A vision in Mali.

Mali is a landlocked nation of 461,389 square miles in central west Africa. Normally this small African republic receives little attention in the U.S. press, but popular unrest during the winter of 1991 changed that somewhat. Demonstrations by students and workers against the military government led to a crackdown, but now Mali has returned to its customary obscurity in U. S. newspapers.

Starting in the 1880s and ending in 1958, Mali was an administrative unit French West Africa. Long before French colonization, the region that roughly corresponds to present-day Mali was the site of several ancient African kingdoms including the Mali and the Songrai. It is the home of the fabled cities of Mopti and Timbouctou, and it was crossed by ancient inland trade and pilgrimage routes leading from coastal west Africa to the Sudan, Ethiopia, and the Arabian peninsula.

Mali is defined by two geographic features: the rich inland delta of the Niger river and the Sudano-Sahel belt of semi-arid woodlands and near-desert running east-west. The delta supports fish and plant life; the dry belt is characterized by seasonal rains and savannah dry forests of thorn and acacia. Further to the north and west is a vast desert region.

The great majority (86 percent) of Mali's approximately 19.2 million people rely on agriculture for their livelihood, cultivating fields interspersed with woods. At present Mali's population is scattered through rural villages, but its annual urban growth rate of 4 percent compares with a rural growth rate of 2 percent.

Only 7 percent of Mali is forested, and 94 percent of its total forest output is devoted to supplying the nation's energy needs in the form of charcoal and fuelwood. who also earns welcome extra wages as a forest extension agent for a private U.S. relief and development organization.

Ibrahim and his group are meeting at the end of the dry season when daytime temperatures reach 120 degrees F. and the increasingly humid air presses against the land in anticipation of the next monsoon. Agricultural activity ceased weeks ago, and the people are now marking time for the coming planting season. The inactivity is deceiving. In the quiet heat Ibrahim and his group are talking through different ways to bring together the villagers, foresters, and extension agents as a small part of a global movement that is changing how forests are used, managed, and planted.

This is not a movement with a grand design, and most of the revolutionaries have no idea of the history they are making. At this time of year, the Foulani and Dogon who live on the plateau are merely taking care of family and village business, traveling to cities and other villages before the coming rains make the roads impassable.

In this part of Mali, the 1989 agricultural year will be revolutionary because of the simple fact that a few of the farmers will plant trees along with the more traditional plantings of millet. The trees will include mangoes, prosopis, leucaena, and papaya. They will be planted in village compounds and fields and as hedgerows and windbreaks. The trees will eventually be used for fuel, food, fodder, and construction. In the meantime, they will enrich the soil, conserve water, and establish the seeds of local tenure and control over natural resources.

Each tree planting is part of a global revolution in how we think about forests and use them. Unlike political revolutions with their grand rhetoric and violence, this is a technological revolution bringing changes in small, incremental steps; it is more akin to changes brought about by the spread of radios, bicycles, and microcomputers. Other campaigns in this revolution are exemplified by AFA's Global ReLeaf and urban forestry programs, or Kenya's greenbelt movement, or India's tree huggers.

The revolution has been slow in coming, but it carries with it the potential for changing what we understand by the word forestry. In the late 1980s, one battle in the revolution was waged across several hundred square miles of southeastern Mali in the parched and poor villages of Yoro, Adikou, Zaye, Ogodenngoro, and Koro. This initial foray is now spreading because the need for food and fuel has risen with increased populations, declining rainfalls, and pressure from the advancing Sahara to the north.

A fierce will to survive and a desire for a better life fanned by popular education and the systematic inclusion of local people in forestry programs have turned old conventions upside down. No longer do experts assume they have only to pass along their superior expertise and knowledge to a benighted peasantry in order to dictate proper resource use. Ibrahim and his peers are slowly redefining the forester's role by shifting the emphasis from technical adviser and policeman to teacher and friend of forest user.

What is truly revolutionary about this movement is the assumption that the necessary wisdom for reforestation rests with people like the villagers and farmers of the Dogon Plateau-and not with a cadre of professional foresters who police existing stands.

In the final scorching heat of May before the rains come, lbrahim will seek local solutions to problems of deforestation and declining crop yields by forming a partnership of farmers, foresters, and other extension agents like himself. This new revolutionary authority is based on an ability to guide existing activities toward economically and environmentally sustainable practices. Central to the revolution are the new experts who travel to the people to learn their needs and desires and the state of their knowledge before introducing tree-planting and management regimes. It's not that foresters and forestry now find themselves redundant. Instead, their skills and knowledge are now being supplemented.

