Combating Desertification With Plants

For thousands of years the Land of Israel has served as a land bridge between Africa, Europe and Asia. Today a unique initiative is upgrading the "bridge" function for the digital age.

The player? A relatively new program called IPALAC, short for International Program for Arid Land Crops. By conventional standards IPALAC is a strange bird among international agricultural organizations. It has no labs. No fields. No greenhouses or nurseries of its own. IPALAC is a "virtual" organization housed in a modest office run by a single full-time salaried administrator and a secretarial assistant who work in conjunction with a scientific advisor, Professor Dov Pasternak, director of the Institute for Agricultural Research at the Beersheva-based Applied Sciences Institute.

Yet, IPALAC's lean organization belies its significance. Established in 1995 under the wing of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, an institution that has pioneered desert agriculture since the mid-1950s, IPALAC has a unique purpose: to forge "cyber-communities" of like-minded agricultural researchers from around the world who once worked more or less in isolation to fight desertification solely in their own individual back yards. IPALAC's goal is to "act as a catalyst for biodiversity utilization" by bringing together existing national and international research institutions, NGOs and other parties to form coalitions designed to develop, evaluate and implement plant-base environmental and development projects, based largely on sharing Israel's successful experience with introducing drought-resistant plants.

The moving force behind this tactic is an agricultural philosophy Israel seeks to "export" to other water-poor regions. For decades Israel has striven to increase agricultural productivity in its own Negev Desert by searching the world over for indigenous plants that can play a role in the development of Israel's own semi-arid and arid regions. The strategy - crystallized in the 1950s by the Negev Institute for Arid Zone Research, a facility that later blossomed into today's Institutes for Applied Research of which the Agriculture Institute is one - looks for plant germ plasm in other geographical regions that can be mobilized to improve the environment or that can be "adopted and adapted " as economically and ecologically-viable agricultural products for Israeli farmers. Once promising species are found, they have been tested for suitability to the Israeli climate and introduced and/or domesticated as crops. Sophisticated and intensive agro-technologies such as drip irrigation and plastic tunnels notwithstanding, even today research continues into frequently ignored plants such as salt grass from North and South America for use as fodder in saline regions, and oil-rich shrubs, such as jojoba as commercial orchards.

IPALAC was launched in March of 1995 with funding from UNESCO, but the organization reflects the new capabilities of the communications revolution as much as the findings of the latest agricultural research.

Unlike many other frameworks that have their own complex internal structure of personnel, offices and agricultural projects, IPALAC's framework is structured using the almost boundless possibilities of electronic communication that make it possible to activate and link people on a different scale than ever before. Its core business is serving as a catalyst, building networks of collaborators who know something about combating desertification.

Today IPALAC enjoys regular funding from UNESCO, the Foreign Ministry of Finland and the Center for International Cooperation (MASHAV) of the Israeli Foreign Ministry. The support is used to host meetings to exchange ideas, to share germplasm (plant material), while encouraging participants to continually share knowledge through channels such as e-mail and Internet websites. In four years IPALAC has organized nearly a dozen workshops or training events in various countries based on this principle. One of the most recent, the first meeting of the African Silk Network, is indicative of IPALAC's philosophy in action.

Mulberry is a tree species upon which schemes for rural development of semi-arid regions can be developed. IPALAC discovered that, while there were fledgling sericulture projects in various African nations, there had not been any contact among the seven project leaders. IPALAC brought them together for the first time - in Africa. Leaders in adjoining countries such as Malawi and Zimbabwe had been unaware of one another's research. Uganda, the most advanced in the field, had been working in isolation. IPALAC became the catalyst for what is now an ongoing dialogue among all the parties for choosing the most favorable varieties of mulberry trees, the right silk worm for specific climatic conditions and, perhaps most importantly, how to market the silk yarn they produce. The entire network that now links researchers in Africa was engineered from a one-and-a-half-room office in Beersheva.

