I recently spent some time in Ghana where the primary focus of my trip was to do a Permaculture Design Course. The short definition of Permaculture (a contraction between the words "permanent" and "agriculture") is......a methodology for designing sustainable agricultural systems and human settlements which have the diversity, stability and resilience of natural ecosystems.
Bill Mollison, the co-founder of Permaculture in 1974, admits: "it's hard to get your mind around it - I can't. I guess I would know more about permaculture than most people, and I can't define it. It's multi-dimensional - chaos theory was inevitably involved in it from the beginning.
You see, if you're dealing with an assembly of biological systems, you can bring the things together, but you can't connect them. We don't have any power of creation - we have only the power of assembly. So you just stand there and watch things connect to each other, in some amazement actually. You start by doing something right, and you watch it get more right than you thought possible." [Click here for the complete version of Bill being interviewed by Alan Atkisson where, in true Bill style, he gives a far less reverent definition of Permaculture!].
The course that I did was run at the Benedictine Monastery of Kristo Buase in the Techiman District of the Brong Ahafo region of Ghana. It is situated in the transition area between the Forest zone in the south of the country and the Savannah zone in the north. The most striking features of this area are the enormous sandstone rock outcrops (called 'inselbergs' in geomorphological terms) which punctuate the landscape.
Permaculture promotes a shift away from monoculture agricultural practices, emphasising bio-diversity, something which is particularly relevant in a region where deforestation is a major environmental concern. Using a system like Permaculture which promotes the preservation of the surrounding ecosystems provides opportunities for innovation in bringing together two oft competing concerns: rural development and preservation of the environment.
The course was taught by Greg Knibbs who has taught Permaculture around the world with contributions from Dr Noah Owusu-Takyi, Director of the Kumasi Institute of Tropical Agriculture (KITA), which he founded in 1984. Dr Owusu-Takyi is the initiator of a Participatory Village Development Programme (PVDP) in conjunction with the Commonwealth Secretariat. The initial project proposal sets out the framework for facilitating a holistic and extremely participatory approach to development planning within 4 rural villages in the Ashanti region of Ghana and Permaculture principles, which are already taught at KITA, will guide much of the agricultural planning.
The design course was only the first step in adopting the Permaculture framework in these regions of Ghana and it will be most interesting to see how the two initiatives take shape over the next few years. For more pictures of the trip, click here.
