Since the start of 2021 the Great Green Wall or GGW has featured regularly in speeches by French president Emmanuel Macron and his foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian. This ambitious project that involves a huge swathe of the African continent also cropped up in debates at the National Assembly and Senate in Paris during mid-May Parliamentary sessions concerning legislation on international development and the fight against global inequalities.
This green project seems to have become the flagship French policy in relation to Africa. In January 2021 President Macron said it represented an “opportunity for the environment, for biodiversity, for farming and the people”. Since then France has been pushing for the project to make faster progress.
The Great Green Wall, or Great Green Wall of the Sahara and the Sahel as it is also known, is an African Union initiative that dates back well over a decade. Proposed in 2002, it was formally launched by the African Union in 2007. Its central aim is to restore the land and stave off encroaching desertification by planting trees along a band of the continent 8,000km or nearly 5,000 miles long and 15km or just under 10 miles wide through the Sahara and Sahel regions of the continent. It encompasses eleven countries: Senegal, Mauritania, Mali, Burkina Faso, Niger, Nigeria, Chad, Sudan, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti. But because of a lack of funding and political commitment very little of the project has so been achieved. Only four million hectares – just under ten million acres – have been “done” out of the 100 million hectares that should be completed by 2030 under a very optimistic timetable set by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD).
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Emmanuel Macron decided to reboot the initiative with his One Planet Summit in January this year. This event, co-organised by France, devoted part of its time to the funding of the project. The French president took the opportunity to announce the creation of a “Great Green Wall accelerator”, bringing together different actors and which is reported to have raised 14.3 billion dollars to fund the initiative for the next five years.
France itself pledged 600 million euros via the Agence Française de Développement (AFD). The “forgotten” project has been “revived thanks to France”, foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian boasted to the French Senate on February 9th 2021.
At the same time responsibility for the Great Green Wall is changing hands; it will no longer be run by the African Union but by the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) working with the Green Climate Fund (GCF). This change allows France to be at the forefront of the action, as one French national is the head of the GCF – executive director Yannick Glemarec – and another, Benoît Thierry, is IFAD director in Senegal.
The aim of the GGW initiative has also been modified. It is no longer just about planting trees but also involves helping rural development projects. The Élysée and the AFD use the term “agro-ecology” to describe it. The Ethiopians, however, are maintaining their massive programme of tree-planting.
The French decision to commit behind the Great Green Wall plan marks a success for Monique Barbut, who was put in charge of organising the One Planet Summit by Emmanuel Macron. This former AFD special advisor, who has worked for the World Bank and was executive secretary at UNCCD, and who recently became president of WWF France, has long championed the idea.
However, some experts doubt the effectiveness of this initiative, which can only be implemented in those areas where law and order exists. Some believe the whole plan is based on a myth, that the Sahel – the geographical region below the Sahara – is becoming drier and drier. Yet while some pockets of desertification remain, since the middle of the 1990s much of the region has got greener, with the return of the rains encouraging a growth in vegetation.
The main fear is that the plans are being drawn up far away from the areas where they are implemented, and that they could actually be damaging. “If the achievements up to now under the GGW are small, even harmful, that's due to the fact some of the operations were carried out by the water and forestry departments of the [different countries in the region], who turned it into a huge cash cow and a tool for controlling the rural populations, fuelling frustrations and, as a result, pushing them towards armed jihadist groups,” explained one agronomist who knows the Sahel region well.
In addition, some ill-thought-out ideas risk causing conflict between arable and livestock farmers if the reforestation work or the development of agricultural projects hamper the ability of livestock farmers to move their animals around in the usual way.
In an article in January 2021, researchers Ian Scoones, professorial fellow at the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, and Camilla Toulmin, senior associate at the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, said they regretted the way that climate change can become a “catch-all explanation for failures in governance”. They wrote of their concern over how a “political obsession with targets – so many trees, this number of hectares, such-and-such an amount of money to be disbursed – can create huge distortions”.
According to the researchers “giving agency to local voices, strengthening rights over land and water, emphasising grounded practices and ensuring accountability will be more likely to create the sustainable mosaic of green patches across the Sahel that one day may be seen from space.” And the cost of this would be well below the 14.3 billion dollars earmarked for the Great Green Wall.
Another expert, who asked to remain anonymous, is also wary about the strategy being pursued. He believes that resources should instead be put into a green wall that already exists; one formed by the great river axes of the River Senegal, the Niger River, Lake Chad, the Chari River in Central Africa, its major tributary the Logone, and the Bahr el Ghazal River in South Sudan. “We should reinforce this real green wall, by limiting plans for big dams and managing those that exist,” he said.
'Greening the Sahel is also about bringing peace there'
Given these doubts, the French authorities' sudden interest in the Great Green Wall might seem odd. But supporting this project allows them to kill several policy birds with one stone. The first is political and linked to French presence in the Sahel. Operation Barkhane, the French-led military effort in the region, is less and less popular with local populations and more and more controversial in France itself. Observers and Parliamentarians think that the French government, which defines its strategy in three words - “defence, diplomacy, development” - puts too much emphasis on a military solution to the lack of stability in the region.
But with the GGW the French authorities now have a non-military landmark project with which to counter critics. And they are not slow in pointing this out. “I'm determined to make sure that the Great Green Wall initiative is a motivating, visible and lasting element of the development of all of the Sahel and beyond,” Jean-Yves Le Drian declared in the National Assembly on March 4th. “Greening the Sahel is also about bringing peace there,” he had told senators a few weeks earlier.
As the senator for the right-wing Les Républicains, Hugues Saury, noted, helping the Sahel nations with “development” could also be “more effective” at bringing on board France's European partners who “sometimes struggle to give us their support on a military level”.
However, a diplomat who works on Sahel security issues is dubious. “The French are looking for something to take root at any cost but nothing lasts,” he said. “For example, they launched the Coalition for the Sahel to little effect.”
Emmanuel Macron also sees the GGW initiative as a way of appearing committed to the fight against climate change. “It's 100 million hectares restored, the creation of ten million jobs, the sequestration of 250 million tonnes of carbon,” he says. Perhaps the most important aspect for the French president of this last point is that it will help boost the international carbon emissions trading market, something that the private sector is very keen on.
There is also the possibility that some French multinationals could benefit from the project. Several of them have become involved in another initiative called IAM Africa, standing for the International Agroecological Movement for Africa. This has made a specific commitment to support the GGW. These companies include the agro-industrial group Geocoton, CFAO Retail, who work in partnership with the French supermarket chain Carrefour, and the Bolloré group, run by businessman Vincent Bolloré, which has extensive business interests in Africa. The asset management firm Mirova (part of the French investment bank Natixis which is owned by Groupe BPCE bank), led by a member of Emmanuel Macron's ruling La République en Marche party, Philippe Zaouati, is also involved. In 2015 Mirova signed a deal with the UNCCD to create the “first global fund dedicated to achieving Land Degradation Neutrality”. At the time Monique Barbut was the UN body's executive secretary.
The AFD is also a winner from France's new-found interest in the Great Green Wall project. This is chiefly because, while providing loans, it will be able to co-finance some of its own programmes via funds from the Green Climate Fund, under the cloak of the GGW initiative. To this end, a few weeks ago it launched a call for bids concerning five of its current projects, even though several of them are located in cotton zones in the Sudan and not in the Sahel region of that country.
In contrast, African states will see their level of debt increase, because some of the funding released for the Great Green Wall will be in the form of loans. Indeed, that is so far the one certainty that has emerged from the project.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter