FAO.org

With EU-backed forces advancing across Mali, the need for European and other donors to accelerate the development process in Africa’s poorest regions appears ever more pressing. For development experts a simple, yet unheralded solution exists - planting trees. “Agroforestry is the future of agriculture in the drylands and sub-humid regions”, Dr [...]

Experts presented achievements towards the realisation of the Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel, a pan-African initiative to halt desertification, while improving food security and contributing to climate change adaptation and mitigation. Launched in December 2006 at the Food Security Summit in Nigeria with a view to tackle [...]

In the Al Hajar Mountains of northern Oman, at the eastern edge of the Arabian Desert, high above the white terraces and minarets of Muscat, rain comes rarely and then in floods. Hajar means “rock” in Arabic, and the mountains are made of little else—a fractal landscape of umber and dusty limestone, [...]

A UN-led pilot scheme hopes to highlight how trees can help people in arid zone, considered to one of the most hostile habitats on the planet.  The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Acacia project's goal is to show how trees provide, food, fuel, shelter and income during times of hardship.  So far, [...]

China built its famous Great Wall to keep out marauders. Now, millennia later, a "Great Green Wall" may rise in Africa to deter another, equally relentless invader: sand. The proposed wall of trees would stretch from Senegal to Djibouti as part of a plan to thwart the southward spread of the Sahara, Senegalese officials said [...]