Nile Basin farmers grow food forests to restore wetlands and bring back a turtle

By David Njagi via Mongabay

In the 44 years Naomi Rita Sitati has lived in Bukirimo village in western Kenya, she has known only one system of farming, which her community has depended on for generations.

Cultivating sugarcane as the only crop in large plots is a common practice in the region, which is part of the larger Nile Basin, and Sitati was happy with it. Apart from creating jobs for thousands of Kenyans throughout the agriculture value chain, it’s a foreign exchange earner for Kenya, and a popular domestic sweetener.

All along, Sitati knew growing sugarcane was a monoculture system and was comfortable with it. Lately, however, she’s begun questioning that after witnessing its destructive effects on soils and the environment.

Its impact on the region’s food supplies and biodiversity has been high, and over the years, she has seen the system accelerate deforestation and dependency on industrial agrochemicals to boost production.

The food forest at Naomi Rita Sitati’s home in western Kenya. Image by David Njagi for Mongabay.

“Our soils are dead. When you try planting a food crop in a field where there was previously sugarcane, it does not grow. You cannot even see things like earthworms and ants,” Sitati says.

Emmanuel Atamba, chief executive at Agricultural Production Systems and Institutions Development (APSID), a farming consultancy based in Nairobi, says sugarcane is also reliant on irrigation, where farmers must extract huge volumes of water from rivers and other water bodies. In the region, this extraction by communities in the upper reaches of the Nile Basin reduces the volume of water reaching the lowlands, leading to drying of wetlands, surface water sources and aquifers.

Turtle trouble

This is the situation for farms, but on a biodiversity level, such farming practices have endangered the existence of already threatened wildlife species like the Nubian flapshell turtle (Cyclanorbis elegans).

The turtle used to range from West Africa to sub-Saharan Africa, and along the White Nile Basin in Sudan. But it’s disappeared from much of this range and today is listed as critically endangered on the IUCN Red List. In 2017, researchers rediscovered it in South Sudan and northern Uganda, but this remaining group is threatened by habitat loss, especially the retreat of the wetlands that constitute its natural habitat.

A report co-authored by Ugandan herpetologist Mathias Behangana indicates that the animal inhabits large rivers with muddy bottoms, but that these habitats are generally not protected. Nor is the turtle protected or regulated under international legislation at present.

“The turtle faces many threats, including hunting for meat [and for its shell and claws] for witchcraft as well as habitat destruction. Increased destruction of its nesting sites is reducing its chances of survival,” Behangana says.

A critically endangered Nubian flapshell turtle (Cyclanorbis elegans) in its preferred riverbank habitat. Image courtesy of ONG OeBenin via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-NC).

Multiple challenges

Albert Nkwasa, a Ugandan research scientist based at the Free University of Brussels (VUB), makes the connection between habitat destruction and its life-threatening consequences for the turtle on two fronts: one is the pollution that leaches into wetlands and water bodies from agrochemical use in the Nile Basin. When sediment enriched with fertilizers gets into a water body or wetland, it can lead to growth of invasive plants that choke food sources that the turtles feed on.

The other is deforestation, which leads to drier spells and increased sediment loads flowing into wetlands, he says, adding that trees and forests control the water cycle by regulating precipitation, evaporation and water flow, as well as preventing soil erosion.

“These two threats are occurring simultaneously in most parts of Africa, threatening wildlife that depend on wetlands for food and nesting,” Nkwasa says.

A brief by the international wetlands conservation treaty organization, Ramsar, says many such sites, including ones of international importance, are being destroyed by agriculture. It says the extent of natural wetlands has declined by 35% since 1970 from conversion to agriculture. On pollution, it says, “High use of fertilizer within or near wetlands increases surface water and groundwater inputs of nitrogen and phosphorus to wetland ecosystems resulting in nutrient enrichment that can have significant ecological effects, including eutrophication, increased productivity of invasive species, higher rates of nutrient leaching and shifts in species composition.”

In Uganda, where Nubian flapshell turtles were only discovered in 2021, both of these threats are squeezing the country’s rich wetland diversity out of the species’ habitat map.

A wetland in Uganda drying out. Image by David Njagi for Mongabay.

From its border with Kenya to the deep eastern belt of the country, monoculture sugarcane farming is a well-entrenched system in Uganda, and with climate change, the system has slowly been depleting wetlands in the country, according to field observations by Mongabay.

These wetlands have been further degraded by upstream communities converting drying wetlands into farms growing rice, sweet potato and eucalyptus.

The environmental impact threatens the biodiversity of Lake Victoria as well as in the country’s lowlands, according to Kiyimba Mugagga, national coordinator of the Schools and Colleges Permaculture Programme (SCOPE Uganda).

While Behangana says droughts are depleting food sources for the Nubian flapshells, Kiyimba says the absence of wetlands, which act as water sponges, leads to flooding during heavy rains, threatening the turtle’s nesting sites.

“Flooded wetlands displace and wash away the turtle’s nests, while floodwaters bring aquatic predators closer to the nests, where they prey on the eggs,” Kiyimba says.

Women prepare the ground for a new agroforestry-based food forest. Image by David Njagi for Mongabay.

Food forest solution

To soften the blow of these threats while continuing to feed people, communities in East Africa are working with food experts and conservationists to establish several smart-farming initiatives aimed at restoring the Nile Basin’s biodiversity.

Sitati’s village in Kenya recently introduced food forests, a technique that changes how the community manages both agriculture and the environment. A kind of agroforestry, it involves intercropping a variety of food crops like cereals, fruits, vegetables, tubers and herbs among woody trees on the same piece of land.

