China to help Mali build agricultural research center

China has extended a U.S.$9 million loan to build an agricultural research station.

The center, which will be constructed on a 20-hectare piece of land in Koulikoro region, will be used for purposes of "experimentation, research and technical training as well as for the development of sustainable agriculture."

The center will mainly be used for the development of rice and maize farming.

Peoples' Daily 

Mali leads in farming-related climate change mitigation effort

Climate change affects agriculture in Africa more than in the rest of the world and that can cause hunger in various countries there. But it is possible for governments to fight the problem, delegates at the climate change conference, COP 17, in Durban heard.

An example is the West African country of Mali, which ranks as one of the countries most vulnerable to climate-related hunger, even though the country's carbon emissions are minimal. However, instead of waiting for disaster to strike, the government there is taking steps to adapt.

The government of Mali shared the lessons they learnt in agriculture and climate at a session at COP 17.

Souleymane Cissé, from the Malian environment ministry, commented: "The paradox is although Mali isn't producing carbon emissions, we are the first victim of climate change. We could not stand by and do nothing."

Dr Alamin Sinna Toure, from the Environment and Sanitation Agency in Mali, gave an overview of the challenges facing Mali and the steps taken to meet them.

The bulk of Mali's economy is based on agriculture and fishing, with 80 percent of the population working in agriculture.

"Agriculture is the motor of the Malian economy", said Toure.

Lack of rainfall is one problem. Mali's rainfall fell by 20 percent between 1971 and 2000, and things could get worse. The forecasts are alarming, with a further 11 percent reduction expected by 2025. As the rains dry up, the temperature rises. There could be an increase of between four and 4.5°C.

"The result", said Toure, "is 68 percent of the population will be exposed to food insecurity.

Reviving old agricultural methods may help, according to Adama Kouyaté, from Mali's ministry of agriculture. "We are trying not to rely on rain, by reviving old agricultural techniques. We are reviving old seeds which were used long ago, replanting them and reviving those crops", he explained.

Uncertain rainfall translates into uncertain harvest times. With the seasons based on rainfall, farmers can no longer be sure when the season starts.

"A drought can take place at any cycle of plant growth - all this has repercussions on the reproductive cycle, and affects yield", said Toure. "If we have a year of drought like in 1983/1984, the production system will be hugely affected", he added.

To safeguard its future, Mali has developed a national initiative on climate change and an action plan. The national plan of climatic adaptation has invested in projects which help farmers adapt to climate change.

"The big policy lines involve capacity building in various sectors so each can know their role, promote and develop use of different types of land", explained Toure. "We can thus use more suitable varieties for different areas."

An important aspect is to enable farmers to limit methane emissions especially in irrigator zones.

Two projects in particular provide solutions to problems faced by farmers. The objectives of the Integration of Resilience in Agricultural Production for Food Security are capacity building, standing up to climate change and integrating various strategies in agricultural development projects.

The first component of this project was to change operations on the ground.

"We were trying to multiply the number of varieties of seeds that tolerate stress, and then distribute these seeds", said Toure.

Integrated management of ground fertility, and participative knowledge allowed farmers to adopt better management practice, which resulted in better crops. Hands-on field schools were set up to educate farmers on climate change, and management. To date, 600 centres have been established.

The outcome met expectations. Thirty percent of cultivated areas improved due to implemented strategies.

The ministry of agriculture's project to improve adaptive capacity to climate change included capacity-building for the most vulnerable - the rural population. Targeted communities received agriculture assistance.

Toure stressed this project was dependent on community participation. "Together with the help of the community, the government could help its population. Complete holistic actions are needed to deal with climate change."

Cissé elaborated on the strategic framework. "In July 2010 we developed an agency for sustainable development, and a national council for environment including stakeholders from all sectors-private and public. We also have a fund, Climate Mali, to have necessary investments to adapt or fight off climate change. We've invested in a green economy."

Optimistic of Mali's future, Toure announced an ambition to be an agricultural powerhouse. "We have the ambition and potential, but we lack the funds", he said. The nation supposedly has big potential in terms of agricultural land. "Thirty million hectares of arable land are available for agriculture or herding", claimed Toure.

Despite this potential, Mali remains a poor country with a precarious food supply situation.

allafrica.com

Great 'water grab' accompanying foreign interest in African farm land

The banks of the Niger river, in southern Mali, have been flooded by a steady stream of foreigners. Coveted by foreign investors eager to snap up large tracts of fertile farmland, the river basin has been at the centre of a race to get hold of African land at rock-bottom prices.

Meanwhile, last week, hundreds of smallholder farmers and civil society activists flocked to the same river basin for the first international conference to tackle the global rush for land.

West Africa's largest river, the Niger is thought to sustain over 100 million people as it snakes 4,180km through Mali and Niger before emptying into Nigeria's colossal Niger Delta. In Mali, the Office du Niger is home to the vast majority of the country's largescale land deals, seen by campaigners as emblematic of the "land grabs" taking place in developing countries. Recent estimates suggest that foreign investment in Mali's limited arable land jumped by 60% between 2009 and 2010. But the potential knock-on effects of these land deals on local communities' access to water has rarely made it centre-stage.

Ongoing research from the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development seeks to redress this blindspot, honing in on how such land deals might affect water access for fishing, farming and pastoralist communities. In a policy paper out on Thursday, the IIED's Jamie Skinner and Lorenzo Cotula warn that an alarming number of African governments seem to be signing away water rights for decades, with major implications for local communities.

Investors in farmland are, understandably, after land with high growing potential – either land with lots of rainfall or land that can be irrigated. What Skinner and Cotula note is a worrying trend where governments are being rushed into signing away water rights during negotiations where they were initially only considering leasing land.

In many cases, say Skinner and Cotula, governments seem willing to simply provide water free of charge. In Mali and Sudan, for example, some investors have been given unrestricted access to as much water as they need. In other cases, where investors must pay to use water, they are often charged according to how much land is irrigated rather than how much water is used.

The role water plays in fuelling the global rush for land has received significant attention. It is no coincidence, observers say, that the most aggressive foreign investors are also those facing water shortages at home. This year, risk analysis firm Maplecroft said the results from its water stress index showed why India, South Korea and China, along with the oil rich Gulf states, are racing to buy land in developing countries and grow crops abroad. The chairman and former CEO of Nestlé, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, has gone so far as to say the global rush for farmland is actually a "great water grab". He writes in Foreign Policy: "With the land comes the right to withdraw the water linked to it, in most countries essentially a freebie that increasingly could be the most valuable part of the deal."

But the effect of these deals on local communities' water access has been a black hole in the debate around land grabs. And it is a severe omission, according to Skinner and Cotula, who stress how long-term contractural commitments with investors can jeopardise water access not only for those living near the agricultural investments but also for those living downstream. "When land is assigned to private investors, the deal only impacts directly on existing users of that land," they explain. "Allocating water to irrigated agriculture potentially affects a much broader range of users."

A 2011 report from researchers at the University of Manchester highlights similar concerns: "Impacts are likely to be far more extensive than might be anticipated from the area of land occupied … restriction or interruption of flows of water in an area occupied in one part of the landscape will have potentially widespread downstream impacts."

According to the IIED paper, in some cases estimates of potential water requirements have run so large that major dam projects are being considered to ensure supply. The controversial Gibe III dam in Ethiopia, for example, will help irrigate 150,000 hectares that the government has allocated to investors. A report published by the African Development Bank says the project could lower the water level of Kenya's Lake Turkana, on which around half a million people depend, by eight metres by 2024.

In an earlier review of land deal contracts, Cotula noted that leases in semi-arid countries would be worthless if they did not ensure access to sufficient water for agricultural use. But just as land without water may be useless to agricultural investors, the same goes for local communities. Will future water conflicts be triggered by the downstream effect of today's land grabs in Africa? Land, it seems, is only a small part of the land grab equation.

The Guardian

Mali farmers adopt short-season crop as rainfall shifts

by Soumaila T Diarra

Mariam Coulibaly surveys the leaves of groundnuts growing in the fields outside her village. The crop is a traditional one in this west African country, but the seed variety is not.

“We no longer grow tikaba (a traditional variety of groundnut)… It has disappeared from our region,” Coulibaly says.

Shifting patterns of rainfall, likely associated with climate change, have shortened the rainy season in Mali to no more than three months. But the old groundnuts took four months to grow, which dramatically cut yields as conditions changed.

Now, Coulibaly and other women in the farming cooperative she heads cultivate a variety of groundnut with a growing cycle of just three months.

“As these groundnut seeds grow rapidly we always harvest before the end of the rainy season,” she said.

The seeds were first provided in the region by the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), which creates short-cycle seeds adapted to the changing climate.

The new seeds, which the women of Wakoro have been planting since 2002, yield a harvest of 30 bags per hectare (2.5 acres). Before the switch in varieties, the women were able to harvest only two to three 100 kg (220 pounds) bags of nuts.

At local prices, a 100 kg bag of nuts can fetch around 23,000 CFA francs (about $50) - less than in the cities but enough to grant the farmers improved economic security as harvests rise.

