Niger
Bokar Moussa & Ephraim Nkonya
We evaluated to cost of inaction and cost and benefit of action of addressing degradation of forests, grazing lands and cropland in Niger. For the forested areas and areas with trees, Niger serves as good success story of combatting forest and land degradation in sub-Saharan Africa and for achieving what became known as regreening of the Sahel. The country experienced severe loss of vegetation in 1970s to 1980s due to land clearing and prolonged drought. This created a new value for trees as collection of firewood and water took a day-long task for women. The government responded to this challenge by designing policies that gave incentives for land users to protect and plant trees and this led to significant improvement of tree cover in Niger. We conducted an analysis of planting or protecting trees and the results show that planting or protecting trees is highly profitable and less risky than rainfed crop production. For the livestock production sector, we estimated the effect of degradation of grazing lands on livestock productivity using Erosion Productivity Impact Calculator (EPIC) simulation model. The results show that degradation of grazing lands leads to a 22 percent reduction of fodder productivity and a loss of profitability amounting to $1,156 per household with 50 tropical livestock units (TLUs).For crop production, we evaluated the cost of action and inaction at the farm level. The cost of action against cropland degradation is only about 10 percent of the cost of inaction per hectare. The total cost of degradation of forests, grazing and cropland - expressed as percentage of GDP – is about 8 percent. The results underscore the large cost of inaction to address land degradation. The results has important implications for addressing land degradation in sub-Saharan Africa. The successful regreening of the Sahel in Niger has served as a success story of combatting land degradation in sub-Saharan Africa. The results show that severe land degradation could in fact serve as “low-hanging fruit” for addressing land degradation but this is possible if government policies are designed to provide incentives to land users to address land degradation.
» Policy brief
