Crossing the Internal Frontiers - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 183

The programme's most significant contribution is not so much in the number of trees
planted or additional area irrigated, but in attitudinal change; people begin to believe
they can influence and achieve their development agenda; and the effect of giving
women knowledge and self-esteem may outweigh all [other benefits]. 18
It is easy to underestimate the significance of these achievements. I once
flew in one of the Aga Khan's helicopters from Chitral in the west, across
the Shandur Pass, location of a famous annual polo match at some 4200
metres, and down the 200-kilometre long Ghizer valley towards Gilgit.
The time of year was July, but the hillsides were brown and grey rock,
picked out with tiny patches of green around villages, or yellow waving
barley and wheat. You cannot take in the scale. The helicopter flew at about
4500 metres for safety, but the valley stretched up another kilometre. And
down, too - poring over a map in Gilgit, I found out later that the top
of this valley was above 6000 metres, the floor at some 1500 metres. The
Ghizer valley is 4.8 kilometres deep, and is just one of many in the region.
It would swallow the Grand Canyon in the US. But before we get too
romantic about these landscapes of villages and fields clinging to hillsides,
it is important to be reminded of the deep poverty, lack of economic and
educational opportunity, and unremittingly tough climate. Nevertheless,
if the people of the villages of Hunza can build their own schools for girls,
the first ever known, or can reclaim a glacial fan and share the new
farmland equally, then elsewhere in the world, should we not be wondering
if we can do the same? Perhaps we have something to learn from them.
The Ministry Officials in Kenya
For too long, Africa has been dismissed as being somehow unable to
engage in patterns of development that aid people and environments.
Food production lags well behind the rest of the world - it is 10 per cent
less per person than 40 years ago. Yet, such a view misses a critical truth.
Despite the difficulties, there are many who have crossed the frontier, and
who, too, have important lessons for the rest of the world, if only we
would listen. Some of these new thinkers are in governments, and their
successes are even more remarkable. One example comes from Kenya,
where a decade ago Ministry of Agriculture officials came up with a new
way of protecting soils and communities. Kenya has a long history of state
intervention in both soil and water conservation and land management.
For five to six decades, farmers had been coerced or paid to adopt soil
conservation methods. These methods require coordinated action at a