While farmers in the region mostly grow staple crops for food, groundnuts – grown largely for sale - are their most important source of income, and have helped make up for failures of other crops.

“The husband of a member of the cooperative was jailed because he couldn’t pay back his loan when his cotton (crop) failed. Her wife sold her groundnut harvest to pay back the loan,” said Amadou Traore, a researcher at ICRISAT who looks after the cooperative members’ farming.

Villages pay other expenses such as their children’s schooling out of their income from groundnut cultivation, Traore said.

The Wakoro cooperative has enabled its members not only to address the problems of a changing climate, but to strengthen their economic position in a country where women are not allowed to own land themselves and must ask their husbands for plots to use.

The cooperative began in 2000 with 25 women who had grown mostly sorghum, a staple crop in the region.

To boost their harvests, the members began planting three different groundnut varieties using seeds received from ICRISAT. From the first harvest on Coulibaly’s plot, the other women received 5 kg (11 lb) of seed for the upcoming farming season.

“The success of the groundnuts we grow encouraged other women, and now there are 65 members coming from different villages,” said Coulibaly.

After every harvest, each cooperative member brings 20 kg (44 lb) of groundnuts to store in a communal warehouse. Each member has the right to take 10 kg (22 lb) later in the season for her own use. Storing part of the harvest helps ensure that farmers don’t run out of money before the next crop is ready.

The other half of the stockpiled nuts is sold, generating 150,000 francs ($320) for the cooperative. The money is then loaned to cooperative members for their individual projects or other needs.

“The only problem we have is that we may not have all the space we need to farm, but if you ask your husband for a plot you will get it,” said Seba Mariko, a member of the cooperative.

The cooperative’s seeds have been certified by the Malian government for sale to other famers, and the women of Wakoro are looking for bigger export markets.

“People from our village and the nearby villages come to buy groundnut seeds from us,” Coulibaly said.

Reuters

Climate information alerts help poor farmers

by Riedner Mumbi and Polly Ghazi

A herder shepherding his animals in Zambia's Eastern Province winds up a solar-powered radio and crouches down to listen to a local FM station. The news broadcast includes a warning that a severe storm is approaching his village. The herder reacts instantly, finding shelter nearby for his animals, which later emerge from the storm unscathed.

Such a scene may be played out increasingly in the future across Africa, where the livelihoods of rural inhabitants are critically dependent on weather and climate. Most are peasant farmers who depend solely on rain for their crop production. A single extreme event such as a major flood or prolonged drought can not only cause loss of life, but also economic setbacks equivalent to years' worth of development.

As climate change intensifies...effective adaptation for rural regions of Africa will depend on timely and accurate advance information.

The Zambian government has been one of the first in Africa to recognize this need. Through its RANET (Radio and Internet for the Communication of Hydro-Meteorological Information) Project, the Zambia Meteorological Department is tapping remote communities across several provinces to collect climate information..

The results have been so encouraging that the Zambian Met Office is now considering providing automatic weather stations and rudimentary meteorological training to rural farmer cooperatives across the country.

In order to help remote rural areas receive (as well as collect) timely weather and climate information, the RANET Project sends weather alerts via SMS text and has also been assisting rural areas to establish community FM broadcasting stations. These pick up regional climate information from satellites, translate relevant weather information into local languages and are then used to broadcast timely warnings over extreme weather, such as storms, as well as seasonal climate information.

The project provides communities with solar wind-up radio receivers to access the broadcasts, 3,000 of which have been distributed across rural regions to date.

In Mali, similar weather forecast bulletins, broadcast every 10 days, have helped low income smallholder farmers to increase yields by providing vital information on when and what to plant, depending on the climatic conditions.

 World Resources Report

African countries getting a raw deal in land leases

by Bruce Krasting

Everyone who eats is aware that agricultural prices have been on a tear the past few years. With this has come a sharp increase in the value of arable land. Deep topsoil farmland in Iowa has changed hands as high as $11,000 an acre recently. That’s up from about $6,000 just a few years ago.

The shortage of arable land has gone global. Africa has seen an explosion of activity since 2008. How big is the land grab? Who’s doing the grabbing? It’s hard to tell as there is no central source of information and many of the transactions are not made public. An outfit called the Oakland Group has been compiling information on this. From their June 8 press release:

The scale, rate and negative impact of land deals is alarming. In 2009 alone nearly 60 million ha– an area the size of France – was purchased or leased in comparison to an average annual expansion of global agricultural land of less than 4 million ha before 2008.

Consider these three maps. They describe the scope of what has happened in Mali, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia.







The total in these two countries alone is 460k HA or 1.14 million acres. How big is that? Big. This is an area the size of Rhode Island, It is about 80Xs the size of Manhattan. But this is small beer. Consider what is going on in one of the poorest countries in the world, Ethiopia:




The total of 5.3mm acres in just this one country is equal to the size of New Jersey. It’s the same as the combined area of both Connecticut and Delaware. If you’re thinking of a European comparison this is equal in size to about half the land of Switzerland, Denmark or the Netherlands. It’s equal to all of Israel.

Who’s playing in this big land grab? Hedge funds and other speculators are big, so are a number of US Universities. From The Oakland report:

Western firms, wealthy US and European individuals, and investment funds with ties to major banks such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan.

Surprised that Goldie and JP are involved? I’m not. Some other players:

Several Texas-based interests are associated with a major 600,000 ha South Sudan deal which involves Kinyeti Development, LLC, an Austin, Texas-based “global business development partnership and holding company,” managed by Howard Eugene Douglas, a former United States Ambassador at Large and Coordinator for Refugee Affairs.

A key player in the largest land deal in Tanzania is Iowa agribusiness entrepreneur and Republican Party stalwart, Bruce Rastetter, who concurrently serves as CEO of Pharos Ag, co-founder and Managing Director of AgriSol Energy, CEO of Summit Farms, and is an important donor to the Iowa State University.

Major investors in Sierra Leone include Addax Bioenergy from Switzerland and Quifel International Holdings (QIH) from Portugal. Sierra Leone Agriculture (SLA) is actually a subsidiary of the UK based Crad-l (CAPARO Renewable Agriculture Developments Ltd.), associated with the Tony Blair African Governance Initiative.

Are the African countries getting a square deal? Not even close:

In Sierra Leone official regulation requires investors to pay $5 per acre, or $12 per ha, per year.

In Ethiopia, Karuturi initially received land for just $1.25 per ha, the rate was later raised to $ 6.75 per ha. In comparison, rates for Brazil or Argentina are $5,000-6,000 per ha.

I loved this quote from Oakland:

“The research exposed investors who said it’s easy to make a land deal – that they could usually get what they want in exchange for giving a poor, tribal chief a bottle of Johnny Walker.”

I suppose that some good could come from all of this. Clearly there is going to be a very big push for agribusiness in Africa in the coming years. This would suggest that a new food supply is coming to a hungry world. It also suggests that there are going to be jobs and opportunity in the countries involved. I doubt that this will happen in the way the land grabbers are thinking. I’m sure that the likes of Tony Blair and Bruce Rastetter will do just fine, but the pensioners and LP interest are going to get clobbered when history repeats itself in Africa. At some point the locals are going to say “No”. At $2 an acre and a tax holiday to boot I wouldn’t blame them.

Wall Street Pit

Malian hopes to build world' s biggest ostrich farm

In Banguineda village, 35 kilometers South of Bamako, Malian entrepreneur Mamadou Coulibaly is making big money from a big bird.

Coulibaly's is keeping and breeding ostriches, the largest species of bird, which in the wild, was hunted for it's meat, feathers and tough skin and now survives around the world mostly in special farms.

Coulibaly approached a group of North Korean ostrich farmers who were breeding the birds in their country for advice on how to get started. He opened his ostrich farm in 2008 with 100 ostriches and the population has now grown to 3000 birds today, making it the biggest farm in West Africa.

"When I first started this project, I contacted a Korean company that speacialises in ostrich farming in North Korea. I made contact with them to see how they managed to develop ostrich farming," he said.

According to experts, for over a century, South Africa had a monopoly on large scale ostrich farming.

The bird had been hunted almost to extinction in 1865. South African farmers began breeding them and made fortunes in the early 1900s when ostrich feathers were in high demand by fashion designers around the world.

In 1989, South Africa banned the export of live ostrich and eggs to try and protect its market.

But ostrich eggs were smuggled out to the United States and Asia, including China and North Korea where breeding farms were established.

There, it is the meat, which many say tastes like beef, but is low in fat and cholesterol, which is most prized.

Ostriches thrive in arid and semi-desert areas, making Mali, which extends into the Sahara desert an ideal place to rare the big bird.

But catching them can be tricky. These birds aren't just the biggest - they are also the fastest, capable of speeds of up to 97 kilometers per hour.

Coulibaly is hoping to turn his farm and Mali into the next ostrich farming destination and with world-wide demand for ostrich products rising he is positioning himself to be the top supplier.

