Wind and agriculture : an essential subject of the African Participatory Research Agenda

ABSTRACT: The Europe/Africa Initiative of IAWE wants to contribute to expansion of relevant wind engineering work in Africa through a Workshop in Africa determining a Research Agenda and participatory follow-up projects. The planned subjects may be summarized as in the fields of wind and the built environment, wind climate and energy, wind and agriculture and wind related disasters including environment and ecology. In expanding into Africa, the poorest continent of the world with a predominantly rural population, rural and urban wind energy and rural wind problems deserve much more attention in the Research Agenda. Wind protection of soils and crops from non-forest tree configurations has in Africa hardly been studied quantitatively. Information on optimum tree and biomass density distributions for various protection purposes, soil and climate conditions and rural environments, including interaction with drifting particles, is badly needed. This is essential in the Participatory Research Agenda for rural Africa.1 INTRODUCTION The authors of this paper work already together since 1990 in fighting wind related problems in Africa. They have done that in the second phase of the Project Traditional Techniques of Microclimate Improvement. This was a research education project that was carried out in a University Collaboration Programme of the "Picnic" type (Stigter, 1995a; Stigter et al., 1998). This was between Wageningen University, The Netherlands, and Universities and Institutes in four African countries, among which the Sudan (since 1985) and Nigeria (since 1990). In this "Picnic" model, the start of the core Ph.D.-studies was in Africa, where also the degrees were obtained from the African Universities in the TTMI-Project. Supportive African and Dutch M.Sc.-students handled important social and economic aspects of the target groups of farmers involved, that were of importance to understand the context of the wind disasters and the selected relief measures concerned. Or they dealt with specific quantitative aspects of the detailed measurements that had to be carried out in the African environment. At the start of each phase, African co-supervisors and their participating Universities had identified the most urgent problems together with local agricultural producers and other local decision-makers (e.g. Mungai et al, 1996; Ibrahim et al., 2000; Bakheit et al., 2001; Onyewotu et al., 2003a; 2003b; Bakheit & Stigter, 2004; Al-amin et al., 2005a). Smallholder agriculture in Africa suffers at many places from strong and/or desiccating winds. These cause mechanical damage to trees, soils and crops, dry out crops, move protecting biomass around or cause sand to invade crop fields. They limit or even prohibit agricultural production and/or endanger infrastructure. In Sudan wind related disasters made up half of the TTMI-research efforts since 1985, in Nigeria since 1991 (Stigter & N'gang'a, 2001). A disaster is defined in this context as environmental conditions that have a strong negative influence on yield quantities, yield qualities and/or farmers' income. Also early work in Tanzania and later work in Kenya had strong wind problem components (Stigter et al., 2002; 2003). These are very often very local problems experienced by specific target groups of farmers that have to decide to abandon their fields and leave the area or defend themselves by increased specific and detailed preparedness for such wind disasters. 2 SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IN AFRICA Africa is the most isolated continent where the applications of science and technology are concerned. Even the ways in which science and technology should be applied in that continent are open to much debate.