Another cooperative project in which IPALAC is engaged as facilitator involves bringing together parties in seven West African countries (Mauritania, Senegal, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, Cameroon and Chad) to promote growing of date palms.

IPALAC's focus is, for the present, decidedly Africa-oriented. This is because the problems of desertification there are "existential in magnitude," say the staff. People live from biomass - dependent on vegetation for clothing, fuel, construction material and food for their animals and for themselves. When there is not enough biomass, it impacts everywhere, threatening the wellbeing of inhabitants and the environment, in all areas of life.

In addition to its skeleton infrastructure IPALAC is also rather unique in that its main thrust is not mainstream crops, as is the case among most internationally supported research organizations. Much of IPALAC's work focuses on underutilized crops and sharing input on local traditional crops that may be suitable in an entirely foreign region half way around the world.

The kind of exchange IPALAC is capable of promoting takes place even over coffee and cake, not just during input from meetings and field trips at conferences, and special courses. During the Beersheva-based conference hosted by IPALAC in November, 1999, one of the participants, Professor Rongsen Lu, a researcher from one of the cold, arid regions of China, collared Professor Dov Pasternak during one of the breaks to hand deliver a bag of seeds of a hearty desert plant he had brought from his native land. Dov Pasternak realized on the spot that the tree species native to China - seabuckthorn - might be of particular interest to a researcher he knew in the cold, arid climate of Patagonia at the southern tip of South America. Pasternak planned to pass on some of the seeds to his Argentine colleague, together with the Chinese participant's e-mail, of course.

Another outstanding characteristic of IPALAC is that it has been a leader in adopting a broader prospective of plant adaptation, taking into account farming systems, that is, not just how suited a plant may be agriculturally, but how a particular crop can fit in with the way local farmers do things.

This outlook was very much in evidence in the first global-scale conference launched and hosted in Israel under IPALAC's auspices - a gathering labeled "Combating Desertification with Plants" designed to share experiences about how the plant kingdom is being utilized in various projects around the world.

The international conference, held in November, 1999, brought together 70 experts, like-minded individuals from 30 countries - all from semi-arid regions and almost all doing research on underutilized species that may be useful for other participants. Most of the participants, mainly scientists, but some field workers, were either "believers" in the IPALAC philosophy or ready "converts." As one staff member put it: "We looked for people who love plants and would be interested in testing plants, the kind of people who go out on a field trip and they see some straggly plant and they are enamored by it because they know it's been there for three years with 17 mm of annual rainfall."

Participants came to the five-day intensive conference that combined scholarly papers from around the world and field trips around Israel to share experience in enhancing the use of plant germplasm to reduce desertification - either by introducing or improving use of plants as income-generators or as components in environmental systems (i.e., serving as wind breaks, stabilizers of sand dunes, foundations for reclamation of saline soils and so forth).

"Finding the right plant" is more complex than finding one that can survive under local climatic conditions. Speakers and ensuing discussion in the session on "technology transfer" underscored the fact that farmers at the grassroots have to feel the impact if a program is to succeed. In one case cited, the discussant disclosed that local farmers, who had been aided by an international organization in planting mahogany trees, preferred to sell their future crops, expected to mature in 25 years, to a contractor for cash that amounted to a small fortune in local terms, subsequently using the money to buy consumer goods, not just farm inputs. This means more than overcoming technical barriers, and much of the research presented as papers involved projects that included farmers from the beginning as partners in seeking and testing the suitability of new plants.

Conference content was almost equally divided between plenum sessions on subjects such as agroforestry, and aromatic, industrial and pharmaceutical plants, and field trips to learn first hand about Israel's experience in turning various plants into commercial crops - including eucalyptus trees whose branches are marketed as ornamentals and cacti which are cultivated for their exotic fruits.

Professor Pasternak sums up the challenges: "The message we seek to pass on to others in countries fighting desertification is this: It is possible to fight desertification by introducing plants from other arid areas of the world, by domesticating local plants and by adopting suitable technologies."