"In 2014, we'll be the world's largest because there are around 30,000 breeding ostriches in the world today and our ambition is to have 10,000 breeding ostriches by 2014," Coulibaly said.

Coulibaly says that the farm's turnover in 2010 was 1.4 million US dollars.

He is still working with North Korean experts to breed ostriches, whose eggs are stored in a high tech breeding center not far from his farm.

Kim Il Ung is the director of the breeding center.

"By 2015, we want to have at least 10,000 hens to establish a big farm. This is planned over a period of eight years and after that 100,000 ostriches will produce meat and furs here in Mali," said Kim.

Analysts say Africa has the fastest growing economy in the world after Asia, and is home to five out of seven of the swifests growing economies.

As African and world leaders gather in Cape Town, South Africa's for the World Economic Forum (WEF), job creation and Africa's economic integration in the world is expected to dominate discussion. Experts have highlighted entrepreneurship as a means to even further economic stability for the continent's populations.

Coulibaly, who is also investing in crocodile farming, is among a growing crop of African entrepreneurs who are trying to create wealth at home.

Mali's unemployment level is at 30 percent.

Mohamed Diawara, a shopkeeper at Bamako's national park, sells ostrich products from Coulibaly's farm, such as decorative eggs and handbags made out of ostrich skin.

"I am here thanks to Mr. Coulibaly. I used to work for him in Niger and when he started his ostrich and crocodile farming, I was doing leathercrafts for him at the time, he offered me to run this shop in the National park," Diawara said.

A breeding ostrich can sell for up to 5,000 US dollars and those whose feathers can be used for decoration can sell for around 3,000 US dollars.

Ensuring the sustainability of organic cotton production in Mali

Mali is one of the largest cotton producers in Africa and about 40 per cent of rural households depend on cotton for their livelihoods. But with world cotton prices having plummeted since the 1970s, and organic Fairtrade cotton selling for up to 50 per cent more than conventional cotton, the Mouvement Biologique Malien (MoBiom), an organic farming cooperative, has been supporting its 8,000 members to produce cotton organically since 2002.

By growing organic cotton, farmers no longer use agrochemicals, which are often expensive and can harm the environment and health of the farmers. But as organic production has increased, so has the exploitation of local plant species used to control pests. Realising that their increasing exploitation of useful pest control species from the wild was becoming unsustainable, farmers from Yanfolila (a MoBiom community) approached the Millennium Seed Bank (MSB) to help them domesticate a number of the natural pesticide species they use.

Through training and the improvement of local facilities for seed storage and wild plant cultivation, the MSB has been working in Mali since 2003 to conserve useful plants and build the capacity of communities to successfully store and propagate species that are locally important. "Seed banks are depositories of precious genetic diversity of value to agriculture, forestry, horticulture and medicine," explains Moctar Sacandé, MSBP international coordinator. "They play an increasingly important role in helping communities find new ways of conserving and using natural resources sustainably."

In 2008, the MSB helped the 55 Yanfolila farmers establish a useful plants garden. One thousand plants of ten useful pesticide species, including Carapa procera, Lannea microcarpa, and Securidaca longepeduncalata were planted. These wild native species, which produce by-products that repel or kill pests, are spread on plants several times during cultivation to protect them from pests. "We know that these plants are at least as good, if not better, than chemical pesticides because organic production is efficient and does not suffer from pest infestations," Sacandé adds.

The community provided the land and invested their time and effort in planting and raising the seedlings. A number of community members stated that this activity was important so that their children would also be able to collect and utilise the useful species in the future.

By growing plants with pesticide properties, this community is able to produce organic crops which can be sold at a premium, enhancing livelihoods. "Families no longer have to get into debt to buy expensive fertilisers and pesticides," Sacandé says. "Farmers now have enough to live on and no longer expose their skin and lungs to chemical products." The extra funds also allow the villagers to send their children to school, improve their standard of living and re-invest in organic fertiliser and compost storehouses.

News of the model garden has spread quickly and over 70 MoBiom communities (3,500- 4,000 people) from the Sikasso region of Mali have now asked for help to set up their own gardens. To support these additional communities, MSB has requested extra funding from bilateral donors and also the government. MSB is also planning to do further research to determine the optimum dosages and mixture proportions to maximise the potential of these pest repelling plants.

With support from the Swiss NGO Helvetas, MoBiom is continuing to offer farmers training, organic certification and a minimum price guarantee to help them increase their incomes. Through Fairtrade labelling, markets for organic cotton are growing, particularly in Europe, and farmers are receiving higher prices for their products. This has resulted in a decrease in rural poverty and increased employment, particularly for women who usually process the cotton ready for sale. The environment has also benefitted from organic production with improved soil management and increased conservation of biodiversity.

Beginning with 174 farmers, MoBiom has grown to include 73 cooperatives with 6,500 members, of which 30 per cent are women. Due to their success with cotton, MoBiom is now moving into other cash crops that are selling well in international export markets, including organic sesame, mangoes, groundnuts, and shea butter.

Due to the fluctuations in the cotton trade and risks associated with climate change, MoBiom is also actively promoting diversification into other markets. MoBiom is also exploring Fairtrade certification for shea butter and fonio and has plans to install sesame oil processing plants and construct a spinning mill, which would add significant value to the farmers' raw products and provide more jobs, particularly for women.

With contributions from Moctar Sacandé, MSBP international coordinator

Date published: February 201

New Agriculturalist

Mali opposition party demands land lease details

by Martin Vogl

An opposition party in Mali wrote to the country's president demanding that details of contracts leasing out massive areas of agricultural land be made public.

the Party for National Renaissance said that since 2003 almost 2 million acres of farm land have been leased out in secret contracts to Chinese, Libyan and South African firms.

The party's complaint comes at the same time that the United Nations' Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Bank have been voicing increased concern about land grabs in developing countries, including Mali.

Bakary Kante, an adviser to the Malian prime minister on agricultural issues, said the government has been promoting private investment because multinationals can afford to finance much-needed infrastructure for the country.

The area concerned contains some of Mali's most fertile land located around the inland delta of the Niger River with good access to water thanks to a dam. Despite this, only a small fraction of the land has been linked up to proper irrigation to this day.

"There's a huge potential there, but the Malian state does not have the finances to pay for the irrigation infrastructure," Kante said. "The proof -- we've only managed to irrigate about 250,000 acres (100,000 hectares) since the dam was built, and that was 60 years ago."

Opposition party head Tiebile Drame said they planned to deliver the letter February 12 to Malian President Amadou Toumani Toure at a ceremony marking the beginning of work on land leased to the West African Economic and Monetary Union.

"Hundreds of Malian families have already been moved from their lands and villages because of these deals," said Drame. "From what we have seen, we have the impression that hundreds of thousands of hectares of Malian land have been given away almost for free."

Libyan state-owned company Malibya, which has 250,000 acres, is among the parties that leased large sections of land. The South African firm Illovo Group has 34,000 acres, and a Chinese backed project, N'Sukula, has been granted 32,000 acres. Malian companies have also been granted large holdings, including the firm Huicoma which reportedly has a deal for 250,000 acres.

Malibya has already financed the construction of a new irrigation canal and a tarmacked road. Local farmers, however, complain that they were not properly compensated for land acquired to build the canal and that it is now more difficult to move their cattle around the area.

Farmers' groups and international organizations have also been voicing increasing concern over the last few years about land grabs in developing countries. Oxfam, the International Institute for Environment and Development, the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Bank have all produced reports on the issue recently.

The U.N. has come up with a set of principles to guide investments such as these, including respecting land rights, ensuring food security and ensuring transparency.

"There's been a lot of secrecy around these contracts," said Faliry Boly, a rice farmer in the region and the head of the farmers union in the affected area.

"We are giving our land away. Farmers who work their own land might one day become farm laborers for these big multinationals," he said. "We here in Africa were colonized once, we would be stupid to let it happen again."

Businessweek

Africa’s flourishing Niger Delta threatened by Libya water plan

by Fred Pearce

Threatened by Libya Water Plan Daouda Sanankoua is an aquatic mayor, and proud of it. The elected boss of the district of Deboye arrived for our meeting in the West African state of Mali last month by overnight ferry. At this time of year, the majority of his district is flooded. Thank goodness. “More water is good,” he said, peering at his foreign inquisitor over his glasses. “Everything here depends on the water, but the government is taking our water.”

While we spoke, in the tiny schoolyard of Akka village, a few meters from the lapping waters of Lake Deboye, the headlines around the world brought news of flood disasters in Australia, Brazil, and Sri Lanka. But Daouda was grateful for the annual swelling of the River Niger, which left most of his 24 villages marooned. For without the water, they would be desert.

The floods in what geographers call the inner Niger delta nurture abundant fish for the Bozo people, who lay their nets in every waterway and across the lakes. As the waters recede, they leave wet soils in which the Bambara people plant millet and rice, and they expose vast aquatic pastures of bourgou (or hippo grass) that sustain cattle and goats brought by nomadic Fulani herders from as far away as Mauritania and Burkina Faso. This inland delta is Africa’s second-largest floodplain and one of its most unique wetlands. Seen from space, it is an immense smudge of green and blue on the edge of the Sahara.

