Faces

Baobab Farm - a green paradise, where wasteland had been

Interview with Dr. René Haller (part 1)

By A. Schoenborn, EcoEng-online co-editor

Dr.h.c. René Haller is a naturalist, trained in Horticulture, Landscaping and Tropical Agronomy. He came to Africa in 1956 to manage a coffee plantation on Mount Kilimanjaro, in Tanzania. Three years later he was recruited by the Bamburi Cement Company to head up their Garden Department. Bamburi's factory is today the third largest in sub-saharan Africa and the largest export earner in Kenya. It belongs to the French Lafarge group.

In the 1970s Haller started a unique ecological experiment, attempting to rehabilitate the limestone quarries scarring the Mombasa coastline. Today he has transformed much of the seven square kilometre Bamburi site from a barren and dusty lunar landscape to an ecological haven. It has lush vegetation and a wide variety of wildlife, including snakes, tortoises, butterflies, crocodiles, giraffe and hippopotami.

Dr. Haller was awarded the prestigious Global 500 Roll of Honour by the United Nations in 1987, for his 'outstanding environmental achievements'. In 1991 he received the Swiss Brandenberger prize, as well as an Honorary Doctor's degree from the University of Basle. In April 2003, he was appointed to the board of the Kenyan Wildlife Service.

Links:
Haller Foundation: http://www.thehallerfoundation.com/ (books)
Baobab Farm: http://www.baobabfarm.com/
Baobab Trust: http://www.thebaobabtrust.com/
Bamburi Cement Company: http://www.bamburicement.com/
Verbindung Baobab: http://www.verbindung-baobab.ch [in German]

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How it all began

AS

The answer is actually that Switzerland was too small for me. I had many ideas and I had the feeling that I can probably get my ideas better into practice if I go to Africa... First I was on a coffee plantation on Kilimanjaro and then I went to Mombasa. I only wanted to go there for two years. But then it was so fascinating because they gave me 7 square kilometres of land and told me to do something with it. I started first feeding the people of the surrounding area with vegetables and protein and started with the rehabilitation of the quarries in 1971...

AS

In the beginning you were not doing anything with the quarries, you were just managing the farm of that cement factory?

There was no farm existing, there was just a lot of land close to Mombasa. The founder of the cement company had the foresight and said: "You know one day there [will be] a problem. We can't have 7 square kilometres of land just a few hundred meters behind the beautiful palm fringed beaches...without any problems"... When they started, there were about 300'000 people in Mombasa, now it has a million. The area is [now] totally surrounded by small farmers and by hotels along the seashore. So he said, we must do something with this land; we can't leave it idle... You know there are a lot of squatters. When lands are not used, people just move in and settle there and you finally lose the land.

AS

It's a fossil coral reef, which later on was to be excavated for cement making. When I came to the coast in 1959 there was a relatively small quarry... Nobody knew where they were taking the material from. But then they expanded the size of the cement factory and a few years later, already 3 square kilometers of land were devastated.

AS

Yes... When I started rehabilitation I left certain control sections out. These are just black limestone today... In areas, which are, now 30 years old there are just a few grasses growing, nothing else. Actually... if a piece of land is barren like that, you have to do something immediately to cover it with vegetation.

AS

So, if once you have left the land for 20 or 30 years and start the rehabilitation later, it doesn't work anymore?

Yes, that's the point. [Then] you actually have to go and rip the ground open again. You have to do the same thing as before. You have to go in with bulldozers and take the top crust away of the rock and then you can start again. [It has become] like concrete.

AS

You started the rehabilitation in 1971. Can you give us an idea why you got the chance to do that?

That's a very interesting question. There is an official version, which we tell, and the true story. I said [before], there was a moral obligation of the cement company to do something with that land, but the trigger was something else. Kenyatta who was the president in Kenya at the time, started with an agreement with all the industries in the 70s. He said: put in a third more people and we stop wage increases for three years. So you can imagine: a cement company that has 1'200 [employees], had to take on another 400 people extra. Suddenly there was a vast number of people and we had to find a solution to do something with them.

AS

René Haller

... which doesn't make sense economically for a cement company. They [asked me] can you do something with this extra labour and I proposed various projects. [One idea I had was to] try and do something with the barren quarries... I gave everyone a crow bar and they had to open a certain number of holes per day and fill them with some topsoil. The holes were used then to plant the first tree seedlings. Otherwise they would have done it differently but it was just to occupy the people. Slowly the people were reabsorbed in other fields. I used them on the farm, for bush clearing, to build an airstrip that was also used for growing sheep. But that was actually the true reason why the quarry rehabilitation started at the time.

