Strategies on Food Production Changing in Sahel Region : Rains Wash Out Famine Danger in Southern Sahara

Just a few months ago, the Sahel region of western Africa was threatened with drought and famine of Ethiopian proportions.

Now the Sahel, on the southern limits of the Sahara, expects bumper crops amid signs of changing food development strategies.

An unpublished report by the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF) says that good rains since July have ended a decade-long drought in the region, which divides West Africa’s coastal states from the desert.

Some of the world’s poorest countries--land-locked Mali, Burkina Faso, Chad and Niger--have been given an unexpected respite to take stock of their agricultural policies after years of dependency on foreign aid.

“It is obvious that the effects of what in some places amounts to 18 years of drought cannot be overcome by one rainy season,” the report says.

But, it adds, many Sahel governments are eager to get away from the mentality of depending on cadeaux toubabou (white man’s handouts) by seeking long-term aid to promote projects that will avert future food shortages.

“The consensus in the region is that aid programs need to be oriented towards rehabilitating the countries, helping the people to help themselves, limiting the effects of such a drought in the future,” the report says.

The emphasis is increasingly on improved herd management, soil erosion projects to halt the inexorable spread south of the Sahara and small-scale water projects involving construction of dikes and dams.

Even though it is over, the social consequences of drought have been profound. Massive population movements uprooted people, split families and broke down traditional social structures.

“Society in the whole of the Sahel has gone through an upheaval. Nomads have gone sedentary, people used to towns cannot readapt to the countryside,” said an Abidjan-based U.N. official.

Throughout the region, malnutrition soared, especially during the first half of this year, leaving children especially vulnerable to disease. Most countries also suffered cholera outbreaks as water resources dwindled alarmingly.

UNICEF’s strategy, according to the report, has been to help Sahel governments with resettlement programs, based on the concept of getting people to produce their own food at sites with adequate water supplies.

Not the least of the region’s paradoxes is the belated respect that many international aid workers now have for Burkina Faso’s radical young leader, Thomas Sankara.

When Sankara seized power in Burkina Faso (then Upper Volta) in August, 1983, and pledged to launch the country on a radical socialist course, many in the West feared the country would go the way of other left-leaning Third World states where lack of incentive for farmers led to a sharp slump in food output.

However, the report, which echoes the views of foreign aid officials working in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, commends the country for officially selling food aid through its National Cereal Bureau and using the proceeds to fund development programs.

While the country’s policies do not encourage entrepreneurial farming, the officials say they are clearly ending Burkina Faso’s traditional aid assistance mentality.

Another trend backed by UNICEF is the so-called Food for Work system applied in Chad and Mali and soon to be introduced in Mauritania. The system requires local people to dig irrigation ditches or prepare farmland in return for provisions from the U.N. World Food Program.