But this rare and magnificently productive ecosystem is now facing an unprecedented threat, as a Libyan-backed enterprise has begun construction of a project inside Mali that will divert large amounts of Niger River water for extensive irrigation upstream.

This is all part of a grand plan by Gaddafi to make his desert nation self-sufficient in food.This is all part of a grand plan by Libyan leader Moammar Gaddafi to make his desert nation self-sufficient in food through long-term deals with nearby countries to grow food for Libya. Mali’s president has agreed to the scheme, which numerous experts say will enhance Libyan food security at the expense of Malian food security by sucking dry the river that feeds the inland delta, diminishing the seasonal floods that support rich biodiversity — and thriving agriculture and fisheries vital to a million of Mali’s poorest citizens — on the edge of the Sahara desert.

“More people will lose than win from most irrigation projects in Mali,” says Jane Madgwick, CEO of Netherlands-based Wetlands International, with whom I traveled for three days in the inner Niger delta. “These projects will decrease food security by damaging the livelihoods of those most vulnerable. What they are trying to do at the moment makes no sense because there is simply not enough water.”

Larger than Belgium, the Niger’s inland delta, laced with rivers and marshes, runs for 250 miles from northeast to southwest in central Mali, one of Africa’s poorest countries. The rights to harvest the delta’s fish and graze pastures are based on long-standing custom neither known nor recognized beyond its borders. I had spent days exploring this world as the seasonal floodwaters began to recede. I watched the arrival of the Fulani and talked to fishing families as they packed up their homes and left their villages to set up temporary camps beside the pools where the fish would concentrate in the weeks ahead.

Out there in the waters somewhere were a few surviving hippos, African manatees, and the odd crocodile. Madgwick constantly grabbed her binoculars to spot kingfishers, marsh harriers, cormorants, and purple herons, many of them winter migrants from Europe. Her organization is working with locals to revive flooded forests destroyed in past droughts, to maintain fish ponds among the flooded grasses, to extend the new practice of cultivating bourgou, and to encourage kitchen gardens planted by women’s groups.

But all this is threatened by events upstream, said the mayor: Others want his water. Over a torch-lit evening meal of Nile perch, millet porridge, and bananas — all fruits of the wetland — he said that this year the rains were good and the waters high. But even so, some dams built prior to the Libyan project, which irrigate 235,000 acres, have already diverted water and changed the timing of when it reaches the wetland, damaging the wet pastures and upsetting fish breeding. Some species have disappeared as a result. And, say Madgwick and others, much worse is to come.

Daouda Sanankoua said dams have already diverted water and changed the timing of when it reaches his district. Libya’s wholesale move into Malian irrigation and agriculture is the result of a secret deal between Mali’s president, Amadou Toumani Toure, and Libya’s Colonel Gadaffi. Paid for by Gadaffi’s sovereign investment fund, theLibya Africa Portfolio Fund for Investment, the deal hands the land to a Libyan-controlled organization called Malibya for 50 years and gives the Libyans undisclosed rights to the region’s water. Why would the Mali president sign up to this?

Local campaigners say their government is in thrall — and hock — to Libya because it has become dependent on Libya for aid and investment. Many of its civil servants work in offices built by Libya, and international visitors stay at Libyan-built hotels. And, says Lamine Coulibaly, head of communications for the Mali small farmers’ union, CNOP, the government is so obsessed with getting investment for its agriculture that it cannot see when that investment will do more harm than good to its people.

Before going to the delta, I had visited a new canal stretching 25 miles north from the River Niger to 250,000 acres of proposed irrigated land at the edge of the marshes. The canal, part of the Libyan project, was dug last year by Chinese contractors, who are now preparing the first 15,000 acres of fields.

The project is one of many major investments by Libya all across Mali. Gadaffi is using his petrodollars to fund government buildings, hotels, and other high-profile infrastructure. Critics such as Coulibaly call the farm mega-project a land grab. But far more important, it is also a water grab on a huge scale. Coulibaly adds: “We have enough land; we don’t have enough water.”

The scale is breathtaking. The brand new intake works for the scheme can grab as much as 210 cubic meters a second, potentially more than doubling
The delta is a vital green resource for both humans and wildlife on the edge of the Sahara.the amount of water taken from the river for irrigation. The director general of Malibya, Abdalilah Youssef, boasted in 2008 that his new canal could supply up to 4 cubic kilometers of water a year to the enterprise’s fields of rice, tomatoes, and fodder crops for cattle. The current take for all other existing irrigation projects is 2.7 cubic kilometers a year.

Already, engineers at the Office du Niger — an agency created by presidential fiat to develop land upstream of the inner Niger delta — admit they are struggling to maintain the minimum flow of 40 cubic meters a second down the Niger to the delta during the dry season, when an estimated 70 percent of river flow goes to farms rather than the wetland. The effects of taking more could be catastrophic on the floating forests and bourgou pastures at the heart of the delta’s ecosystems and human livelihoods.

A vital green resource for both humans and wildlife on the edge of the Sahara, the delta is a wintering ground for millions of migrating European birds and is vital to the flow of the Niger River and its fisheries. All this is threatened by the Libyan project. For example, planned dams and diversions will reduce the growth of the important bourgou grasses by almost two-thirds, according to a study by Leo Zwarts, a water management expert for the Dutch government.

Now, however, Malian officials have no control over the project. Their president has signed that away. They say the Libyans have carried out a social and environmental impact assessment, although its contents have not been made public. The job of the Malian officials is simply to organize compensation for the thousands of people who are expected to lose their homes to the irrigation projects and to find new land for those farmers who refuse to be turned into Gadaffi’s laborers.

There is no official confirmation, but few doubt that the rice grown here will go to Libya. More than 1,200 miles away across the Sahara, Gaddafi has spent $30 billion over the past three decades building the Great Man-made River, which pumps ancient water from deep beneath the desert through 1,800 miles of huge pipes to irrigate farms on the Mediterranean coast. But even with that giant hydrological enterprise in operation, Libya still depends on foreign markets for three-quarters of its grain.

The giant farm being built on the edge of the inner Niger delta by Malibya is his next big gambit.

Mali of course needs development. It is changing and so are the wants and needs of its people. Schools and clinics are starting to appear; every fishing encampment, however temporary, has a TV antenna; the fishing nets are
Any disruption of the region’s traditional way of life could feed Al Qaeda’s violent agenda.made of nylon and come from China; the kids wear Obama T-shirts and support European soccer teams; motorbikes are starting to replace donkeys; there is sporadic cellphone coverage and young village men break the still wetland nights with their sound systems. These days, too, traditional lines of ethnicity and livelihood are blurred as cattle herders take up fishing, fishers harvest grain, and millet farmers go herding. But the fecundity of the delta remains the basis of their survival in one of the poorest countries on Earth.

Many government officials see saving the wetland as an environmental priority they cannot afford in the push for human development. But in fact, maintaining the wetland is essential to development.

This year, the Mali government is expected to publish a ten-year “sustainable development plan” for the delta. Early drafts are said to sanction a big expansion of irrigation. European aid agencies funding the process have reportedly demanded a rewrite. Whatever it finally contains, the plan faces a long consultation process before being enacted, by which time the game may be over, the water swallowed up by the Libyan project and others.




MORE FROM YALE e360

Does Egypt Own The Nile?
A Battle Over Precious Water
A dispute between Egypt and upstream African nations has brought to the fore a long-standing controversy over who has rights to the waters of the Nile. The outcome, Fred Pearce writes, could have profound consequences for the ecological health of the river and for one of the world’s largest tropical wetlands.
READ MOREThis may not just be a local matter either. With Al Qaeda busy recruiting disaffected people such as the Tuareg nomads around Mali’s borders, any disruption to the traditional way of life could feed its violent agenda.

So this is a key moment that will likely determine the fate of one of Africa’s great natural resources, a living embodiment of how humans and nature can live not just in harmony but in synergy. Get it wrong and they will be creating new desert while claiming all the while to be greening it. Get it wrong and the repercussions could spread far and wide.

As we left the heart of the wetland for the provincial town of Mopti, our boat kept grounding on the bottom of the narrower waterways. Macaques laughed as we scrambled to resume our journey. The low water was simply a sign of the changing season, but it felt like an omen for the wetland.

POSTED ON 03 FEB 2011 IN BUSINESS & INNOVATION POLICY & POLITICS POLICY & POLITICS SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY SUSTAINABILITY WATER AFRICA NORTH AMERICA

http://e360.yale.edu/feature/a_major_libyan_water_project_puts_africas_niger_delta_at_risk/2366/

Foreign investment impact in Mali: whose land is it anyway?

by Madeleine Bunting

A new complex of government offices on the banks of the river Niger in Bamako, Mali. It's called the Administrative City and it was financed by the Libyan-backed Malibya development company. It is a powerful symbol of North African oil money and what it has to offer one of the poorest countries in the world.

