It was profitable, enabling him to place apart cash. However, he later informed interviewers, he was stressed and yearned to return to the land. Stacking the percentages towards him was the looming drought that devastated the Sahel from the mid-Nineteen Seventies, when he left the market, to the mid-Nineteen Eighties.
Rainfall decreased by 30 p.c. Entire villages had been deserted as a result of farmers had been not capable of feed their households. “It was a little bit of an environmental catastrophe,” Mr. Reij mentioned. It turned pressing to preserve what little rainfall there was, and to make use of it productively. Mr. Sawadogo started experimenting.
The improved zai — he put millet seeds within the pits as properly — led to a tripling of his grain yield, permitting him to feed his household for 3 years, he informed one interviewer in 2011.
By the Nineteen Nineties, researchers in addition to farmers had been coming to check his strategies; Niger alone despatched 13 farmers. Fame for Mr. Sawadogo and journeys overseas adopted. He participated in a United Nations convention on local weather change and testified earlier than congressional staffers in Washington.
“He was a bit just like the timber he needed to guard, easy and accessible,” Luc Damiba, a honey producer and movie pageant director in Burkina Faso, mentioned in an interview.
After the final fireplace, on the urging of Burkina residents, the federal government constructed a fence round Mr. Sawadogo’s forest, Mr. Reij mentioned.
Along with his son Loukmane, Mr. Sawadogo’s survivors embrace his three wives, Safiata, Khaddar Su and Raqueta, and his 26 different kids.
“He managed to seek out sources to face as much as drought,” Mr. Gnacadja mentioned. “That’s known as adaptation.”
Hervé Taoko contributed reporting from Ouagadougou.
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