Tony Rinaudo

Who is Tony Rinaudo?

Tony Rinaudo is a man who learned to see a forest where others saw only bare fields. In the Maradi region of Niger, in the early 1980s, he recognised that the scrubby bushes scattered across the farmland were not bushes at all, but trees: cut down again and again, yet still alive in their roots. From this insight, and from years of patient work with farmers, came Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration (FMNR), one of the most successful methods of regreening drylands.

He is an agricultural scientist by training and a practitioner by conviction. He has always seen the farmers, not the experts, as the decisive actors. His own role, as he describes it, was to help people see what was already at their feet.

His path

Rinaudo was born on 19 January 1957 in Wangaratta, Victoria, and grew up in the Australian countryside. He studied rural science at the University of New England in Armidale and then trained at a Bible college in New Zealand. In 1981 he went to Niger for the mission organisation Serving in Mission, to help in the fight against desertification.

The beginning was sobering. He planted trees, and most of them died: from drought, from grazing animals, from neglect. In 1983, stopping by the roadside between two villages, he looked more closely at one of the low bushes and recognised it as a tree sprouting from its stump. As he later put it, there was an underground forest beneath the fields: a vast network of living roots waiting for a chance.

That same year he offered a handful of families food in exchange for letting trees regrow on their fields. Many gave up in 1984 and cut the shoots again, but those who persevered saw better harvests. During the famine of 1984, a food-for-work programme of his mission introduced, according to the Right Livelihood Foundation, about 70,000 people to the method on around 12,500 hectares of farmland.

The idea

FMNR is simple. Instead of raising seedlings in a nursery and planting them out, the farmer works with what is already there: living stumps, roots and seeds in the ground. On each stump a few strong shoots are selected, the others are removed, and the chosen stems are pruned and protected. Within a few years they grow into trees. They give shade, protect the soil from wind, drop leaves that feed the soil, and provide firewood, fodder and fruit, all without killing the tree.

The method is cheap. The Right Livelihood Foundation puts the cost at about 20 US dollars per hectare. But its heart is not technical. It lies in a change of view: trees on the field are no longer weeds that compete with the millet, but partners that make the field more productive. As Rinaudo has said, the real battle was about how people thought about trees. And it depends on rules agreed together in the village: who may cut what, and who may harvest the wood. Where people can be sure that the trees on their field benefit them, they protect them.

His own summary is short: whoever works with nature makes miracles possible.

The work

His main work is the regreening of southern Niger, which he helped to set in motion with farmers from the 1980s onwards. When he moved to World Vision in 1999, he took the method into the world. Today it is used, according to the Right Livelihood Foundation, in at least 25 countries, mainly in Africa. In his book The Forest Underground, which was named Australian Christian Book of the Year in 2022, he tells the story of these decades. Volker Schlöndorff's documentary Der Waldmacher (The Forest Maker), which opened in German cinemas in April 2022, made his work known to a wide audience.

What became of it

The scale of the change in Niger is remarkable, and the figures are estimates. The Right Livelihood Foundation speaks of around 5 million hectares and more than 200 million trees, benefiting about 2.5 million people. These figures go back to geographer Gray Tappan and colleagues, who compared aerial photographs from 1957 and 1975 with recent images and estimated tree densities in the field; the coarse satellite images of the early years could not show the change at all. Tappan considers 200 million trees a low estimate. The study by Reij, Tappan and Smale from 2009 places the regreening of southern Niger among the great farmer-led transformations of the Sahel, alongside the zaï pits of Burkina Faso.

In 2018 he received the Right Livelihood Award for demonstrating on a large scale how drylands can be greened at minimal cost. In 2019 he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia.

What we learn from Tony Rinaudo

Terra Humana takes from Tony Rinaudo the most economical lesson in restoration: look first at what is already growing before you plant anything. On the slopes of Sa Medada there is macchia, and many Mediterranean shrubs and oaks sprout again from their stumps after cutting or fire. Guiding this natural regrowth, choosing strong shoots, protecting them from browsing and giving them time, can be cheaper and better suited to the site than planting from scratch.

We also take from him that restoration is first a matter of perception and of agreement. Trees survive where the people around them want them to, and where it is clear who looks after them. And we take his patience. An underground forest does not show itself in a season; it needs years of care before it can be seen. That is the kind of ecological restoration we want to practise.