In Zambia, tiny farms grow more with less

Cecilia Moya and her daughters rise each day in the early light of dawn to work their fields before the midday heat. For two hours, they kneel in the earth, carefully digging small, rectangular holes in the parched winter soil that will nurture their seeds when the rains come.

Here in Lwimba, sparse rainfall has led to dwindling food supplies. But Mrs. Moya and 10,000 other small landholders – using new conservation farming techniques that will be a major focus of the 10-day World Summit for Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa – all grew enough corn to see them through the next harvest in April.

"My neighbors understand this year...." says Moya, a thin, wrinkled woman who feeds 11 hungry mouths. "But last year they were laughing at me."

This year, Moya reaped ten 110- pound bags of corn from her third-of an-acre plot. She harvested only three bags from the 1.25-acre plot she planted using traditional farming methods two years ago. Nationally, conservation farmers are achieving yields twice as big as traditional farmers and 25 percent better than commercial farmers.

"I had to sleep in my fields to prevent my neighbors from stealing," she said, waving her hand over the newly cleared field where she slept. "They were desperate, because their crops had failed and mine had not."

Monday, some 40,000 participants and 100 world leaders are in Johannesburg to gauge the progress and further implement the plans made at the Rio Earth Summit 10 years ago. One major theme of the summit is sustainable agriculture – conserving water, minimizing the use of fertilizers, and protecting land to extend its arability.

While the immediate causes of the food shortages threatening more than 12 million Southern Africans with starvation are two years of bad weather and government mismanagement, the region's land is overworked and becoming less productive. The conservation farming project used by Moya, which is being run by a US nongovernmental organization, is showing how environmentally friendly agricultural methods can also help subsistence farmers increase productivity.

"Conservation farming is about conserving resources, especially water," says Chris Muyunda, an agribusiness specialist at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) which is funding the program. "The new farming techniques we are teaching are going to maximize the quality of the land."

Nearly 65 percent of Africa's arable land has been affected by soil degradation, and the United Nations predicts that if steps are not taken to reverse the trend, in a few decades, the continent's agriculture yields will fall to half their present levels even as population rises.

"The soil here was already degraded, but the amount of rain reducing, and the changes in weather patterns was the nail in the coffin," says Rubin Banda, an agricultural economist with the Cooperative League of the United States (CLUSA), which runs the Zambia program. "We're going to see more and more of that unless we take steps to improve the quality of the land."

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