The Man Who Stopped the Desert is a one hour feature doc telling the story of Yacouba Sawadogo, an African peasant farmer who has pioneered a technique that reverses the process of desertification. This is what Dr Chris Reij, a world expert on desertification has to say about Yacouba: “Yacouba single-handedly has had more impact on…conservation than all the national and international researchers put together” “..in this region tens of thousands of hectares of land that was completely unproductive has been made productive again thanks to the techniques of Yacouba ..”
Soil is essential to life on earth. But much of the world's soil has become degraded and useless. As the global demand for food grows, millions of pounds and the latest technological advances have been invested in attempts to improve soil quality. Leading scientists and agriculturalists from around the world strive against growing world hunger to find the means to bring exhausted soils back into production, but it seems that a peasant farmer from one of the poorest countries on earth has finally achieved what these experts dreamt of; halting the desert.