Several hundred kilometres downstream there is more evidence of the petromillions pouring into Mali. In the dusty flat marshlands of Macina in the Ségou region, enormous green metal sluice gates tower over a massive new canal built by Malibya. Forty kilometres long and 30 metres wide, it is one of the biggest canals in sub-Saharan Africa.

The Chinese contractors have just finished building it and it is eerily quiet, with only the slap of water against the new concrete walls and the chatter of occasional groups of schoolchildren heading home. The canal is destined to irrigate a vast area of land – 100,000 hectares in total – in one of the most controversial and secretive land deals in Africa, a continent that has become a target for a greedy and hungry world.

In the last six years, there has been a dramatic increase in foreign investment in land deals across Africa and the Malibya deal – a 50-year lease agreed by the Malian and Libyan presidents – has become totemic of the fear that this new phenomon of land grabbing will deprive subsistence farmers of their land and their food.

Mali is one of the countries most affected by the scramble for land, and Ségou, the country's rice basket, is at the eye of the storm, with buyers from Senegal, South Africa, China, as well as domestic companies snapping up leases on thousands of hectares. This is land already intensively used in a country with one of the highest population growth rates in the world and where 80% of the people depend on farming for their livelihood.

As you stand by the sluice gates with the chalky brown water churning below, or you drive for the best part of an hour on the new road running alongside the vast canal, you get a sense of the dramatic scale and huge cost – estimated at $54.7m (£34.6m) – of the project.

Big ambitions are about to be unleashed on this land of small, mud walled villages, rice fields and grazing herds of cattle. Some villagers are hopeful that the new scheme will bring much needed irrigation and jobs to these desperately poor communities. Malibya has promoted its scheme as part of a bid to raise agricultural yields and improve food security in a country where many often go hungry.

"I'm not reassured by the promises," says Abduallai Kee, a member of the local farmers' union. "They tell the villagers that they will give compensation for land and that they will give jobs, but this is just to give villagers a feeling of having been 'consulted'." He has seen the maps of how the land will be parcelled out for mechanised rice production and fears that the dispossessed will have no choice but to work as day labourers.

No one knows if there has been an environmental impact assessment or what attempt has been made to map how many people are living on this land. Already, the canal has blocked several important cattle routes. What adds to the sense of insecurity is that Mali has almost no private land titles and land is owned ultimately by the state. Traditionally, this has been interpreted with respect for customary land use – both for grazing and agriculture. But it is far from clear that the rights of those currently living on the land will be protected. Already, more than 150 families have been forced off the land to make way for the canal, and campaigners worry that this is only the start.

"The government are bandits. What they are doing is completely against every law," says Ibrahim Coulibaly, president of the Coordination Nationale des Organisations Paysannes, which has been organising protests. "Even if the land does belong to the government, the people living on it still have rights, and we will do everything to fight against this injustice."

The danger is that it will exacerbate food insecurity in a country where malnutrition is widespread and food production is already seriously threatened by climate change, argues Mark Butler, the country representative for the UK aid agency Tearfund.

Georgette Foure saw her house and garden flattened to make way for the canal. She was paid just £511 for her house and fields. A widow and mother of six children, her eyes well up as she tells her story.

"I used to get a good harvest from my big garden and it helped me feed my family and pay for the children's education. Now we have nowhere to live. How would you feel if someone came early one morning and destroyed everything? It was unbelievable. They gave us some compensation but it was not enough and the land they gave us is a big hole in the ground which we will have to fill before it can even be used to grow anything."

She smooths down her dress; ironically, it is made of fabric celebrating Mali's recent 50th anniversary and emblazoned with the slogan "The Fiftieth is for You."

"It is hard to look ahead because my family depended on me. Now I work a little on other people's farms and doing odd jobs to survive. It's a nightmare and the only thing which gives me strength is to rely on God."

In the village of Kolongo, where Foure's house once stood, more villagers offer stories of inadequate compensation. The tumbled-down mud walls of their demolished homes are still evident beside the new canal.

Tienty Tangaka stands on the baked earth and rubble where his home and garden once stood. Beside him is the massive stump of a neem tree that was cut down to make way for the heavy equipment needed for construction.

"The compensation they gave was not enough to build a new house," he says, his clothes ragged. "We are very deeply shocked. I have lived here all my life but I was told my smallholding was not on the map used by Malibya to build the canal. They took me to the tribunal and I was told that I had built on land where building was not allowed – and I lost my home.

"This project is good for the government but it is not good for the people. Even before it has become operational we are seeing the drawbacks; once the gates opened on the canal we saw all the water pour in, we knew there would be less water for others.

"We had meetings with Malibya but the compensation they have offered is too little for our families. We have no words to describe this betrayal. I'm not worried about myself – I'm 51 and in another 10 years I will be done. But my little children, I don't know what will be their future. I don't know how they will survive."

Standing in the ruins of Tangaka' s old home, two brand new phone masts are visible on the other side of the canal. There are also plans for an airstrip, which is fuelling suspicions that the rice produced is not destined for Mali but for export to Libya to meet the need for cheap food for its large migrant workforce. Like many Middle-Eastern countries, oil-rich Libya imports large quantities of food and it needs to ensure cheap and plentiful supplies.

A little further on, just beyond Kolongo, in the village of Bourant, the David and Goliath conflict between these villagers and Malibya came to a head a few months ago. During his nightshift, one construction worker noticed that the bulldozer was turning up human corpses. Without adequate maps, the construction team had stumbled into two adjacent cemeteries, one for Muslims and one for Christians. Uproar ensued with nearby villagers grabbing farm tools to form a blockade against the bulldozers. Work stopped for several weeks.

Diarra Seynei takes us to the area beside the canal. "Considering the culture and traditions of Mali, this is a big shame, an insult to our values. This was the resting place of our parents," he says.

We walk on the bare earth along the dyke in the baking heat, listening to his story of outrage. We stumble on a fragment of human skull.

"They could have avoided the graveyard but they wanted to do the job quickly and they wanted the straight route. Many people cried when the bodies were taken from the graves. It was a big shock," he adds.

Worst of all, he says, there was no way to identify the broken bodies or to work out which bones were Muslim and which Christian for reburial in the new sites.

As we are talking, a large truck draws up. A Malibya manager approaches us, asking us what we are doing and tells us that the land is private property. Our guides talk vaguely of research and the manager is suspicious, insisting that we should have asked permission from his office. The atmosphere is tense, and we leave.

Local farmers risk losing their land and their livelihood, but perhaps the greatest risk of this project is the loss of water. Malibya has boasted that the new canal has the capacity for 11m cubic metres a day, 4bn cubic metres a year. Campaigners claim that is twice the capacity of any other canal in the region. Their concern is that neighbouring land will be deprived of water when stocks run low; they have heard rumours that Malibya has negotiated priority access to the water.

Water is everything in Mali: half the country is desert and the bulk of the population depends on the river Niger, which dominates the country's central belt and forms one of Africa's biggest inland swamps, an area crucial to Mali's rice production, fishing and nomadic cattleherding economy. Further downstream, another five countries depend on its waters before it finally empties into the Atlantic in Nigeria. The Malibya deal is making not just many Malians anxious, it is making its neighbours uneasy as well.

The Guardian

African farmers displaced as investors move in

by Neil MacFarquhar

The half-dozen strangers who descended on this remote West African village brought its hand-to-mouth farmers alarming news: their humble fields, tilled from one generation to the next, were now controlled by Libya’s leader, Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, and the farmers would all have to leave.

“They told us this would be the last rainy season for us to cultivate our fields; after that, they will level all the houses and take the land,” said Mama Keita, 73, the leader of this village veiled behind dense, thorny scrubland. “We were told that Qaddafi owns this land.”

Across Africa and the developing world, a new global land rush is gobbling up large expanses of arable land. Despite their ageless traditions, stunned villagers are discovering that African governments typically own their land and have been leasing it, often at bargain prices, to private investors and foreign governments for decades to come.

Organizations like the United Nations and the World Banksay the practice, if done equitably, could help feed the growing global population by introducing large-scale commercial farming to places without it.

But others condemn the deals as neocolonial land grabs that destroy villages, uproot tens of thousands of farmers and create a volatile mass of landless poor. Making matters worse, they contend, much of the food is bound for wealthier nations.

“The food security of the country concerned must be first and foremost in everybody’s mind,” said Kofi Annan, the former United Nations secretary general, now working on the issue of African agriculture. “Otherwise it is straightforward exploitation and it won’t work. We have seen a scramble for Africa before. I don’t think we want to see a second scramble of that kind.”

A World Bank study released in September tallied farmland deals covering at least 110 million acres — the size of California and West Virginia combined — announced during the first 11 months of 2009 alone. More than 70 percent of those deals were for land in Africa, with Sudan, Mozambique and Ethiopia among those nations transferring millions of acres to investors.

