A Journal of US Farmers' Journey to West Africa
21 August 2006
Oxfam's Jim French kept a journal during his recent trip to West Africa with other US farmers. Here's what he saw.
Day One: Dakar, Senegal and flight to Bamako, Mali
We formed a rather unlikely group: five farmers from around the US, two women who worked as field organizers with Oxfam America -- and me, a sort of mixture of both worlds. I farm and ranch, and I work for the international aid agency, Oxfam America.
It was three a.m., and we were standing on the warm tarmac of the Dakar, Senegal airport. The group had made the 10-hour trip from Washington, DC to Dakar to look at the effects of American agricultural policies on people thousands of miles away.
That early in the morning, the Dakar streets remained busy, mostly with young men -- some loading small carts with fruits and goods for the next day, some crowded in dimly lit bars, some simply sitting by the roadside.
An almost full moon had an elongated and rippled its reflection onto the Atlantic Ocean as we drove by the shore on the way to the Hotel Ndiambour. The circling beam of the lighthouse on the hill by the shore lit up rock cliffs and small islands not far in the distance.
All of our senses let us know that this place did not have the look, or touch, or sound, or feel of the places we came from only a day before.
This was our introduction to West Africa. A place where in five countries, over 11 million people rely in some way on the growing of cotton. A place where more than 75 percent of the population live in rural areas, and where the majority live on less than two dollars a day.
This group came to see first-hand how countries suffered from the dumping of surplus commodities like cotton. This excess cotton on the world market was encouraged by production-linked subsidies paid out to producers in the US. These surpluses have caused such a drop in the market price that more than 10 million African low-cost producers cannot get a fair price for their cotton.
Modibo Makalou, Economic Advisor to the Malian President emphasized to us that this state of affairs does not just affect the lives of individuals and families. It creates a "very explosive situation," he said. "Three quarters of Malians live in rural areas, and we must try to create income generating activities," Makalou added, implying the threat to national security when people faced desperate situations.
Ahmed Bachir Diop, Vice-President of the African Cotton Association, told us "we have a village where there are almost no men." They had left to search for work, possibly in cities like Dakar.
But, in this first day, it was not just the poverty that we confronted in our meetings, briefings, and travel. Charlie Melander, a Kansas wheat, sorghum and soybean farmer, described his first day with the word, "riot." He said, "My mind keeps coming back to the riot of noise, color, motion, and people."
Oxfam organizer, Katie Danko, loved the beautifully colored cloth and outfits worn by the women as they walked tall and erect often balancing boxes of fruit or baskets of bread or groceries on their heads.
In the days to come, this journal will convey the learning and experiences of this group of Americans from the heartland as they meet with government officials, farmers, and workers in the nations of Mali and Senegal. It will also try to show the look and feel of this poor, vibrant, and surprisingly joyful land.
Day Two: Meeting with USAID in Bamako, Mali; journey to Ouelessebougou region, ginning factory and farm at Dafara village; Dinner and ceremony with farmers, presidential office, and cooperative agriculture organization in Bamako, Mali.
The day began with a briefing at USAID, the US agency that is in charge of foreign aid, where we were told by economists that farmers here should work to add value and marketing potential to other crops that could grow well in this rich environments. But even here, there was a sense that without improving an infrastructure, and creating a viable market, the Malian rural sector, over 75 percent of the population, could not expect much soon. USAID also acknowledged that the production subsidies paid out in the developed world, especially in the US and Europe, continued to cripple poor nations like Mali.
From Bamako, the capital of Mali, our group boarded vans and headed out to the countryside. Right outside the city, the French colonial architecture disappeared, as did the masses of people crowded around small roadside shops and stands. The constant bumper-to-bumper traffic of motorcycles, bicycles, cars, trucks, and buses thinned to a long ribbon of asphalt like the two lane pavement of US county roads -- only the potholes were much deeper. Bone-jarring speed bumps signaled the edges of small villages built on the very shoulders of the highway.
