Food systems are crumbling due to climate change, biodiversity loss and ecosystem destruction.

Dwindling water sources and severe droughts are degrading soils, resulting in almost one quarter of the earth’s land being less productive.

But it’s still possible to turn back the tide, restore ecosystems, and manage our land and water sustainably – if rural people take the lead.

Learn from local communities

In southern Mauritania, sparse rainfall has turned fields to badlands where nothing can grow. When the rain does fall, it often comes in torrents that sweep away the topsoil.

Villagers from Ifeih Ould Messoud knew that soil needs to retain water to become fertile but lacked the resources to do so.

Now, through the IFAD-supported PROGRES project, they are building flood recession dykes that protect fields from gushing rainwater while allowing it to infiltrate slowly into the soil.

Over time, fertile soil will accumulate while underneath will be a rich store of groundwater. This will feed crops and wild vegetation, helping to keep the desert at bay.

Empower women

Despite making up nearly half of rural people working in agriculture, many women don’t own the land they tend, preventing them from doing what needs to be done to restore it.

When Indo’s husband died, customs blocked her from inheriting her family land in Niger. As the land lay untended, she watched it being taken over by the desert.

Determined not to let her land go to waste, Indo approached the Dimitra Club, a community group supported by JPRWEE. They told her about the legal frameworks supporting her right to inherit.

After winning her case at the land commission, Indo began putting in place measures to protect her land from desertification. She uses bio-pesticides and manure to prepare her fields sustainably and restore the soil.

As a landholder, she now earns enough to support her children, while doing her bit to keep back the desert.

Group decisions

Previously, farmers in Tajikistan’s Khatlon Oblast grazed their livestock without coordination or planning. This degraded the shared pastures.

But today, things have changed. The villagers have combined their herds and herders, like Davlat Safarov, are hired to graze them based on a rotational grazing schedule set by their Pasture Users’ Union.

Through this platform, developed by the IFAD-supported LDPD project, communities decide together how to manage their pasturelands fairly and sustainably, taking into account the interests of individual pastoralists and the environment.

“We see our pastures restored to a good condition with plenty of edible grasses and other plants,” says Davlat. “Our animals are healthier and more productive now and we are happy.”

Change what no longer works

As the population grows and pressures on ecosystems increase, some traditional farming methods no longer work.

Farmers in India’s Mizoram state use to practice jhum, whereby a patch of forest is cleared by burning and cultivated for a number of years. This worked when land could rest for several years before being used again. But with growing pressure on available land, the uncultivated period was halved so the land could no longer recover.

The IFAD-supported FOCUS project works with farmers to introduce more sustainable techniques, like agroforestry, water management and integrated farming. These encourage sustainable settled cultivation.

Land has an incredible ability to restore itself – if given the chance. By involving and empowering the rural people who rely on land the most, it’s possible to recover degraded land and make food systems sustainable – from the ground up.