Real Lives: Cotton in Mali
FIELD TRIP TO FANA
One of the principal cotton growing areas is in southern Mali, near Fana.
There's a nice, smooth road running east from Bamako into the heart of the agricultural fields of Mali. Despite the arid Sahel climate, shady trees grow from the red earth amidst the rocks and cliffs dotting the landscape. About 300 kilometers away there's Fana, where a cluster of stores, roadside food vendors, and even the occasional internet café, are set along a narrow strip near the electrical wires along the road.
Hang a left down a dirt road, through a neighborhood of mud brick buildings and you quickly enter an agricultural zone. You drive through fields of millet, corn, and eventually the primary export crop of Mali: cotton. The cotton is low to the ground, struggling out of the parched earth. The individual cotton bolls are a complex network of stark white dots spread out across the fields.
Cotton growers near Fana are organized into small cooperatives, each with about a dozen growers or so. Most of the families that rely on growing cotton don't have many other ways to earn money. They also grow other crops they can eat such as corn, but rely on cotton to earn cash they can use to buy food, pay medical bills, and cover the modest fees required to keep their children in school. Families living well away from the main road have no electricity, rely on wells for their water, and do their best to live off their modest cotton earnings.
Farmers here borrow from the government to buy fertilizer they need to grow cotton. They pay back the loans with their cotton yield, and hope there will be money left over for their other needs. There is no irrigation in Fana, all the farmers rely on rain to grow their crops.
One measure of a community is its commitment to education. The community of Fana built its own school, and provides its own books and blackboards. The government provides two teachers. The students' families pool their funds to hire one more teacher that helps cover the five grades. The families are committed to keeping their children in school, and said their kids only work in the fields on the weekends. School fees are about $US1 a month, materials like books are extra. As one farmer put it, "If someone can't pay, after two or three months their child is kicked out of school."
Another issue in any impoverished community is access to health care. Farmers living some distance from Fana have difficulties just getting to the health post in the town, even if they have money to pay for doctors or medicines.
Their ability to cover health costs, like every other basic necessity, is intricately tied to the price of cotton.
