Further to the today’s earlier blog on trees, there’s another good read on the IFAD website: Cameroon: tree domestication boosts family income. This describes a joint IFAD-World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) project – ICRAF is one of the research centres of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and it describes agroforestry as focusing “on the wide range of working trees grown on farms and in rural landscapes. Among these are fertilizer trees for land regeneration, soil health and food security; fruit trees for nutrition; fodder trees that improve smallholder livestock production; timber and fuelwood trees for shelter and energy; medicinal trees to combat disease; and trees that produce gums, resins or latex products. Many of these trees are multipurpose, providing a range of benefits.” But not a mention on the ICRAF website of using human excreta to fertilize these trees! They need to know about Arborloos!
Another CGIAR centre is The WorldFish Center – but there’s no mention on this site of excreta- or wastewater-fertilized fishponds. However, this is a common practice and one for which the World Health Organization published in 2006 its Guidelines for the Safe Use of Wastewater, Excreta and Greywater − volume 3: Wastewater and Excreta use in Aquaculture.
Time to integrate the use of human wastes more effectively into the production of fish and useful trees by poor rural farmers! Definitely something very worthwhile to start doing in IYS2008.
About Me
- Duncan Mara
- University of Leeds, United Kingdom
- I'm an emeritus professor of civil engineering at the University of Leeds in England. I've been working on low-cost sanitation in developing countries since the mid-1970s, and also on low-cost wastewater treatment and reuse. I was a lecturer at the University of Nairobi, Kenya, 1970-73 and then a senior lecturer at the University of Dundee, Scotland, 1974-79 before moving to Leeds in late 1979. I was a visiting professor of sanitary engineering at the Universidade Federal da Paraiba in Campina Grande, northeast Brazil, during 1976-95, and since 1996 I have been a visiting professor of environmental engineering at the Instituto Cinara, Universidad del Valle in Cali, Colombia.