Xavier Imondo, a teacher, oversees the community food forest in the 0.1-hectare (0.25-acre) garden at St. Denis Libolina School. The project also serves as a learning site for the community, where a mix of crops like banana, sweet potato, hibiscus, papaya, avocado, chili and many more grow between trees like silver oak (Grevillea robusta). This gives the garden a bushy appeal that attracts various wildlife species like pigeons, weaverbirds, sunbirds, earthworms, white ants, caterpillars, honey bees and crickets, among others.

“Food forests are a game changer for our farmers. Apart from giving families a variety of food, rivers and wetlands are regaining water recharge. The water is also safe because we do not use farm chemicals,” Imondo says.

At the school garden and in the wider community, these plots grow naturally with a little application of composted livestock manure. But in parts of western Kenya where the soils have become infertile due to continued use of monoculture agriculture and synthetic fertilizers over the years, farmers are adopting biofertilizers to revive their farms.

Felista Omuronji, a farmer in Esiruli village, says that in 2020 she started making biofertilizer from food waste, yielding a compost called bokashi. She says she’s seen this system improve yields at her 0.6-hectare (1.5-acre) farm. Omuronji makes it using local materials that she composts and mixes with molasses, yeast and a bit of bran.

“Organic farming is enjoyable and I love it. When I was using synthetic fertilizers, you could not find even termites on my farm. But now many soil organisms can be found in my garden. If fertilizers could do this to my farm, imagine what they are doing to the regional food and environment,” she says.

Sarah Mukholi displays some produce grown in the new food forests. Image by David Njagi for Mongabay.

Further fresh ideas

Karen Nekesa, the regional advocacy and communications coordinator at Regional Schools and Colleges Permaculture Programme (RESCOP), says destructive farming practices threaten biodiversity in the whole of East Africa. To help the region recover from food insecurity and environmental degradation, RESCOP has been working with farmers in Kenya, Uganda, Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe to establish agroecological farming.

In Uganda, the battle to save Nile Basin biodiversity is also being fought with renewable energy, plastic waste recycling, and agroforestry, according to Francis Ssemetimba, head teacher at St. Maria Gorreti Mpugwe Primary School.

At the school, which also acts as a learning center, farmers gain skills like reusing plastic waste to create vertical gardens and remote irrigation units. But these efforts alone can’t work without efforts to reduce deforestation, Ssemetimba says. This is why the community is adopting more efficient cooking methods, aiming to reduce the amount of firewood and charcoal they need to burn in their kitchens.

Working with SCOPE Uganda, farmers are replacing traditional cooking hearths, which consume large amounts of firewood, with more efficient stoves. The program comes with increased use of charcoal briquettes, which are made from local recycled materials like corn husks, banana peels, sawdust and peanut shells.

Plastic is collected and put to use for water saving sustainable agriculture at St. Maria Gorreti Mpugwe Primary School in Uganda. Image by David Njagi for Mongabay.

In instances where there’s a shortage of briquettes, or where a family is compelled to use firewood, woodlots have been established among their homes to serve as a source of firewood instead of collecting it from community forests.

“The combined use of energy-saving stoves and establishment of woodlots in the farms is reducing dependency on natural forests. I see it as a smart move to fight deforestation and save our endangered wetlands,” Ssemetimba says.

Over a span of four years, the woodlots have bloomed with a mix of timber and fruit trees. Farmers recently added another ingredient to their agroforestry: replacing eucalyptus with coffee trees.

A thirsty tree that’s also toxic to other plants, eucalyptus is becoming less appealing and being cut down to create space for coffee plantings. Ssemetimba says farmers have realized eucalyptus is one of the leading agents threatening the country’s wetlands. But coffee, which is intercropped with environmentally friendly timber trees, doesn’t pose such a threat. It’s also a carbon sink and an income-generating plant for communities.

“We have been practicing production for eating. But now we need somebody who produces for food to have some income,” Ssemetimba says. “Coffee prices have been low on the world market, but farmers have realized that however little you get, as long as you get it, is a beginning.”

Several avenues to protect turtles

Working with the Turtle Alliance, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Turtle Surveillance and the Rainforest Trust, Behangana says the most promising effort to conserve the Nubian flapshell turtle is through establishment of community protected areas.

But this is a long-term project that requires funding, which they don’t have at the moment. Education is another avenue: “Local protection of the species by communities is where we started our awareness campaigns. I am glad that people are showing efforts to save the turtle because they can use it for cultural identity, tourism, education and research,” Behangana says.

And recharging wetlands through the adoption of farming techniques like agroforestry is one of the simplest things communities in the Nile Basin are doing to help this species that inhabits muddy waters and papyrus patches, though improvement isn’t happening as fast as conservationists would like.

A variety of crops are intercropped in the St. Dennis Liborina School food forest, which also serves as a community learning site. Image by David Njagi for Mongabay.

At the sixth session of the United Nations Environment Assembly taking place in Nairobi this week, the global biodiversity framework and overuse of fertilizers will be part of the six issues under discussion.

That’s happy news for Sitati, the sugarcane farmer from western Kenya. It lets her know that she’s not alone and that the global community is battling biodiversity loss alongside smallholder farmers like her, even in a small region of the planet like the Nile Basin.

“We are doing the most we can to restore the environment and save endangered wildlife species,” she says. “But we cannot win this battle without support from governments and world leaders.”

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