Yacouba Sawadogo, a farmer known as “the man who beat the desert” in Burkina Faso for revolutionizing agricultural methods and creating a 75-acre forest on barren land, died on Dec. 3 in Ouahigouya, a northern provincial capital in that West African country. His death, in a hospital after a long illness, was confirmed by his son Loukmane Sawadogo. A throng greeted him at the airport in Ouagadougou, the country’s capital, and he was received by the country’s president at the time. The Sahara’s encroachment, abetted by decades of indiscriminate tree-cutting and now climate change, with decreased rainfall, is a major threat to an already fragile region. Large swathes of land have been stripped of trees, from the Gulf of Guinea right up to the desert.

Source: The North Africa Journal December 23, 2023 03:32 UTC