Agriculture in the desert
A strip of three million square kilometers of aridity extends from the Atlantic to the Red Sea, bathing with its high temperatures the poorest regions of the planet.
In the Shael, “the hunger belt”, when humanity had not yet noticed climate change, its consequences were already being felt.
A Burkinabe farmer, Yacouba Sawadogo, has managed to make more than three million hectares of desert land fertile. He has managed to slow down the unstoppable advance of the desert in his country by using a traditional farming technique called “Zaï”, but adapting it to modern times.
This method consists of digging holes of about twenty centimetres in which manure and compost are deposited next to the seeds.