How Growing Trees Helps Fight Poverty in Cameroon | National Geographic

[Music] Just imagine that you are a farmer in Cameroon. You spend all your life struggling to cultivate cocoa, coffee, and rubber, cutting which you don't eat. They are called cash crops, and that's where the problem lies. Big Industry fixes their prices, not going back to the farmer to consult them. So it means that the prices fall on top of your head every year, and you are struggling to feed your family.

The solution is to empower this farmer, so we link them to the market, diversify the source of income, so you become less vulnerable when the prices of this cash crop [Music] fluctuate. The Rural Resource Center is an area where we develop tree domestication of high-value fruit trees because we can't eat cocoa; we can't eat coffee. These indigenous fruit trees are part of the diet of the local population for millions of years.

So what we are trying to do is bring farmers where they can learn new innovations, new techniques, and how to multiply those trees so they can be able to cut the chain of poverty in the rural [Music] area. By using agroforestry, you restore soil fertility, you control erosion, and you achieve a multi-purpose tree in one small area. You select the local tree according to the fruit they are already producing. If they are good, big fruit, very sweet fruit, very colorful fruit, then you say, "Ah, that's the characteristic of one."

Now, the essential tool in tree domestication is to have sound planting material. You can get them through three different techniques: rooting, marcotting, and grafting. It is up to the farmer to choose the technology that is easy for him. The routine is the fastest one to produce a big number of trees. This is the easiest way of producing selected material identical to the mother tree.

Another technique we are using is marcotting. You remove back on 5 cm, cover it with soil, and in two to three months, you can see the rooting system. Another technique used is grafting. You have what you call a rootstock, take a branch which we call a scion, and then you attach it. The rooting system can go deep in the soil and nourish the scion to express itself. That's the beauty of this simplified technique, well adapted to rural areas, and understandable to every type of farmer.

The big idea behind the Rural Resource Center is to give the entrepreneurial spirit to the farmer. So we develop the marketing skills, we give them the bargaining skills so they can get the right price for their products, and the farmers can get back to their human feeling and be proud of the agriculture they are doing. [Music] [Music]