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Burkina Faso Farmers Fight Drought, Climate Change

Burkina Faso Farmers Fight Drought, Climate Change

Written by Kieran Guilbert | From Scientific American via Retuers

Over the last three decades, Burkina Faso’s poorest farmers have produced food for half a million people by restoring some 300,000 hectares of degraded land with innovative techniques to conserve water and soil, according to a report on Wednesday.

The UK-based Overseas Development Institute (ODI) thinktank said Burkina Faso’s subsistence farmers were leading the fight against climate change in the West African country, which is prone to severe droughts and increasingly erratic rainfall.

Amanda Lenhardt, research officer at the ODI, said farmers on the edge of the Sahel belt in Burkina Faso’s Central Plateau region had made major strides in offsetting the worst impacts of climate change in “one of the world’s most fragile areas”.

“While malnutrition and poverty remain major problems in Burkina Faso, the fact that farmers can still produce food during extreme droughts has helped the region to avoid famine,” Lenhardt told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“The reclamation of unproductive lands in such a climatically vulnerable region by resource-constrained farmers is an achievement by any standards,” she said by telephone from Ouagadougou.

Landlocked Burkina Faso ranks 181 out of 187 countries in the U.N. Human Development Index, and remains one of the world’s poorest nations.

Read more at Scientific American