To reduce the impact of global warming the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has established objectives that will be operationalized through the Kyoto Protocol (KP). The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), a KP flexibility tool, allows Annex-B parties to fund projects contributing to the sustainable development of and to the mitigation of greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions in developing countries. Carbon sequestration into soil and biomass and mitigation of greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions through agro-ecological practices can help reduce global warming. The role of West African savannas (WAS) to mitigate climatic change through Agriculture, Forestry, and Other Land Use (AFOLU) projects seems promising thanks to the crucial role endogenous carbon resources play in sustaining smallholder farming, the high potential of improvement of African agricultural systems, the large surfaces involved and some low implementation costs. However, the scientific community has to investigate more thoroughly the assumptions underlying such a win-win promising development opportunity. First the work investigates the potential of agro-ecological practices such as mixed fertilization, minimum tillage, mulching, agroforestry, plantation, fire management and animal diet management suitable for sustaining farming systems and reducing the GHG atmospheric content. Agricultural intensification allowed by these techniques, besides enhancing food security, should also serve GHG emissions mitigation through carbon accretion in soil and biomass and decreased need for cropland lessening human pressure on ecosystems, notably tropical forests. Then the authors examine several factors which will likely limit the achievable potential of WAS for GHG sequestration. These factors are human, biophysical and institutional. They include (1) population growing and conflicting need for cropland, farmers' lack of resources, inadequate legislations and policies, and unfair international competition, (2) lack of knowledge about the carbon and nitrogen cycles in agroecosystems of the WAS and driving forces of their GHG balance, and (3) restriction of CDM eligibility of AFOLU projects to afforestation/reforestation activities. Finally the essay draws the contours of a renewed, equity-based framework of thinking which may help reducing uncertainties as to whether synergistic or antagonist local agroecological concerns in the WAS and the global environmental climatic challenge should be considered.