Indigenous partners in Green World Ventures
I asked Marc Barasch, leader of the regenerative Moringa tree project of Green World Ventures which looks like a great context providing peer for Ejido Verde what role indigenous people had in the project design. His answer is worth posting below.
“This is an essential question — in fact, at the heart of our project — so please pardon a somewhat lengthy response,” Marc said.
The Igbo people of Imo State in southeast Nigeria are full partners in our nascent “regenerative food industry” that will increase rural income, soil organic matter, food security, human and ecological wellbeing, and climate change adaptation/mitigation — while generating healthy returns. We are working closely with self-governing co-operatives representing hundreds of thousands of smallholder farmers who have long practiced biodiverse, organic regenerative agriculture.
We have co-designed an operations model to grow moringa trees for “superfood” leaf powder that will act as a commercial driver for large-scale conservation and restoration of landscapes and soil. (Moringa is a very fast-growing, drought-tolerant tree whose leaves are 30% protein with all essential amino acids.) The farmers of this region have practiced biodiverse perennial agriculture for centuries. Similar methods are, as you know, practiced by well over a billion smallholder farmers worldwide, supplying most of the nutrition on this planet). The moringa tree is already grown in traditional Igbo smallholder plots. We are requesting only 5% of farm area be devoted to increased moringa cultivation, alongside other plants in customary “forest-garden” layouts. The Igbo are masters of eco-agriculture, often growing up to 25 synergistic species on a single hectare, reflecting a cultural ethos expressed in their saying, “Life to All Life.” The methods and goals of this venture are congruent with their own indigenous values.
One million moringa trees were planted by local farmers from their own enthusiasm during a minimally financed pilot phase. Today 100,000 smallholder co-op members are formally committed to growing moringa in this program, where manual production of leaf-powder will be replaced by a renewables-powered, high-capacity processing plant that will yield a quality-assured, phytosanitary product (instead of the usual microbial contamination)(. Representatives of an additional 750,000 Nigerian farmers from Abia and Imo States have indicated they will participate. For example, the Eze (paramount chief) of MgbirichiLand has agreed to mobilize his people to grow moringa, and farmers in Enugu and Anambra States have also said they will sign on. These four states alone represent 1.8 million smallholder farms. (If each plants 0.05 Ha per our smallholder cultivation plan, this represents 90K ha of moringa.) We also have received private commitments from leading Anglican and Catholic Archbishops in Nigeria to provide land, facilities, commissary distribution, and other support through the extensive parish infrastructure (there are nearly 25M Catholics in Nigeria).
West African moringa projects are plagued by poor growing, harvesting and processing practices, low quality control, inadequate transportation, and locally restricted uptake. To change that paradigm, we are working with respected indigenous leaders, such as company principal Chief Dave Amonu, past president of Nigeria’s national farmers organization. My Green World Ventures partner (and ex-Kraft Foods operations head) John Gregg has spent 12 years working alongside indigenous smallholders on poverty alleviation, helping to co-found the locally run Aku-Ubi farming cooperative (negotiations are now underway for it to become a “co-op of co-ops” for the nascent moringa trade).
Another principal, Chidi Osuagwu, is an ex-chair of biochemistry at the leading technical university, FUTO, and a noted expert on Igbo culture as well as an agronomist with a deep knowledge of indigenous plants. (“ It is important,” he told me, “that we try to recreate the indigenous forests of given areas, as this is best for the local people as well as the local environment.”) Prof. Osuagwu also chairs the 11-nation Africa Future Earth Committee, a consortium promoting African scientific solutions for ecological, economic, and nutritional problems. Prof. Rattan Lal of Ohio State, who has just agreed to work with Green World Ventures on optimally designing and measuring carbon sequestration, himself spent nearly 20 years in SE Nigeria, working alongside the late Prof. Bede Okigbo, the former minister of agriculture and the country’s leading light in indigenous biodiversity. Nigerian scientist Prof. Godson Osuji, now at Texas A&M Prarieview, will lead an R&D arm that will emphasize mothers’ and children’s nutrition.
These eminent African scientists are acutely aware of the devastating knowledge gap between centralized modern annual commodity agronomy and the wide range of alternative crops and indigenous land management techniques. Indigenous agriculture also needs data — what to measure, when, and how accurately. Our project will establish models for agro-ecology systems to participate in agriculture’s knowledge-driven future. We are working with UC Davis and other institutions to mobilize multinational support for holistic agronomy and food science under our rubric of “The Moringa Moonshot,” with a special focus on learning from, collaborating with, and training African scientists in regenerative approaches.
Here is an illustrative email from Prof. Chidi Osuagwu: “Our strategy is to encourage indigenous peoples to go back to the foods that they are epigenetically adapted to over millennia for better health. I have known the moringa tree since I was born, as our people have long used it for food and medicine. I look forward to us working together to utilize indigenous plant knowledge that the West still knows little to nothing about. For example, one of our most valuable trees is the Uha, which is protein-rich and excellent for soil regeneration. As you enter my home compound in Owerri, you will see what is a typical garden here with a lot of intercropping: a papaya tree to the right, a moringa to the left, and a dwarf coconut to the back. Surrounded by these others is Uha (pterocarpus mildbraedii), the iconic prime leafy-vegetable of the Igbo people. Its prime location is deliberate and cultural in an Igbo household. With 26% protein (only a little less than moringa grown in West Africa), and in quality superior to soybean, it is the one of the prime sources of protein in traditional Igbo diet. It’s also very rich in anthocyanins (the plant melanin flavanoids) that act as sunscreen and is probably the phytochemically richest leafy vegetable of Eastern Nigeria. We are doing experimental work on new methods to quickly propagate it. Though Uha is a tree that grows up to 24 meters, it is a legume, and a better nitrogen fixer/soil regenerator than moringa. Once established, it lives for a hundred years, ideal for long-term reforestation. So we will grow these trees together, to the joy of humans and soil and gods! Green World Ventures and Green World Campaign are the perfect platforms.”
