Chad residents in planting drive with tree nurseries

After a long journey from Niamey, Niger, to Goz-Beida, eastern Chad, two grafted Ziziphus plants were handed over to a community nursery group in Chartingue, one of six villages chosen as pilots for the fruit tree component of the Building Resilience and Adaptation to Climate Extremes and Disasters (BRACED) programme.

The programme is implemented by the Building Resilience in Chad and Sudan (BRICS) consortium in Eastern Chad and South Darfur.

In the area of Goz Beida, traditionally farmers have used direct seeding to grow fruit trees but only in small numbers.

The difficulty with this method is that when you plant a seed, it takes several years to grow and mature to the stage when it can start to bear fruits. This means it is not possible to guarantee the quality of future fruits at the time of sowing making livelihoods uncertain.

AN ALTERNATIVE

BRICS is introducing an alternative to this method in Goz Beida using grafted plants.

Grafting is a technique for creating new plants which involves uniting a plant fragment (scion) with another plant (rootstock) to produce an independent plant that has the qualities of both and hence is more resilient to climate change.  

This process makes it easier to guarantee the quality of the fruits because the plants for grafting are checked for fruit quality and ability to withstand the effects of climate change before being chosen.

To date, very few farmers have ever bought grafted plants in Goz Beida region because they can only be found in the town and cost about 500 CFA francs (roughly $1) – a considerable amount of money in this poverty-stricken region.

The BRACED programme plans to change this by setting up community nurseries to make improved tree planting material more accessible to smallholder farmers and to train them in tree propagation and management methods using demonstration plots.

However, good fruit varieties to propagate from are difficult to find in the area and so, to kick-start the tree improvement programme, ICRAF staff travelled from Niamey to Goz Beida with grafted plants of four different varieties of Ziziphus.

Ziziphus mauritiana, also called ber or jujube, is a fruit tree that grows vigorously, copes with extreme temperatures and thrives under rather dry conditions making it a suitable tree for eastern Chad.

These trees were then given to the nurseries to serve as base material for farmers to further propagate from.

They were highly praised by the farmers in Chartingue and the nursery group designated two members, one man and one woman, to go and plant the trees in their homestead and take care of them.

It is hoped that introducing these improved varieties of fruit trees will kick-start community nurseries and encourage the growing of plants that are more resilient to recurring droughts resulting from climate change.

As a result, farmers and their families should be in a better position to cope with droughts, by improving their income and nutrient intake, and hence their overall health and quality of life.