50,000 tree cuttings planted in the Comoros

By Kitty Brayne (BCSF)

Bristol Conservation & Science Foundation and Durrell have been working in partnership for two years now to run a conservation and sustainable development project in the Comoros. The project aims to support the rural population in the Comoros to improve the sustainability of their land management and use of natural resources, as a means to protecting remaining native forest and biodiversity. You can find more information about the project here.

This is our first blog posting from the project, but we will be updating you on a regular basis with the highlights from the project and what the different members of the team in the Comoros have been up to.

Last week Neil Maddison, the project leader from BCSF visited the project and we organised a field trip which took us to five out of the six villages the project is currently working in. As we did the tour of the villages I was struck by the scale of the aménagement work the project is supporting. We use the French term aménagement (literally means ‘doing up’) to refer to a suite of techniques aimed at sustainably intensifying agricultural production by improving the physical structure of the field through terracing and the planting of tree cuttings to reduce erosion and maintain soil fertility.

Intensifying agriculture, through preserving soil fertility and increasing the productivity of existing farm plots, should in the long term reduce pressure on the remaining forest as farmers won’t need to clear more fields higher up the slopes.

This season we’re trialling a new method of outreach in order to get more farmers on board. Previously we were limited in the number of farmers we could offer support to by the amount of time it took the two agricultural technicians to get around the fields in the different zones. This year we’ve trained a group of farmers in each village who were committed to working with us last year to support others to implement the techniques. These people are now ‘relay trainers’, helping other people from their village to improve their fields. They’re still supported and supervised by the team, but in this way we can cover a lot more ground.

At the start of the season we produced a film featuring a relay trainer from each village explaining the potential benefits of the aménagement techniques and what each stage involves. We then organised a tour of the villages, projecting the film on a big screen and running a question and answer session for anyone interested.

The tour was a logistical challenge, as some of the villages are only reached by steep mountain paths, up which we had to bring a generator and a sound system. But it was worth every sweaty minute… there was a great atmosphere at each event, and the film was very popular.

Since then I’d had reports from the facilitators that they’ve been signing up lots of new people to take part in the activities. But nothing prepared me for the sight that greeted me on the way up to the village of Outsa (where the project started working in February this year) – all the fields on a whole hillside are now enclosed with new tree cuttings planted over the last few weeks. In fact this afternoon I tallied up the number of tree cuttings planted in each village this season and it already comes to almost 50,000, of which 35,000 of those are for the zone that we visited between Adda and Outsa. We’re not even half-way through the season - impressive work!

However its not all hard work. We’re now at the half-way mark for the project as funding (from the Darwin Initiative through Defra and the French Development Agency amongst others) is in place until the end of 2012. It’s been a hard slog to this point and everyone’s worked very hard under challenging conditions... So it was decided that a party was in order!

So on Saturday the team and their significant others all gathered at Hugh’s house. Enough food was prepared to feed an entire village (in fact we’re still eating it a few days later). But apart from eating we also fitted in some fiercely competitive Comoros-themed games of Pictionary and charades, some questionable dancing (pictured) and an award ceremony. Among the awards given out were the prize for the favourite member of staff for female villagers (went to Moustoifa), the fastest up a mountain (to Ishaka) and the award for the champion banana eater, which went to Siti (pictured).