Most homes were made of mud and roofed with thatched grass. Women were occupied around the homes sweeping the loose red dirt, washing clothes, or tending small charcoal fires. Children ran and played often by the small ditches that carried the waste water away from the homes toward the larger gullies or streams. Men and boys could be seen in the small slash-and-burn plots hoeing between the sorghum, corn, millet, or cotton rows.
The first stop was a surprisingly modern and mechanized gin operated by the partially state-owned cotton support industry. The facility processed over 60,000 tons of cotton in the region each year. One of 17 gins in Mali, the facility in the Ouelessebougou region ginned, baled, and marketed a high quality product. Gaye Daffe, manager of the cotton gin, told the group that last year over 99 percent of the cotton coming out of the facility graded “excellent.”
"And yet, even with the premiums for quality, they could not receive a price that covered their expenses," he said. He told the group that they all are counting on us to tell the American people their stories, and ask the government to reform its policies.
From the gin, we turned off onto a winding, red dirt road on our way to the small village of Dafara. The sheep, the cattle, the small wagons pulled by donkeys often traveled in the middle of the road.
We pulled up to the family farm of Odiuma Traore. It soon became clear that this farm was not operated and managed by an individual farmer in the way that we understand in America.
Odiuma farmed 43 acres, a farm size considered to be small where we come from. An extended community of 20 men and 39 women lived and worked on the farm, along with 31 people who from time to time were paid laborers. The farm also included 137 cattle, 10 of which were used for tillage, 17 geese, 2 donkeys, and 70 goats.
As our group toured the plots we understood that the Traore family were farming both in the traditional manner of rotations of corn, sorghum, millet, and cotton and in new innovative ways. Even though Odiuma owned no tractor, he showed us an experimental one-row planter from Brazil that two oxen pulled. The planter cut through heavy residue -- a non-motorized version of minimum tillage.
From the field, the group moved out from under the searing African sun, to the cool shade of two large Shea trees for a community meal After washing our hands, we soon learned to make balls of the rice and chunks of meat in our palms and pop it handily into our mouths.
We participated in a gift-giving ceremony with more than 80 men and a few of the women in the family and neighboring farms. We thanked them for our warm reception and headed back to Bamako. Back in our hotel, we ended our day discussing what we had experienced.
Dexter Randall expressed awe at the generosity our group had experienced. "The villagers may have been poor by our standards, but they gave more than they could afford in that meal and in leaving their fields to speak to us -- they are the ones rich in community and love.”
Days Three and Four: Meeting at US Embassy; Meeting with Malian Minister of Agriculture, Mr. Seydou Traore; Travel to Kita; Meeting with CMDT; Travel to Santankouto Kheourou village and meet with community; Travel to Djidian village and learn about the fair trade program operating there; return to Bamako; internal briefing.
We pulled over for a break after four hours of travel on one of the major roads in Mali. It was a wide, red dirt affair, sporadically maintained and leading us to Kita, a city in southwest Mali. I desperately wanted someone to take my picture with Kansas farmer Charlie Melander. I wanted something to show back home that made the point that Africa had made us look younger. Both of us have mostly gray hair. But after a few hours of road dust, our scalps were Lucille Ball-red.
We arrived in Kita, a higher, more rocky and mountainous area than what we had seen in Ouelessebougou area. The growth was lush in this period of the rainy season, and we saw many fields of cotton, sorghum, and millet. We also encountered more fields of peanuts or "ground nuts" as they are called in Africa.
The travel left us quite tired. Our lodging was quite different than the Grand Hotel in Bamako, but our wonderful host provided us with a bucket of water, toilet paper, and towel for our rooms. Mosquito nets hung above the thin pad covering boards crossing the center of the bed frame. While these accommodations were spare, we reminded ourselves that these living conditions far exceed the sleeping quarters of the majority of people in West Africa.
