In the Sahel, ‘famine food’ becomes a conservation staple

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In the African Sahel, where the humid savannas to the south meet the dry Sahara to the north, once-stigmatized crops are making a comeback.

These plants, once considered ‘famine foods,’ now provide income, food security and an opportunity to restore the region’s degraded lands.

“The basic idea is conservation through use,” says Josef Garvi, CEO of Sahara Sahel Foods, a social enterprise in Niger.

“We create markets for as many native species as possible to create value around them and draw people’s attention to them,” he says.

When the trees have value, they are more likely to be planted and protected. What was once “just a shriveled shrub in the bush” is now a source of pride, Garvi explains.

One such shrub is hanza (Boscia senegalensis), which was once so heavily stigmatized that gathering it was considered an indicator of famine.

Now, its seeds are one of the enterprise’s key products.

The staple pea of the hardy hanza

Growing two to four meters tall, hanza has vibrant yellow fruits with bitter seeds about the size of a pea.

The ripe fruit is harvested in early July and can be turned into syrup, while the seeds are dried and stored, where they can last a decade or more.

The majority of this work is done by women, who sell the dried seeds to Sahara Sahel Foods.

Garvi and his team currently work with more than 2,000 women across 80 villages and are striving to maintain this gendered focus as men are increasingly attracted to the plant.

“As the economic benefits grow, there’s more competition from men who would like to enter the circuit and especially to have umbrella roles,” says Garvi.

“We work actively to limit the umbrella roles because otherwise, the women will lose out on their benefits, and we’d rather have the women organize themselves.”

After purchasing the seeds, Sahara Sahel Foods skins and soaks them for about a week to remove the bitter taste. They are then put in solar driers and milled into flour or semolina.

Hanza seeds are a ‘pseudo-cereal’ and can be used in stews, porridges, hummus, breads and more, similarly to chickpeas. They consist of about 60 percent carbohydrate and 25 percent protein, making them more nutritious than local true cereals like millet.

And hanza is just one of the many plants being revived. Sahara Sahel Foods currently works with 21 species and plans to expand to 40 in the near future.

Balanites aegyptiaca, for example, is a thorny tree found deep in the Sahara desert – hence its English nickname, the desert date. Its fruit is too bitter to enjoy, but the seeds can be eaten or pressed for a high-quality oil.

The bitter leaves of the marula (Sclerocarya birrea), meanwhile, are purposefully collected for use in medicinal tea.

These are all examples of non-timber forest products.

What are non-timber forest products?

A non-timber forest product (NTFP) is any useful substance, material or commodity taken from forests other than wood used for building.

This can include everything from nuts and mushrooms to oils and game animals, as well as fuelwood.

Globally, around 5.8 billion people – nearly three-quarters of the world population – use NTFPs. Almost half of this number are rural users in the Global South.

More than 2 billion people rely on wood for cooking and heating. Wood accounted for 27 percent of Africa’s total primary energy supply in 2014.

A similar but more stringent concept that Garvi and his team use is non-wood forest products (NWFPs), which exclude the use of wood for any purpose.

Both NTFPs and NWFPs have long been praised for their potential to alleviate poverty, increasing household incomes in forest fringe communities by as much as 78 percent.

They can also play a role in tackling the climate crisis, which is particularly important in the Sahel, which is now at risk of desertification as the Sahara expands.

The Sahel: the drylands turning to desert

The Sahel region, also called the Sahelian acacia savanna, stretches 5,900 km across the width of Africa, from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Red Sea in the east.

Depending on how it’s defined, the Sahel is up to 1,000 kilometers wide and spans more than a dozen countries, including Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan.

The semi-arid region suffers from frequent food and water shortages, and temperatures there are rising 1.5 times faster than the global average.

“The Sahel is arguably one of the most vulnerable regions to climate change,” said Ibrahim Thiaw, executive secretary of the United Nations Convention to Combat Deserification (UNCCD), in 2018.

“It is most likely the region with the largest number of people disproportionately affected by global warming.”

As a result, droughts and floods are growing longer and more frequent, while land degradation is slowly turning the region’s remaining cropland into desert.

Around 132 million hectares of cropland are already degraded across Africa, including 9 million hectares in Burkina Faso alone, and those numbers are growing rapidly.

So, what role could NTFPs play to help turn the tide?

Could NTFPs save the Sahel?

According to a 2023 study, NTFPs can help tackle unsustainable practices like overgrazing and deforestation by offering alternative sources of income. They can also boost biodiversity by promoting the conservation of forests and other habitats.

The authors described NTFPs as “a valuable opportunity for effective climate actions and biodiversity conservation in the West Africa Sahel region.”

Non-timber forest products also help dispel the fallacy that conservation areas should be kept free of people. Harvesting native crops offers a “win-win situation” that benefits biodiversity, nutrition and food security together, says Garvi.

What’s more, the plants themselves can combat some of the challenges of a changing climate.

The very factors that made hanza a ‘famine food’ – only needing rainwater, growing in poor soil and surviving droughts – are what make it so valuable for regreening the Sahel.

Growing almost anywhere, the once-maligned shrub can prevent soil erosion and land degradation, buffer against wind, stabilize sand dunes and cycle nutrients.

And many of the other plants Sahara Sahel Foods works with offer similar benefits.

“These trees are very well adapted to the climate here, and many of them can grow in drier environments,” says Garvi. “If we could get enough people to adopt these foods into their regular habits, then we could create a very strong impact on regreening the whole of the Sahel.”

“We could create a movement that pushes back the desert on a larger scale.”