AS

You can, it doesn't matter, I'm retired now (laughs).

AS

I took on the challenge and went for it. I don't think I would have the guts again to do it. You have this huge area of land and you have no soil, there was nothing there. For every little plant you have to do something. For me it was only to observe what was growing, you know I had time. Because I was running the farm [alongside other work]. It was not a job that had to show results in a given time. I could carry on with it and [do experiments]. Then I saw that it's a fantastic idea to see whether we can recreate nature. So we restarted right from the beginning.

(...) One of the breakthroughs was, when I met a friend of mine who was a filmmaker. He made a film on the Krakatao eruption (1883, the greatest in recorded history-AS), which sent a tidal wave three times around the earth. There he filmed how it [looked today]; the vegetation [had come] back. He thought, as there were the same climatic conditions, similar plants could be used Krakatao also brought the Casuarina to the East African coast. I'm living right on the seashore. There is a sand dune, no humus, nothing, and there is a Casuarina tree, which is over a hundred years old. I always wondered how it could grow on the pure sand dune. It was silica sand and a little bit of coral sand mix, but no humus. That's why I started with the Casuarinas. Casuarina was one of the 26 species, which I tried out in the beginning of the experiment.

AS

That looks to me like the work of an artist. Looking for inspiration wherever you go, pick up the little pieces and put them together, is that correct?

René Haller

I made my apprenticeship in Switzerland as a gardener and landscaping was my specialty. I didn't want to bring foreign trees and animals into this quarry. But there was no example, which I could copy. Nowhere in East Africa there is a forest so close to the saline groundwater table. So I started experimenting on a trial and error base. It's very important that you have some imagination and a vision, and then you build on this.

AS

During the presentation you gave before I thought, oh, this man had a lot of time, swimming in the fishpond, observing the Tilapia. This is something I can only envy you for...

Of course it's a challenge, which is not an 8-hour job. When you are at home you dream about it. You are more or less obsessed by the idea to do something and you have to pick the brains of many people. My teachers or masters were the Chagga, the tribe that lives on Mount Kilimajaro, where I was working when I was running a coffee plantation. They were too many people in such a small area. The population had multiplied and they had to develop a system to survive. We call it agroforestry today, but they were the first people who actually did it over a long, long time. It came out of necessity, to get the optimum out of small pieces of land. They grew coffee, they grew bananas, they have there zero grazing livestock, and all the vegetables they could grow in the area as well. They developed a well-designed irrigation system using rain- and river water. So I learned the combinations, how that could be done in a sustainable way.

Baobab farm and the local society

AS

That leads to another area: The keyword is integration: I'd like to ask you about the integration within the system and the integration within the society of that Baobab farm. Can you say some more about the farm and the relation to the surrounding villages, towns and the people that live there? What kind of connections do you have?

René Haller

All was made in style that could be copied by local farmers... Same with vegetables, in the beginning I couldn't grow them without using agrochemicals. But soon I saw that there is a tree like the Neem tree, with which we could do it. We then made farmer training courses for the small farmers in the surrounding area. They could always come back and copy the system.

AS

René Haller

Oh yes, they just picked things out that they thought were good for them (...). One principle was: If you've got water you have to have fish. Not only for eating but also because of malaria. You need fish, which are eating the mosquito larvae. We developed a rain-fed pond culture system. We have a lot of rain in a short time, and then maybe for 6 months we have no rain. So we tried to make a system that we can catch the rain. Little "koffer dams" (a series of small dams harvesting rainwater and reducing erosion, AS) and deep-water retreats. In these ponds, first they got fish and then they plant vegetables, when they dry up slowly. Parallel to it I developed tire culture. We've got used car tires around, all over the place, which are a source for malaria because of the water inside, [which mosquitoes breed in]. If we put 2 or 3 of these on top of each other, cut some holes into it, put all sorts of organic matter in it, we can grow vegetables in it. In every corner of their little courtyards you can have a pile of tires. Then in these tires you can plant your cabbages and vegetables, whatever you want. This is something they start copying as well now. This is something coming close to bringing polyculture into urban areas.

AS

You're a white man coming from Western Europe within Kenya - I am just thinking of the problems Whites have for example in Zimbabwe now. Is it an easy task to be there, to transfer the knowledge to the local people and interact with them?