Thursday morning we departed for the remote rural village of Santankouto Kheourou. The road on the day before was a superhighway compared to our road on this journey. Travel would have been almost impossible without the 4x4s. We moved through a landscape of farming plots, secondary growth forests, and villages. The Malians practice "slash and burn" agriculture. This means that the fields will be used for three or four years, and then allowed to lay fallow and grow up in native vegetation until coming back into production again in the future. Valuable fruit bearing trees like the Shea tree and others remain standing throughout all this process regardless of whether the land is in crops or is fallow.
Upon arriving at Santankouto we were met by almost all of the men of the village eagerly waiting to shake our hands and welcome us. We quickly moved to a community area under a group of large trees shading us from the sun.
When it was initially apparent that only the men would be a part of our meeting, Oxfam staffer from the West Africa Regional Office, Oumou Diallo, asked whether the women of the village could also be included in this meeting. Within moments a line of women and children attired in bright colors approached our group.
Like our visit to the village on the day before, we heard many of the same messages. The prices of commodities have decreased to a point where the village receives no profit. This prevents them from being able to build a school house, or have a medical clinic, or even to invest in equipment that could improve their farming. They live one drought or natural disaster away from famine and displacement.
In contrast to the Dafara village in the Ouelessebougou region, Santankouto did not have a well. The women had to walk many kilometers a day to carry in water. The children had no school. Only one person in the village had received any schooling.
From a young age, Soloba Mady Keita showed extraordinary promise, so the village decided to invest in his education so that someday he could return to help the community. The chief reminded us that the village was one big family. "We are proud of our son, Soloba. And our investment in his education is so he can help us advance," he said.
Soloba told us that the village desired to compete in a fair market environment and have the opportunity to work for improvement. But that would mean the opportunity to earn a profit. He pointed out that all the work was done with hand hoes and some cultivation with oxen. It was a very hard existence. But he also reminded the American farmers that "we are fighting for the same cause, we are all farmers."
Before leaving the village, Kansas farmer Charlie Melander asked to have a go at using the traditional 18-inch hand hoe. Oxfam America organizer, Rasa Zimlicki, wanted to find out how it felt to have a baby tied to her back. Both requests met with a joyous response and eagerness on the part of our hosts to let us experience some small aspect of their lives.
After another hour and half driving from Santankouto, we came upon a village, Djidian, which showed some marked contrast to what we had seen earlier. There were still the mud huts with thatched roofs, but we pulled up to a new concrete structure with a new galvanized roof -- a community center. We also learned that the community had a school, and clinic.
Djidian had become a Fair Trade community. This means that they had made changes in their production to meet the certification standards that allowed them to sell their cotton with Fair Trade trademarked label. The Fair Trade label had initially been used to certify the practices and improve the prices of coffee and chocolate. Currently several commodities have access to certification, and cotton has recently been added.
To receive certification a community must agree to abide by certain farming practices including following best management practices to protect the soil and environment. In turn, they are guaranteed a price that covers the cost of production plus an additional premium. Finally, a bonus is added to that payment which cannot be spent on individuals but must be invested in the community. The use of that additional bonus is determined democratically by the community. In the case of Djidian, the profits from their cotton had built a school and the community building that we met in, and dug a well.
The Fair Trade approach is gaining popularity. However, it still depends upon sales outside of the country. Poverty is so great in Africa that the Fair Trade cotton, chocolate, and coffee is mainly sold in developed nations. Nevertheless, it is one way of developing a value-added market that can return more of the agricultural dollar to the producer.
As we headed back to Bamako, Terry Steinhour, corn and soybean farmer from Illinois, said that he would capture our experiences of the last two days with the words: "bumps in the road." He said he wished that in the years to come the work to reform the trade rules that contributed to the extreme poverty he had witnessed and to the demise of family agriculture in the US might be viewed simply as bumps in the road -- a pathway to justice and new opportunities.
