This wall should grow stronger

Unlike other barriers in history, Africa’s Great Green Wall is not aimed at keeping people out, but to stop the Sahara from growing
This wall should grow stronger

Walls are acquiring a bad press. The worst one is being generated by Donald Trump’s “big beautiful wall” to keep out those “bad dudes” in Mexico trying to reach the land of milk and honey. Then there is Hungary’s wire fence topped with razor wire and patrolled by snarling dogs and armed guards. This wall is aimed at blocking Islamic refugees from the Syrian civil war who threaten to pollute Hungarian Christian culture.

Then there is the newly proposed wall along the hazy Afghan-Pakistan border imposed by colonial Britain on a tribal culture. If it goes ahead it will split the Pashtuns in the same way the Berlin Wall split the Germans. There is also the Israeli-built wall restricting Palestinians to their ghettoes in the same way the European Jews were kept in theirs during the Middle Ages. Then there are the walls of history. There is Hadrian’s Wall which kept the marauding Scots away from the peacefully Romanised English. And we mustn’t forget the blot on the British Raj—the salt hedge constructed by the East Indian Company to enforce its disastrous salt tax.

Then there are also castle walls built around the world and throughout history to keep undesirables outside and prison walls to keep undesirables in. These are all nasty walls. But this one is about a good wall. A massive friendly wall which is not aimed at keeping people in or out or to help authorities collect punitive taxes. This is a wall which is literally sprouting wealth and prosperity.

It has been dubbed “The Great Green Wall of Africa” and its purpose is to hold at bay the sands of the Sahara desert and help people to stay in Africa. They started planting the Great Green Wall of Africa ten years ago. The wall is in fact a six-mile-wide strip of millions of Acacia trees which will eventually stretch 4,800 miles across the southern edge of the Sahara and through 11 countries from Senegal on the West coast to Djibouti on the Red Sea. That is about half the length of Trump’s proposed wall along the US-Mexican border and about 600 miles short of the length of the Great Wall of China.

Its purpose is to battle the effects of climate change in Africa. Over the last half century 60 acres a minute have been lost to desertification as the Sahara marches south. This means that if you are an African farmer in Somalia, the Sudan, Chad, Senegal or many other African countries, there is a good chance that you have lost, or will lose your livelihood to the shifting sands of climate change. With no livelihood you either starve, join the terror group Boko Haram or its like, flee to overcrowded cities such as Nairobi and Mombasa or risk your life trying to illegally immigrate to Europe.

By 2020, if nothing is done, it is estimated that desertification will be the primary cause of 60 million people attempting to migrate out of Africa. Monique Barbut, the executive secretary of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, said: “There is an emergency, and I have a feeling that people do not really get it. Most of the people who talk about migration—the press, the TV and all that—they always either say it’s because there’s a war or because they are so poor they are migrating. But why do you have wars? Why do you have economic distress which makes you migrate? It’s rare that people unearth the real roots of that question.”

So far 4.5 million acres of sturdy acacia trees have been planted in Ethiopia, 2.5 million in Algeria and 6,000 in Sudan. Altogether an estimated 11.4 million acacia trees have been planted since 2007. The Great Green Wall is planned to be completed by 2030 and is projected to provide food security for 25 million people and create 10 million small farms.

The cost is estimated at $8 billion. The project is being funded primarily by the European Union, UN agencies and the World Bank and coordinated by the African Union. It is one of the unsung flagship projects which goes a long way to answering the question: “What has the UN ever done for us?” The acacia trees are not only holding back the sand but are actually helping to reclaim the desert.

They produce a lovely flower and the Australian aborigines grind the seeds for an edible—if not very tasty—paste. But the reason they are being planted across Africa is that they grow fast and deep. In doing so they prevent the wind from blowing away the topsoil. They have been so effective at this task that in Senegal farmers have pushed back the sand and planted vegetable crops under the boughs of the spreading acacia trees.

In the past 12 months, the green border along the Sahara’s southern edge has started to become visible from space. The concept for the Great Green Wall has taken years to come to fruition. The seed was planted in 1952 by the British colonial forester Richard St. Barbe Baker. It lay dormant for half a century until 2002 when it was pulled out of the archives at a Conference to Combat Desertification and Drought. It took, however, another 10 years for the first tree to be planted.

The initiative came from the African Union. But they did not have the money. That has come from the EU and World Bank. The UN has supplied a bit more and technical expertise. The building of the Great Green Wall is already creating jobs. The trees have to be brought in and the seedlings nurtured. Once the trees are planted, wells have to be dug and irrigation systems created.

Then the vegetable crops are planted and links to market have to be established. But it starts with acacia trees, and over the past ten years they have sprouted like a fast-growing weed. They have made a wall which creates goodwill rather than ill will and is already helping hundreds of thousands of Africans to stay close to their roots.

Tom Arms

Author of Encyclopedia of the Cold War and the editor of Lookaheadnews.com

Email: tom.arms@lookaheadtv.com

Related Stories

No stories found.
The New Indian Express
www.newindianexpress.com