Sustainable Agriculture and Food: Four volume set (Earthscan Reference Collections)

Making Soil and Water Conservation Sustainable 383

Lack of maintenance by local people

Despite decades of effort, soil and water conservation programmes have had sur-
prisingly little long-term success in preventing erosion. On paper, the quantitative
achievements of some programmes can appear impressive. Throughout the world,
terraces have been built, trees planted and farmers trained on a massive scale. In
Africa, huge areas of land have been protected in the short term by conservation
measures (Table 16.1).
However, these have not been long-term successes. In virtually all these sites,
structures and practices have not persisted. Projects assume that maintenance will
occur. Yet as farmers are treated at best as labourers for construction, they have few
incentives to maintain structures or continue with practices that they neither own
nor have had a say in designing. All too often, impressive new structures and prac-
tices slowly disappear, leaving little evidence of interventions and institutions.
This was recognized in the early days of the SCS in the US. A 1941 study of
some 520 terraced fields on 5000ha in the south found that most terraces had been
‘improperly constructed’ and poorly maintained (Carnes and Weld, 1941). The
terraces had been constructed by the SCS, yet 83 per cent were not being main-
tained by the farmers on whose fields the measures were situated.
Sometimes, successes are reversed almost immediately. In an evaluation of
World Food Programme-supported conservation in Ethiopia, the extent of the ter-
racing was quoted as being ‘impressive’, yet monitoring found 40 per cent of the
terracing broken the year after construction (SIDA, 1984). The project had expected
that local people would bear all the costs of maintenance. Another example comes

Table 16.1 Extent of large-scale soil conservation programmes in Africa

Burkina Faso 120,000ha of graded bunds constructed 1962–1965

Ethiopia 1–5 million km of stone and soil terraces and bunds

constructed on 300,000ha, and 80,000ha closed off from local

people during the late 1970s to 1987

Lesotho All the uplands were said to be protected by buffer stripping

by 1960

Malawi

(then Nyasaland)

118,000km of bunds were constructed on 416,000ha between

1945 and 1960

Malawi 288,000ha terraced between 1968 and 1977

Rwanda/Burundi 750,000ha terraced and planted with trees to 1960

Swaziland 112,000km of grass strips laid out to 1950

Tanzania 125,000ha of Kondoa completely destocked of cattle to 1979

to encourage hillside regeneration

Zambia

(then North Rhodesia)

Half the native land in eastern province was said to be

protected by contour strips by 1950

Sources: Stocking, 1985; Marchal, 1986; Reij, 1988; IFAD, 1992