Niger's Farmer-Managed Natural Regeneration — State Tree-Tenure Reform (Code Rural)

Farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR) emerged in Niger's Maradi and Zinder regions from the early 1980s, developed by farmers together with World Vision agronomist Tony Rinaudo, as a low-cost technique of pruning and protecting the stumps and root systems of native trees rather than planting seedlings. Its spread was constrained for years by a colonial-era rule under which the state, not the farmer, owned any tree on farmland, removing the incentive to protect regrowth.

Give farmers secure legal ownership of on-farm trees so they capture the value of the trees they protect, removing the legal disincentive that had discouraged natural regeneration.

Niger's 1993 Rural Code (Ordinance No. 93-015), drafted by a National Rural Code Committee established in 1989, set out the legal framework for rural land tenure and natural-resource management. Tree-tenure certainty was reinforced by a 2004 forestry law and made explicit by a July 2020 presidential decree granting farmers exclusive rights to the trees they have planted or maintained on their farms. On the ground, farmers apply FMNR by pruning and protecting existing stumps and root systems rather than planting new seedlings.

Sourced estimates of the resulting regreening vary by dataset and date: CIFOR (2025) cites more than 5 million hectares regenerated over roughly 20 years; National Geographic cites around 12 million acres (about 4.9 million ha) over 35 years; and the Global Partnership on Forest and Landscape Restoration cites 6 million ha. On-farm tree density is reported to have risen from around 4 to around 40 trees per hectare, and roughly 200 million trees are estimated to have regenerated. Chris Reij and colleagues attribute roughly 500,000 additional tonnes of cereal production per year to the practice, feeding an estimated 2.5 million people, though this remains a largely observational, non-experimental estimate.

The mechanism's strength lies in a well-documented 30-year legal evolution and a large observed area of regreening, rather than in a monitored payment or verified transaction — this is a government-enabled ecosystem-service incentive delivered through tenure reform, not a cash-transfer scheme. FMNR requires ongoing farmer labour and remains reversible if tenure security or local enforcement lapses; adoption is heavily concentrated in Maradi and Zinder, with uneven uptake elsewhere in the Sahel, and Niger's rapid population growth continues to add land pressure the regreening is unlikely to fully offset on its own. A CIFOR-ICRAF/World Vision randomised controlled trial testing the causal impact of FMNR and land-tenure certification on yields is under way (via J-PAL, roughly 3,000 farmers) but not yet published.