While linking up researchers is part of IPALAC's mission, the nitty-gritty is application in practice, he stresses - transferring plants from one region to another involves deciding what purposes and which plants to introduce - meaning which plants "have the capability to take root in both economic and social terms."

Pasternak adds that linking up these kinds of researchers, "people who are not working with well-known crops such as sorghum and corn, but all with plants outside the mainstream," bringing them together at conferences and by e-mail, is also a source of encouragement that underscores the importance of their work by showing researchers that others are doing "the same thing," while offering a chance for each to share what he or she is doing with others on a world-scale. Dov Pasternak cites the case of his Chinese colleague, who "with the aid of one plant has succeeded in stopping soil erosion and turning land that was unusable into agricultural land." The seeds of his research - literally and figuratively - will be passed on to South Americans who will, hopefully, be able to benefit from the fruits of the Asian research.

Among the other projects IPALAC is currently involved in promoting, besides silk production and palm dates, are introduction of halophytes to reclaim saline soils in coastal areas of Senegal, seeking superior species to combat wind erosion in Niger, and orchestrating cooperation among seven African nations to introduce varieties of a promising tree (Zizyphus mauritiana), originally domesticated and improved in India.

Spreading the Seeds of Local Knowledge Around the Globe

The participants in the "Combating Desertification with Plants" Conference each went home enriched by new knowledge that would contribute to their work in the future:

Shushan Ghirmai from Eritrea, a coordinator with the National Action Program to Combat Desertification, who recently went to Norway to work on her doctorate which will focus on soil fertility, reported that the conference had broadened her outlook, for instance the fact that a cactus common to her country and Israel, the sabra in Hebrew and Arabic, can be not only a source of food, but also turned into a pharmaceutical product, using the flowers as a medicinal tea to treat prostate problems.

Albert Nikiema from Burkina Faso, director of the National Tree Seed Center, now in the Netherlands working on his PhD focusing on assessment of agro-forestry and parkland, noted the importance of the conference that focused on dry land farming as the issue, not a peripheral matter. Secondly, the conference promoted an integrated approach to transfer of plants, enhancing the search for multi-purpose varieties that provide not only food, but also improve the soil, provide shade or fodder and so forth, enhancing chances of acceptance.

Joshua Adam Yidana from Ghana, a lecturer at the University for Development Studies in Tamale and researcher in plant genetics and breeding in the horticulture department, revealed that he was particularly impressed with the potential for introducing ornamental plants as export crops that he had encountered on one of the field trips. He planned to initiate a seminar for NGOs working in his country and region, to update them on the alternatives he saw at the conference, to nourish both cooperation in testing suitability of various plants, while involving farmers from the start.

Basem Shmoun from Jordan, a land-use planner with the Amman Technical Corporation, engaged in preparation and enhancement of underutilized and marginal land for agricultural use. He hopes that a northern watershed he is in the midst of planning, now planted with olive orchards, and a southern watershed, now open range land, can possibly benefit from further diversification. He hopes Israel and Jordan can collaborate, particularly in new varieties of commercial cacti on which both countries are working.

Tahseen Barakat from the Palestinian Authority, a forestry and range land agronomist with the PA's Agricultural Resources Department, was particularly taken by a host of trees he saw on conference field trips, particularly trees such as eucalyptus and acacia that he hopes will be suitable for transforming the slopes of the eastern foothills of PA territory into range land. He hoped to deepen ties with one of the Israelis experts in this area who he encountered during the conference for further collaboration.

Shannon Horst from the United States, executive director of an American NGO called the Center for Holistic Management in New Mexico that helps develop and encourage adoption of agricultural policies that are ecologically, socially and economically sound in both developed and underdeveloped countries, was one of a handful of participants from Europe and North America attending the conference. She lectured on case studies of reversing desertification through simulation of the positive interrelationship of perennial grasslands and large herds in nature. Horst was impressed by the fact that the conference focused on addressing the needs of developing countries and bringing together key figures at the grassroots, the "implementation level" in her words, people for whom in-country research in the field has immediate relevance.