Before 2008, the global average for such deals was less than 10 million acres per year, the report said. But the food crisis that spring, which set off riots in at least a dozen countries,prompted the spree. The prospect of future scarcity attracted both wealthy governments lacking the arable land needed to feed their own people and hedge funds drawn to a dwindling commodity.

“You see interest in land acquisition continuing at a very high level,” said Klaus Deininger, the World Bank economist who wrote the report, taking many figures from a Web site run by Grain, an advocacy organization, because governments would not reveal the agreements. “Clearly, this is not over.”

The report, while generally supportive of the investments, detailed mixed results. Foreign aid for agriculture has dwindled from about 20 percent of all aid in 1980 to about 5 percent now, creating a need for other investment to bolster production.

But many investments appear to be pure speculation that leaves land fallow, the report found. Farmers have been displaced without compensation, land has been leased well below value, those evicted end up encroaching on parkland and the new ventures have created far fewer jobs than promised, it said.

The breathtaking scope of some deals galvanizes opponents. In Madagascar, a deal that would have handed over almost half the country’s arable land to a South Korean conglomerate helped crystallize opposition to an already unpopular president and contributed to his overthrow in 2009.

People have been pushed off land in countries like Ethiopia, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Liberia and Zambia. It is not even uncommon for investors to arrive on land that was supposedly empty. In Mozambique, one investment company discovered an entire village with its own post office on what had been described as vacant land, said Olivier De Schutter, the United Nations food rapporteur.

In Mali, about three million acres along the Niger River and its inland delta are controlled by a state-run trust called the Office du Niger. In nearly 80 years, only 200,000 acres of the land have been irrigated, so the government considers new investors a boon.

“Even if you gave the population there the land, they do not have the means to develop it, nor does the state,” said Abou Sow, the executive director of Office du Niger.

He listed countries whose governments or private sectors have already made investments or expressed interest: China and South Africa in sugar cane; Libya and Saudi Arabia in rice; and Canada, Belgium, France, South Korea, India, the Netherlands and multinational organizations like the West African Development Bank.

In all, Mr. Sow said about 60 deals covered at least 600,000 acres in Mali, although some organizations said more than 1.5 million acres had been committed. He argued that the bulk of the investors were Malians growing food for the domestic market. But he acknowledged that outside investors like the Libyans, who are leasing 250,000 acres here, are expected to ship their rice, beef and other agricultural products home.

“What advantage would they gain by investing in Mali if they could not even take their own production?” Mr. Sow said.

As with many of the deals, the money Mali might earn from the leases remains murky. The agreement signed with the Libyans grants them the land for at least 50 years simply in exchange for developing it.

“The Libyans want to produce rice for Libyans, not for Malians,” said Mamadou Goita, the director of a nonprofit research organization in Mali. He and other opponents contend that the government is privatizing a scarce national resource without improving the domestic food supply, and that politics, not economics, are driving events because Mali wants to improve ties with Libya and others.

The huge tracts granted to private investors are many years from production. But officials noted that Libya already spent more than $50 million building a 24-mile canal and road, constructed by a Chinese company, benefiting local villages.

Every farmer affected, Mr. Sow added, including as many as 20,000 affected by the Libyan project, will receive compensation. “If they lose a single tree, we will pay them the value of that tree,” he said.

But anger and distrust run high. In a rally last month, hundreds of farmers demanded that the government halt such deals until they get a voice. Several said that they had been beaten and jailed by soldiers, but that they were ready to die to keep their land.

“The famine will start very soon,” shouted Ibrahima Coulibaly, the head of the coordinating committee for farmer organizations in Mali. “If people do not stand up for their rights, they will lose everything!”

“Ante!” members of the crowd shouted in Bamanankan, the local language. “We refuse!”

Kassoum Denon, the regional head for the Office du Niger, accused the Malian opponents of being paid by Western groups that are ideologically opposed to large-scale farming.

“We are responsible for developing Mali,” he said. “If the civil society does not agree with the way we are doing it, they can go jump in a lake.”

The looming problem, experts noted, is that Mali remains an agrarian society. Kicking farmers off the land with no alternative livelihood risks flooding the capital, Bamako, with unemployed, rootless people who could become a political problem.

“The land is a natural resource that 70 percent of the population uses to survive,” said Kalfo Sanogo, an economist at the United Nations Development Fund in Mali. “You cannot just push 70 percent of the population off the land, nor can you say they can just become agriculture workers.” In a different approach, a $224 million American project will help about 800 Malian farmers each acquire title to 12 acres of newly cleared land, protecting them against being kicked off.

Jon C. Anderson, the project director, argued that no country has developed economically with a large percentage of its population on farms. Small farmers with titles will either succeed or have to sell the land to finance another life, he said, though critics have said villagers will still be displaced.

“We want a revolutionized relationship between the farmer and the state, one where the farmer is more in charge,” Mr. Anderson said.

Soumouni sits about 20 miles from the nearest road, with wandering cattle herders in their distinctive pointed straw hats offering directions like, “Bear right at the termite mound with the hole in it.”

Sekou Traoré, 69, a village elder, was dumbfounded when government officials said last year that Libya now controlled his land and began measuring the fields. He had always considered it his own, passed down from grandfather to father to son.

“All we want before they break our houses and take our fields is for them to show us the new houses where we will live, and the new fields where we will work,” he said at the rally last month.

“We are all so afraid,” he said of the village’s 2,229 residents. “We will be the victims of this situation, we are sure of that.”

New York Times

Malian cotton struggles against international subsidies

by Ruudhan Mac Cormaici

Cotton has been in Broulaye Traoré’s family long enough for him to remember the days when they used to call it “white gold.”

In the decades after Malian independence in 1960, surging global demand pushed yields higher and great swathes of land here in the Sikasso region, in the southwest of Mali, turned white as smallholders switched to the fluffy cash crop. When Traoré took over as head of his extended family in the early 1990s, he remembers business running smoothly.

“In 1994, there weren’t many problems with cotton,” he says, sitting in the shade of a tree in the village of Kolondieba, in the heart of Mali’s southern cotton belt. “It was straightforward: the government bought it from us and there was little trouble. The problems began a few years later, starting with problems getting paid.”

It’s the middle of the cotton harvest in Sikasso. Men and women can be seen in the fields from first light, leaning over the stalks, filling their baskets. Donkeys haul carts brimming with newly picked bulbs to the villages, where they’re collected by open-topped lorries that trundle for hours along dirt roads to deliver the stocks to the towns further north, where the raw product is packed for export.

Mali’s reliance on cotton is hard to overstate. In a country that ranks 178th out of 182 in the UN’s human development index, about 40 per cent of rural households, or 2.5 million people, depend on cotton for their livelihood. The crop accounts for one-third of cultivated land and provides the second largest source of foreign exchange earnings. But here and across the Cotton-4 – or C-4, as the west Africa producer countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Chad and Mali are collectively known – the industry is besieged by problems and the halcyon days of the late 20th century are retreating into memory.

Although Mali and its neighbours produce cotton more cheaply than anywhere else – a competitive advantage that logically should place the C-4 in a strong position to benefit from the world’s increasing appetite for cotton products – global processes outside their control have been constraining their potential.

A rise in cotton prices on world markets in 2007 and 2008 largely passed West African farmers by, because the dollar was weak against the CFA franc, which is pegged to the euro.

Then there is the long-term trend towards lower global prices, further dampened by a fall in demand for clothes when the recession took hold, which helps explain why production in the 12 main African cotton producers fell by 23.7 per cent between 2008 and 2009.

“The financial crisis hit Mali really hard,” says Rachel Hearson, business development manager for cotton at the Fairtrade Foundation. “Like other West African nations who rely on cotton for export revenue, they saw a dramatic reduction in orders for their cotton as the global demand for clothes dropped dramatically in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of western banks.”

Most of Mali’s cotton is exported to China, whose garment factories are the world’s biggest consumers but whose reduced output during the downturn has had a clear knock-on effect. In the same 12 African countries, production fell by 50 per cent between 2005 and 2009.

“The global crisis of 2008 led to big difficulties for us as well,” says Sidy Nguiro, of the pioneering Malian Organic Movement (Mobiom), a co-operative that includes 8,000 cotton producers.

“The market was badly hit, and it meant that 30-40 per cent of our production was unsold and just sat at the port in Dakar. The CMDT [state monopoly] couldn’t sell it.”

In Sikasso, falling prices led many smallholders simply to abandon cotton and replace it with food commodities such as maize or rice. Broulaye Traoré explains that in 1997 he had eight hectares of cotton, but the following year he halved it to four and kept it that way until last year, when prices stabilised and he planted more cotton seeds. Nearly everyone in his village – where cotton is grown by 95 per cent of farmers – did the same.

In a country where the typical cotton holding is two or three hectares, Traoré is a big producer, but his income from the land has to cover the needs of a large extended family. “My father is dead, so I’m the head of a family of 55 people now,” he says. “I have two wives and six children. I’m responsible for everything – health, food and all the necessities. It’s a lot of people.”