In the heat and sun of midMay, lbrahim travels around the plateau contacting scattered villagers to convince them to join a tree-planting campaign before the next agricultural cycle begins. The technologies he wants to introduce are simple and cost effective: hedgerows, living fences, and improved woodstoves that use local materials. Plantings are supplied at cost by agents or simply given out through a decentralized system of nurseries scattered around the region.

lbrahim Mu'min is typical of many helping to develop forestry and agriculture in the tropics. A farmer himself, he takes great personal interest in what other farmers are doing. His own small farm is near the nation's capital, Bamako, and he mixes silvicultural techniques with agricultural production. When not working with farmers in remote regions of Mali, he dreams of raising chickens and turning his operation into a model farm.

Ibrahim Mu'min is, however, not typical of most Malian farmers and villagers. He is schooled and speaks French in addition to his native Foula. He is also an innovator, not afraid to experiment, and has access to money. Ibrahim Mu'min is the type of farmer the experts of a generation ago would have identified as progressive.

The world has changed in the past decade, making investments in farmers like lbrahim expensive. More importantly, farmers like him are isolated from the vast majority of subsistence farmers. Ibrahim recognizes this and chooses to work with the more numerous and poorer farmers of Mali who scrape their existence out of the fragile Sahelian soil.

For lbrahim, barriers to more efficient production include lack of access to information and new technologies. These difficulties are compounded by poverty and a harsh environment. Sandstorms whip across the dry interior of west Africa carrying precious soil thousands of miles away, drying the land and killing plants. The pressure of human population growth with attendant increases in livestock herds and an insatiable desire for fuelwood in the growing towns and villages eats into the resource base.

As if these demographic pressures were not enough, economic collapse throughout Africa in the 1980s spurred by high petroleum prices have forced growing populations to fall back on the land for bare survival. Very few give any thought to material gain.

So for those with whom lbrahim works, the barriers to improved resource use and economic development are very basic. When a woman must spend three or four hours each day carrying water home and another three or four hours gathering firewood, and her family has but one large meal a day, little other work is done. With these constraints, simple resource-management techniques such as manuring a field can seem far out of reach for most rural people.

This is all complicated by the villagers' concern for the security of their tenure on the land. Traditionally, land and forests were held in commonfirst by tribal authorities, then by colonial administrators, and, after independence, by the government of Mali.

The role of foresters was to enforce the state's right to forest resources. Forestry grew out of a tradition that impeded the transfer of management information to villages: Foresters carried guns. Rural people's control was limited to the fields they cultivated. They ran the risk of running afoul of foresters if they grazed their cattle in the woods or collected firewood too far from the village. Even now, villagers are reluctant to expend much effort in tree planting, not knowing if the tree or the land is theirs or if they will be taxed for their efforts.

Extension agents such as Ibrahim work slowly and carefully, from village to village. He quietly seeks out local leaders who are willing to try new ways to counter a desperate situation. In one village, he discovered that the chief had a penchant for papaya. Ibrahim provided seedlings that the chief grows in his compound for distribution throughout the village.

In this highly gender-segregated society, the chief's female counterpart thought that growing one's own trees was a good idea besides, if a man can do it, so could she), and she now grows seedlings for distribution to other women in the village.

In another village, one of the more prominent men was visited by an extension agent and given trees. He raised them in his own ad-hoc nursery, planted them, and saw he had some small measure of control over his life and a chance for making a better life. He now raises seedlings for distribution among the men in his village. He says that when the people understand that trees help bring rain, they'll know the importance of planting seedlings and growing trees.

This quiet revolution that is regreening the tropics one tree and one village at a time proceeds from planting season to planting season. In the gathering dusk of a 100-degree evening, still waiting for the first rains and sipping hot, sticky Cokes, a few budding extension agents and young foresters discuss the next steps in their work.

These young professionals become amateur hydrologists, trying to convince local authorities to drill wells at village nursery sites. They become homespun nutritionists, helping the women plant fruits and vegetables in their kitchen gardens at the same time as they encourage them to include tree seedlings for future outplanting. But their greatest concern is gaining enough time for success.

Success will mean that the villagers will come to trust them and allow them to share their knowledge about tree planting and the use of forest resources. In the past, development projects have suffered from suspicion on the part of the recipients regarding the motives of the project authorities. Too often, it seemed to the recipients as if the real benefits accrued to the state, tribal authorities, private volunteer agencies, or whoever it is that is administering the project-rather than to the recipients. Now Ibrahim Mu'min and the others hope to turn this upside down.

Here in gathering twilight, a young, very pretty extension agent expresses a most revolutionary hope: This time the project is really helping them rather than them working for the project." AF