Forest Gardening by Robert Hart

Author:Robert Hart
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: UIT Cambridge Ltd.

Chapter Eleven

AGROFORESTRY

AGAINST WORLD WANT

THE BEST ANSWERS to Third World problems can generally be found in the Third World itself. Its people have vast reserves of skill, resourcefulness, creativity, inventiveness, energy, survival techniques and will to win, of which most Westerners seem largely unaware. But since many Western aid schemes, notably the ‘Green Revolution’ and a number of big dams, have proved costly failures, an increasing number of relief workers and agronomists have, from the mid-1970s onwards, been taking a close scientific interest in indigenous methods. When asked to solve the problems of a particular valley, far-sighted administrators have learnt to turn, not to Western mechanical and chemical know-how, but to systems practised in the next valley.

Of course this does not mean that Western expertise in many fields has no role to play in tackling the Third World’s colossal and multifarious problems. In the realm of forestry one name must stand out, that of a man of enormous energy and all-encompassing vision, who foreshadowed and inspired the present worldwide Green movement, and even shared Gandhi’s convictions linking a post-industrial society with lasting peace. This man was Richard St. Barbe Baker, who, as a young forester in 1922, founded the Men of the Trees in Kenya, a country that is now playing a leading role in many departments of tree-planting and which holds the headquarters of the International Council for Research in Agroforestry.

In his book My Life My Trees St. Barbe describes the devastation of the forests in the Kenya highlands caused by nomadic herdsmen, land-hungry white farmers and logging contractors. The young forester’s response was to demarcate a wide area and get it gazetted as a forest reserve. With the co-operation of a man who was to be his lifelong friend and colleague, the Kikuyu chief Josiah Njonjo, St. Barbe had thousands of indigenous trees planted between rows of corn and yams – an agroforestry system. At the same time he started Kenya’s first large tree nursery, planting olives in conjunction with Mutarakwa cedars, an association found in the natural forest. Thus, from the first, as he admitted, St. Barbe took advantage of the local tradition of mixed cropping.

Later St. Barbe became responsible for the sustainable development of mahogany rainforests in Nigeria, where he observed another example of plant symbiosis.

Each mahogany is surrounded by numerous trees belonging to other families, amongst which is that important family of Leguminosae – the soil improvers. These I have observed to be good nurse trees for the mahoganies. The more important species of mahogany require the services of a succession of nurse trees throughout their life to bring them to perfection. Some of these provide just sufficient competition to coax the young sapling upwards. Others do their work in secret under the surface of the soil, interlacing the roots, a sort of symbiosis, like the mycelium, which starts as an independent web-like growth, surrounds the sheath of plant rootlets and prepares food that can be assimilated by the growing trees.

In the 1950s and 1960s St.

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