Traoré hopes to sell 18 tonnes of cotton this year, which – after loans have been repaid and equipment costs covered – will leave him with the equivalent of just over €2,300, or €44 a week, to meet the needs of 55 people over the coming year. “I really hope so,” he says of the target. The typical annual return on three hectares of cotton – the national average – would be less than €400.

The vulnerability of Malian producers to sudden price shifts on global markets casts uncertainty over every harvest. “People don’t know how much they’re going to get,” says Abdoulaye Soumara, an advocacy officer with Oxfam in Bamako. “They know how much they’ve produced but they have no idea about the international markets.”

A weak dollar and falling global demand have clearly shaken Mali’s cotton industry, but many believe the greatest impediment it faces is the policy of mostly rich-world governments of heavily subsidising their own cotton-growers.

The Great Cotton Stitch-Up, a report published last month by the Fairtrade Foundation, shows that in the past nine years, $47 billion has been given by the United States, the European Union, China and India to their cotton growers. Over 51 per cent of that has gone to US farmers, the world’s biggest cotton exporters. The effect of this “wall of subsidies” has been to dampen prices, “fatally undermining the C-4’s ability to trade their way out of poverty”, the report states.

“For the Cotton-4, it is a situation that spells economic ruination. With no subsidies to bail them out, Cotton-4 farmers struggle against insuperable odds to compete. And a lack of revenue means C-4 governments cannot afford to build roads, ports and other infrastructure to catalyse a garment industry that would employ millions of people and create greater value in a desperately underdeveloped sector.”

While no data exist to measure the distorting impact of subsidies at a national level, the World Bank says they reduce prices by 12.9 per cent, amounting to an annual revenue loss to African producers of $147 million.

In his office in a smart complex of municipal buildings in Kolondieba, Yacouba Koné, the state’s agriculture director for the region, says Mali’s problem is fundamentally that of the global market. “Our cotton, if you take the quality, is very competitive with other countries’, but with the subsidies . . . there’s a huge loss for Mali,” he says.

Koné is encouraged by recent news that cotton prices are again on the rise, but the effect will be limited, he says, unless Malian growers can play on a “level playing field” with their counterparts in the north. “Smallholders here are very much aware of the problem, but whose door do they knock on?”

Mali: in numbers

12,710,000: population

73.8%: adult illiteracy rate

48.1 years: life expectancy at birth

46.9 per cent: enrolment in education

77.1 per cent: population living on less than $2 a day

Source: United Nations Development Programme

Irish Times

Mali: Shea production vital to women's incomes

by Soumaïla T. Diarra

Across the semi-arid Sahel region of West Africa, the shea tree prized by women, who produce a butter from its nuts that is a key ingredient in food and cosmetics. However, drought and diseases threaten this source of income.

"Shea represents 80 percent of rural women's income," says Fatoumata Coulibaly, explaining how women go out to collect the nuts and later process them to make shea butter. Coulibaly is a member of La Maison du karité ("the House of Shea"), a women's group in Siby, a village in southern Mali. She was interviewed during Global Shea, an international forum on shea trade that took place in mid-March in Bamako, the Malian capital.

Shea trees grow wild in West Africa. According to experts, they take 25 years to reach maturity and their lifetime can span two centuries. In the rainy season, women pick the trees' fruit – a sweet pulp wrapped around an oily kernel. In the dry season, they sell a portion of their nuts to international companies and process the rest themselves for sale on the local market.

In West Africa, shea butter is used in cooking by nearly 80 percent of the rural population. Its also used in traditional medicine, and the wood from the tree is prized as fuel.

The trees many uses have assured its protection for centuries by local populations, some of whom even consider it sacred.

"We treat shea with respect. That is why we organise ceremonies when shea treas reach maturity," said Nayouma Coulibaly, a woman from Tioribougou, a village in southern Mali.

But now, according to the Albert Schweitzer Ecological Centre, a Swiss-based nongovernmental organization (NGO), shea trees face many threats such as drought, diseases and over-use as a source of firewood.

Not all observers agree that there is a problem.

"I don't think there's cause to worry. Actually, the number of shea trees is on the rise, because people have now started planting them. I've done so myself," said Seydou Kone.

Kone is a trade technician with AMEPROC, Mali's association of exporters of agricultural products, headquartered in Bamako. AMEPROC is combatting shea tree disappearance and disease by conducting public education in rural areas where shea trees are threatened, training local populations on shea planting and protection.

Among the roughly 16 countries where shea grows, Burkina Faso, Mali, Benin and Nigeria represent the bulk of world production. Mali occupies an important position in the market.

"With nearly 150 million shea treas, Mali is ranked second largest producer after Burkina Faso with an output of about 60,000 tonnes per year," Kadidiatou Lah said. Lah is a shea butter exporter based in Bamako. She's also the president of Mali's National Federation of Shea Exporters, which trains rural women in shea trea planting.

The growth of international demand for shea outside Africa is explained in part by its expanded use by the food industry in some developed countries. In 2000, a decree came into effect in Europe allowing chocolate manufacturers to use a limited amount of fat other than cocoa butter in their products, up to five percent.

This change in regulations, which had previously been the case in Japan, the United States and Eastern Europe, has opened up new opportunities for shea. "Today countries from all continents import shea butter or shea nuts to extract butter," confirmed Lah.

Local shea producers have no influence over the price fetched by shea nuts and butter internationally. "The prices change frequently on the international market, but at the moment a kilogramme of shea nuts costs between 500 and 600 CFA francs (just over one U.S. dollar)," said Kone.

Large companies prefer to buy their shea nuts from villages through local buyers who roam the countryside. However, these intermediaries make far more profit from the trade than rural women producers.

"The local market is different," Kone said. "In Mali, the current price of a kilogramme of shea nuts is 75 CFA francs (15 cents U.S.)."

Large firms are reluctant to buy shea butter produced by local rural women due to its strong smell. Industry professionals, explain that this smell can be avoided by following certain procedures during processing.

But the extraction method used by most Malian women is not very efficient, extracting roughly 27 percent of the oils from the nuts, compared to 40 to 50 percent achieved with industrial technology, experts say.

However, locally produced butter has seen improvements. In addition to serving the local market, fair trade schemes have allowed women to export valuable finished product to large markets in developed countries.

IPS

Dutch companies to invest in biofuel programs in Mali

by Rachel Pollock

Dutch automaker Kia Netherlands recently announced that it would be investing in Mali Biocarburant SA (MBSA), a Dutch-backed biodiesel program in Mali. This investment allows for Kia automobile owners to participate in a voluntary carbon tax program, which will benefit jatropha production in Mali. The Dutch government as well as the Malian farmer’s union also supports the program.

Jatropha curcas is a poisonous plant that grows abundantly in Africa, Central and South America, Asia, and the Caribbean. The plant can cohabitate with other crops such as coffee, sugar, fruit, and vegetables and is already being used by farmers to protect their pre-existing crops from animals and insects. The seeds from a Jatropha plant can be crushed to produce oil that can be used in a standard diesel car and the remaining residue can be used to power electricity plants and also used as fertilizer. Jatropha can grow in areas where the environment is arid and the soil has experienced erosion, therefore, a place like Mali is the perfect candidate to cultivate jatropha as biofuel.

Since 2007, Jatropha has been recognized by several Dutch organizations to be a viable source of biofuel. However, it was not until recently that projects aimed at jatropha production were able to be implemented and show their impacts on the rural communities. Wind Energy for Mali, a small organization based in the Netherlands has set up workshops in mid-December to teach Malians how to build turbines and to educate the rural communities about energy alternatives and sustainable fuel. Piet Willem Chevalier, who is the founder of the organization, told MediaGlobal, “Mali has abundant renewable energy resources that can be used to make a relevant difference for access to affordable electricity in especially rural areas, which, until now, has been absent.”

Mali Biocarburant is a private company aimed at setting up sustainable decentralized biodiesel processors in West Africa. Hugo Verkuijl, who is the CEO of Mali Biocarburant, said, “Farmers are 20 percent shareholders in the company. We have a strategy of local production, processing, and consumption.”

Unlike other sources of biofuel, Jatropha production poses little threat to the local agriculture production and food security. It also offers the most practical advantages for the local farmer and the environment. Verkuijl told MediaGlobal, ”[Jatropha biofuel] allows farmers to produce food and also to reduce soil erosion, increase soil fertility, and increase yield of food crops.”

Verkuijl said, “Biofuel is sold at a competitive price, which is about 10 percent lower than the pump price of ordinary fuel.” The recent integration of biofuel has provided jobs and supplemental income for farmers utilizing land that was otherwise futile. The Jatropha oil is produced in Koulikoro with a field staff of 60 and works with over 5,000 farmers in Mali and Burkina Faso.

Furthermore, large-scale projects like the 15-year electrification program of Mali-Folkcenter in Garalo have been set up in small villages to bring electricity to communities that lack the technology and financial means. In May of 2007, special generators were installed to run on jatropha oil. Ultimately, the project aims to set up 1,000 hectares of jatropha plantations to provide oil for a 300 kilowatt power plant, thus providing electricity for 10,000 people in the Garalo community.

