Niger farmers reclaim barren wasteland

Working on their own with no outside aid, farmers in Niger have made huge areas of land productive again by simple techniques. They stopped cutting down tree sprouts in the fields when preparing for harvests, sowing the crops between the trees. Now the trees hold the soil, have raised the water table, produce firewood, and the leaves are used in composting. In areas where the earth was rock-hard, women dug small pits and filled them with manure. When the rains came, they seeded the manure, producing crops.

Satellite images have shown 7.4 million new trees in the area with vast acreage saved from desertification, all done by farmers working on their own.