Nigerian indigenous farmers and their leadership are in general eager to adopt programs to ramp up beneficial local agricultural production. A traditional leader, the Obi of Onitsha, stated recently, “Our massive food import bill is spent mostly on rice and wheat, yet our country is blessed with vast arable land and a large population of young jobless people that can be usefully deployed to local agriculture.” (Wheat may also be a health issue, given what some believe to be Africans’ epigenetic gluten-intolerance that may be increasing Type II diabetes incidence; Prof. Osuagwu notes, “Nobody in my family eats wheat products anymore, and I feel we are healthier for it.” )
We know the current agribusiness system, centered around wheat, corn, rice, soy, and industrial livestock, is woefully inadequate for a sustainable future: climate-fragile; extraction-dominant; soil-depleting; requiring chemical inputs; producing greenhouse gases (GHGs) and other negative externalities; nutrient-deficient; utilizing only a minuscule fraction of the hundreds of environmentally and nutritionally beneficial food-crops known to humankind for millennia. It is non-sustainable in its social, economic, health, and environmental impacts, especially on Africa, where countries like Nigeria have become dependent on food imports and millions lack adequate dietary nutrition. Moringa is uniquely suited to supply commodity volumes of high-quality protein for local consumption and export that can be cultivated in ways that serve people, planet, and profits.
Please also note that the nonprofit Green World Campaign, focused for the past 5 years in Kenya, has collaborated closely with indigenous leaders, partnered with dozens of local organizations, and worked with tens of thousands of smallholder farmers in forest and landscape restoration projects where local co-ops take the lead (e.g., the Rumuruti Forest, the Pungu Watershed). In fact, virtually the entire staff is indigenous. We have designed in partnership with them uniquely effective holistic “green community” model that includes reforestation, permaculture, rainwater catchment, and eco-education. Because it has evolved from the ground up, it been widely adopted and propagated, affecting hundreds of thousands of people. Locally led projects have included a “Trees for Peace” youth movement that spread nationwide, and working with elders to restore and conserve local sacred groves, or kayas (biodiversity hotspots that were culturally protected from the destruction of the once-great coastal forests). Local people and institutions (churches, mosques, schools, conservation groups like the Kenyan Scouts, etc.) are project-leaders and stakeholders who volunteer or sometimes co-fund out of inspiration for projects they themselves innovate and manage.
Clearly, indigenous agro-ecology systems that generate environmental health, abundant nutrition, and economic self-sufficiency for billions of people should no longer be regarded as inferior to industrial agribusiness, whose success is measured in mono-crop yields while virtually ignoring metrics like nutrition per acre, soil health, carbon storage, biodiversity, and the sustainable wellbeing of people and planet. We believe that our model, placing drought-tolerant, fast-growing moringa trees as a keystone species and cash crop in a productive, biodiverse eco-agriculture system, may prove relevant to rapidly renewing the 5 billion acres of degraded land the U.N. identifies as capable of regeneration, with potentially significant absorption of atmospheric carbon in restored soil.
So we are designing with our Nigerian partners a circular economy-based “regenerative food industry” that will enable smallholders there (and eventually, in Ghana, Kenya, and elsewhere) to be major beneficiaries as well as major players in solving issues of environmental degradation, poverty, food insecurity, and climate change. We believe our value proposition is the foundation for a billion dollar, triple bottom line business with very significant upside. A new regenerative industry can arise in Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation, with multiple adjacencies that will help diversify the economy of this geostrategic nation-state and balance the social, political, and environmental distortions caused by a single non-regenerative commodity — petroleum. It will provide long-term, sustainable, enterprise-driven social and environmental benefits for all stakeholders.
We are now working with the country’s Export Office, and have signed a preliminary agreement with a large African food company to co-develop moringa-enhanced local retail products that will increase the nutritional health of millions of Nigerians. New intercropped moringa trees, which live 15+ years and can be harvested 6x/year, become an asset for individual farm families, multiplying income 3–5x plus providing family nutrition and medicine; and for the co-ops that in aggregate become industrial-scale suppliers for the local and global market. (They’ll also plant extra trees for afforestation/reforestation.) Our goal is to move moringa from a specialty health product for early adopters to a commodity-level ingredient that will help feed a protein-hungry world, establishing a scaleable enterprise that regenerates land and communities along the entire value chain while providing robust ROI.
What Wendell Berry called “solving for pattern” is the sine qua non for any hopes we might have to collectively navigate our civilization’s current evolutionary bottleneck. Green World Ventures is excited to be part of a foundational colloquy on how ”regenerative enterprise” can address major global crises and opportunities — coming as close to ideal holistic solutions as sound business practice and real-world exigencies will permit.
