How You Can Help

 

 

​HELPING THE ENVIRONMENT AND DEFORESTATION

When I was young, I watched as my people cut down the virgin rainforest to plant corn to feed their families. A few years later they would move further on and cut down new forest, only to move on a couple of years later to slash and burn down more of the virgin forest.  Now everyone knows the tropical rainforest regions are not suitable for growing corn compared to the temperate regions like the plains of Kansas in the U.S.A. The forest land quickly loses it nutrients and becomes unproductive.

This Zeleti tree, as alluded to earlier, has not been successfully cultivated as a crop by humans. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)is engaged in a lot of research on how to domesticate this plant.

Choosing ZELETI is one way of helping to stop the deforestation. The peasant farmers can now go into the forest and harvest this plant and also grow this forest crop on previously cut forest land allowing the forest to grow back around the tress, hoping the trees will survive. They can then cater for their daily living and not have to cut down more virgin forest year after year. At present, only about a third of the original rain forest that once covered West and Central Africa still exist. As the forests disappear, these rare plants and other yet to discovered medicinal plants are being lost forever.