René Haller

You should never try to teach something which they don't want to know. You have to wait until they come to you. Then they see...and they want to copy... Also we don't give anything for free. Maybe we buy some tools for them, to start something. They pay a minimum amount of money, for instance I talked about this game sanctuary we were building. There are no trees anymore in the surrounding area because they cut everything down for cooking their meals. That's one of the things we tend to forget: It's not a problem to produce enough food in Africa. It's a problem to cook the food. Because there are really no trees anymore... Now I say, okay, for a cubic meter of wood, you pay me 100 shillings. I know they can sell it for 700 shillings. It's just that they don't become beggars. That works well. I get on with the people very well. They don't look at the colour or the white skin.

AS

How well does Baobab farm integrate into the development of sustainable agriculture. Is it a focus of crystallization?

René Haller

It clearly is a focus point, which has quite some influence in Eastern Africa. I must say, however, that due to the latest development, Baobab farm doesn't have its own livestock anymore. The agricultural activities are continued by Baobab Trust, which I am running. Baobab Trust has got economically run units - sheep, goats, cattle and poultry - for educational purposes.

AS

In your talk you mentioned the importance of long term planning, on the timescale of 50 years. How do you do that? Do you have any systematic methods to do that or is more intuition?

René Haller

It comes back to the vision you have. But then you have to look into nature, what is actually happening. If I say fifty years, it reaches a little bit far. But I want to say, that you really [have to] look forward, what is happening when the trees are big, for instance. If I've got tropical hardwoods, which I'm growing, what is happening in 50 years time when they are ready to be cut? We know that the whole thing will start either with pioneer bushes, grasses or trees, which have to disappear again. Then you can have the next generation of different trees, 2 or 3 or 4 different ones, so it broadens out to a bigger thing. Then finally after 50 years, 20% of the trees that have been there are actually tropical hardwoods of very high value. And of course now more and more I have got students, which help me to put things on the computer, so that we can make simulations.

About the future of Baobab farm

AS

Now you are retired. Your life's work has been handed over, in a way, and you have shifted your attention towards other issues. What happens to the Baobab farm now?

René Haller

At this very moment we are in a phase of rapid change. The whole farm is now owned by Lafarge, a French group that is the biggest cement manufacturer in the world. Lafarge doesn't want to be involved anymore in the Baobab Farm. Their motto is "going back to core business". At first they cut down the activities of the farm that yielded financial returns from 46 to only 3: tourism, crocodile aquaculture and lands development. Now it looks like they are trying to get rid of these last 3 as well.

The one thing I can say now is, that there will be another organization in the end that carries on the activities of Baobab Farm. Parts of it may be taken over by Baobab Trust, but since it is a charity organization it can't take over all. However, the details are still largely unclear. Negotiations are under way and I can't say much more at the moment. There's also a question mark concerning tourism. I'd like to be able to use the financial returns from tourism for our ecological projects.

AS

Actually that could be helpful on a strategic level. I myself am going [a step] back to a much lower level. I am going to the local people, that they can fill their bellies. Secondly they have to get a bit more, a little bit of cash return that they can pay their school fees and some extra things, but first is feeding themselves. On the strategic level you have to deal with a big infrastructure, managers etc. I see in an indirect way one has to lobby these Lafarge guys in Paris (...), that they realize what they are loosing, if they do not help to carry on what has been put there

AS

That would be interesting because it indicates a wider interest. These engineers, they...don't understand the connections. That's the shocking thing. One of the success stories was, that we made a separate company to rehabilitate their quarries and build an ecosystem. That was actually the basic success. Now [Lafarge] wants the quarrying people...to rehabilitate the quarries...I've seen many many quarries, in France and it's cosmetic. You know you make a pond, it's green, you make a playground, you've got birds and things on it, so it looks good. But it's not a self-sustaining ecosystem which we have been developing.

So, I think it would be very interesting to have a meeting with your society down there. For them it's a prestige issue, that it's brought down there. When you are attacking them, you don't get anything, you have to get it the other way round, lobby them in a way, and congratulating them for what they have been doing. That's the only way to approach it. And that's what I'm doing these days, you know, still talking about it, talk very openly...

AS

Oh yes. What I need is the good will between Baobab Trust and Lafarge. And the farm still depends on them. They work on their land.

AS

It had been self-sustaining...

AS

...but it is not anymore?

I wouldn't say anything about that. Because I think they cannot hold it, you know, they cannot be self-sustaining anymore. Because they cut down these 46 different resources.

AS

Thank you very much for this interview, Dr. Haller.