Days Five and Six: Meet with Francois Traore, president of African Cotton Producers Assn. (APROCOT); meet with Senegalese Minister of Commerce, Choguel Maiga; International Press Conference; return to Dakar, Senegal. Saturday: Tour Gorée Island; meet with Dr. Thiendou Niang, executive director of REPA (Agricultural Policy Expertise Network); US farmers interviewed by Reuters; final dinner and 1 a.m. flight back to DC
After the travel in the countryside and the hectic pace of Monday through Thursday, the final 48 hours of the farmer visit to West Africa were more relaxed. Meetings and events still took place, but there was more time to think and talk about what had been seen and heard.
Upon returning to Dakar, the farmers met first with Francois Traore, president of the African Cotton Producers Association. Traore stood well over six feet, and spoke with a voice that clearly conveyed his message of improving the lives of African farmers.
In the course of our conversation, Traore seemed became reflective. He told us that he had never heard farmers from the US claim that the subsidies were also hurting American farmers.
Dexter Randall, the dairy farmer from North Troy, Vermont, said, "We may come from very diverse areas, but we all have one thing in common: the survival of the family farm, not just in the US but across the world.”
This conversation may have led Traore to state at a later press conference that “international trade decisions should not go against producers who want to live on their production. The aim should be that the power of one farmer should not destroy another farmer.”
At that same press conference on our last day in Mali, a reporter from the national agriculture press asked “I have heard that there are 25,000 cotton producers in America that can’t live without subsidies. There are over 10 million African cotton farmers that can’t exist much longer with those same US subsidies. How do we solve this dilemma?”
As a spokesperson for Oxfam America and the farmers, I knew the question was mine to answer. I thought of the several hundred farmers we had seen in the African fields laboring with hand equipment and small implements pulled with draft animals. I thought of their dreams for improvement through education, better health care, and roads. I heard the voices that said “we want to compete, and we can compete if only the rules were fair for all.”
I also thought of the thousands of young people in my own country that could not return to the farm or acquire land because of the inflated price of land bolstered by our current production payments. I thought of the incentives that drove American farmers to overproduce only to barely meet the cost of production.
I then framed my answer and told the journalists that none of us would say to a government -- whether in Africa or the US -- that providing support to farmers and the rural sector would be wrong. In fact, it would be wonderful if someday a tax-base could be grown in Mali and Senegal from a thriving agriculture which in turn could help build schools, clinics, clean water wells, and adequate roads.
I told them that the tragedy of US production subsidies was that they created an incentive for overproduction and distorted the market. If there was hope for the future it would be through vehicles like the WTO and the US Farm Bill. There we could work together to forge policies that rewarded stewardship, created opportunities for entrepreneurship and markets in rural communities, and provided a true economic safety net for times of natural disaster. These sorts of programs would not distort the market or contribute to overproduction.
On the final day, we visited an island just about a mile into the Atlantic off the Senegalese coast. We saw the very a spot where Americans had played a role in hurting Africa before, for almost three centuries up until 1848. Gorée Island was the point where more than 15 million Africans had been forced to leave their homeland to be slaves in the New World. And like now, it was agricultural trade that drove the plunder of African communities and crippled African society.
We looked at the “door of no return” where a slave would walk out and onto the ship to be crowded with others like livestock to slaughter. In the holding and marketing compound over 25 percent of the 15 to 20 million persons passed through here died before reaching their new home.
As we all faced leaving Africa, the horrible images and story of that island left us to ponder what we had experienced. Leo Tammi, a sheep farmer from Virginia, could not escape the irony that almost 150 years after the abolition of slavery we still create hardship for Africa and shackle her potential.
I think about the words of my Senegalese friend, Dr. Thiendou Niang, who traveled with me more than a year ago from western Kansas to a machine shed filled with farmers the far northern corner of eastern Nebraska. When we met with him on our final day in Africa, he reminded us that we lived in the only country in the world “where any decision that is made will affect all other nations. This is true whether that decision involves technology, finance, sociology, or culture. You come from the most powerful and wealthy nation on the earth.”
We left Africa with the desire to influence our nation for the good of the sisters and brothers who had welcomed, fed, and placed their hope in us.
