抄録
Land and agriculture in Sub-Sahara Africa are in serious crisis. Sustainable upland farmings are not yet established and lowland agriculture has been neglected long time in most parts of the tropical Africa. In addition to this, population explosion, deforestation, and drought accelerate the crisis. The origin of these African crisis, however, may date back to the long history of slave trade (because of destruction of African society) and the ages of colonization (because of destruction of agro-environment) . Therefore it will not be easy to recover these crises.
Although African rice (O. glaberrima) was domesticated thousands of years ago in some parts of West Africa, the Asian type of rice agriculture, “SUIDENNOGYOU” in Japanese, or “SAWAH” in Malayo-Indonesian, which means a leveled and bunded rice field, was not practiced. In contrast, rice is grown on a naturally sloping phreatic and flooding land.
The author described the strategy to regenerate society, agriculture and environment by wider scale introduction of Sawah based farming in lowland areas. Of the lowland ecologies of tropical Africa, the small inland valley swamps (IVS) have the best socio-economic and natural conditions to introduce African adoptive version of Sawah based rice farming with local farmers' participaiton. Each IVS is small in size, 10-100 ha. However total potential area for Sawah develpment may reach to 20-30 million ha. More than million farmers are growing rice in IVS in addition to grow various crops in upland in a watershed. A possible tactics for Sawah develpement in the IVS was proposed.