In regards to the environment, the jatropha tree reduces carbon emission. According to Biocarburant, biodiesel produces less carbon fossil fuel by about 73 percent. Furthermore, the waste left over from the jatropha seed can be used to make charcoal rather than the usual method of burning down trees.

The jatropha plant has many advantages when it comes to both the economic impact on the local Malian communities and sustainable energy alternatives for the rest of the world. Communities cultivating jatropha seed in Mali are serving as and example to companies looking to invest in these alternatives and replicate projects like those in small Malian communities. India, Brazil, Swaziland and the Philippines are among the countries, which foreign companies are looking to invest in the future.

Media Global

Mali's poultry sector overwhelmingly informal

Mali had some 30 million chickens, ducks, guinea fowl and turkeys in 2005, but not enough protein-rich poultry products are consumed locally, according to the government and nutritionists.

In 2006 15 percent of under-five children were too thin or did not weigh enough for their height group, signs of malnourishment, and two out of five children in the same age group were too short for their age, a sign of chronic malnutrition, according to the Ministry of Health.

Poultry is still seen as a luxury, a source of money rather than protein, nutritionist Rouky Bah Tall said in Bamako. "Instead of consuming chicken and eggs, families prefer to sell them without knowing how much natural protein they lose out on or how it could improve their family's nutrition."

The Poultry Development Project in Mali (PDAM) estimates more than 90 percent of poultry farming in Mali is unregulated traditional backyard poultry. "Our backyard is a savings account," one farmer in the Bamako neighbourhood of Moribabougou said.

While more than 70 million eggs and 21,000 tons of poultry meat are produced annually, residents consume at most only 16 eggs per year and 1.7 grams of poultry every day, according to the director of the Poultry Development Project in Mali (PDAM), Ibrahim Ayouba Maïga.

The regional avian flu in 2006 halved the sale of eggs in Mali. Since then, the price and quantity have stabilized, according to a December 2008 Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) analysis of Mali's poultry sector.

Adama Tangara, president of the poultry farmers' cooperative in Barouéli, 200km southwest of Bamako, said most of the cooperative's sales are in the capital.

Even though modern poultry farming contributes only 5 percent of all poultry in Mali, "it plays an important role in urban and peri-urban food security," noted the FAO evaluation.

Poultry brings in 7.5 percent of the country's agriculture income and reaps more profits than either beans, potatoes or corn, Livestock Minister Madeleine Diallo Ba said. "It is wrongly perceived as a side trade in rural farming when it actually represents a large pool of animal protein. Poultry plays a significant role in social life, with special symbolic importance in cultural festivities and ceremonies," said Ba.

Nevertheless, nutritionist Tall said that prejudices against eggs persist, such as the belief that children and expectant mothers will have bad luck if they eat too many eggs.

While more egg consumption could decrease childhood malnutrition, it is only one of many local solutions, the national director of nutrition, Raki Ba Samake, told IRIN. "We have a lot of biodiversity and nutrient-rich plants here in Mali. More eggs can help improve nutrition, but we also have other products here that we have not explored."

IRIN

Malians fight to slow advance of the desert

by Andrew Harding

Towards the end of an illustrious career in the Malian police force - during which he has battled locust swarms, chased drug traffickers and dabbled in some coup plotting - Col Tidiani Ascofare, bald, burly and unflappable, has taken on his most daunting opponent, the Sahara desert.

"Dig, dig," he boomed cheerfully at a crowd of several hundred villagers standing in the scorching sun in a dried-out river bed, some four hours' drive west of Timbuktu.

The narrow channel, overshadowed by a line of imposing yellow sand dunes, used to flow into Lake Faguibine, helping to carrying an annual flood surge from the mighty Niger River into an ecosystem that directly supported some 200,000 people, and produced food for Mali, Burkina Faso and Mauritania. It was the region's most fertile farmland.

"Inexorably, perhaps, the climate will deteriorate," said the colonel. "But we have proved we can delay the advance of the desert. In 2006, only 100 hectares of land around the lake was farmed. This year it will be more than 20,000 hectares."

Kouna Mohammed sat in a group, cheerfully sifting sorghum, as her sons brought in this year's crop from the green fields around them. Like many families, they had abandoned the lake years ago. Several relatives had died because of the drought. But the past two years have seen a dramatic improvement.

"Without water, there is no world," said a neighbour, Medel Al Houseini.

Recently, the United Nations Environment Programme (Unep) agreed to help the Malian government, with a $15m (£9.2m) project for the Lake Faguibine system.

"That's peanuts in relation to the benefits that will accrue," said Unep's spokesman, Nick Nuttal. "What we're trying to demonstrate [ahead of the Copenhagen climate change summit] is that large-scale renovations of ecological infrastructure are possible."

Unep argues that countries like Mali, which are considered to be on the front lines of climate change, need help now to enable them to cope with much tougher conditions expected in the years ahead. Leading Unep's work on the ground, Birguy Diallo showed a group of villagers how to stabilise the dunes with twigs and saplings.

The UN is helping villagers to stabilise the dunes and keep back the desert


"We're here to win," she said. "The villagers are already seeing they can gain from this. "They're working for their own benefit, not for outsiders. They were born here, and live here. They are supposed to stay here."

But the lake's future is far from certain. Mali is poor, and its government riddled with corruption. Before Col Ascofare took the lead, similar projects appear to have achieved nothing. The colonel is clearly frustrated by the slow pace of change. With outside help and heavy equipment, he estimates that he could have achieved in six months what has now taken four years.

"Without foreign help, it's impossible," he said flatly. "The costs are enormous. We need lots of equipment and lots of technical education to fight against all this sand you see around us. We expect much from Copenhagen and the international community."

BBC

Malian farmers fear being pushed out by foreign investors

In Mali the government has approved long-term leases for outside investors to develop more than 160,000 hectares of land. Government officials say the country could not develop its cultivable land otherwise, but local farmers say they fear being pushed out.

Rice producer Siaka Daou from Niono, 300km north of the capital Bamako, said he is worried about becoming a day labourer for industrial agriculture giants. “The way the government is parcelling out land from Office of Niger [region] is worrisome. This will stamp out small producers. We will no longer have land to cultivate and will be forced to work for industrial agriculture producers.”

The region, 300km northeast of Bamako, contains some of the most fertile rain-fed land in Mali.

Former Finance Minister Abou Bakar Traoré, who in April 2009 signed an agreement to lease more than 11,000 hectares to the West African Economic and Monetary Union, said: “Land deals are not pushing any farmers off the land, but rather trying to improve the land for these producers.”

International research groups have called such deals land grabs by investors seeking produce for their own countries, but Mali’s Agriculture Minister Agatham Ag Alassane says the country has no choice if it is to feed its own population.

“Our concern today is to modernize agriculture, especially rice cultivation. To do this, we need a lot of resources and a lot of land. We cannot give a tractor to a small producer who would use it on two or three hectares; that would be a waste.” Boosting irrigable land will ensure there will be enough work for local producers and enough food for local populations, Agatham said.

Land development secretary Abou Sow says it will cost half a million dollars to clear enough land to meet local food needs. “We have one million [hectares] of potentially cultivable land, of which we have developed 70,000. The state cannot do it alone. The need for cultivable land increases every year, but development has not followed suit. These contracts allow Libyans, Chinese and others to come help us.”

Mali’s land code protects local land rights, but only as far as the land is used for “productive use”. But “productive use” is not clearly defined and this may “open the door to abuse and undermine the security of local land rights,” according to a 2009 Food and Agriculture (FAO) report on land deals in Africa.

For the 162,850 hectares of land approved for allocation thus far – 0.6 percent of Mali’s cultivable land, according to the FAO – the government will be paid US$292 million by investors from Libya, the West African Economic and Monetary Union and the US-funded Millennium Challenge Account.

Some land investors in Mali must build and maintain irrigation systems, pay a rental fee of up to $12 per hectare per year and an annual water fee. But what remains unclear in many land contracts is how much of the harvest remains in the country. “Most of the sample contracts are silent on the issue,” said the FAO report.

During a July 2009 visit to a Libyan-funded irrigation project, Mali’s National Association of Farmers issued a communiqué demanding more information about the contract signed between Libya and Mali.

“The contract signed remains invisible…there are no guarantees in the contract that the [local] population would benefit from it,” the association said. “The renewable 50-year lease sparks fears of a Libyan land grab.”

IRIN

Mali invests for milk self-sufficiency

Mali is putting in place plans to produce milk locally to ensure self sufficiency in the product, according to official sources.

The project, estimated to cost 15 billion CFA francs (about US$ 30 million), was also aimed at contributing to poverty reduction. It will involve the establishment of 41 'milk basins' in the country with each supplying enough product to its area of coverage.

The government will also set up eight milk transformation units with capacities ranging from 2,000 litres and 10,000 litres of milk per day.

Mali is one the greatest livestock-farming countries in the West African sub-region. Its livestock profile is estimated at 8.1 million bovines, 23.4 million sma l l ruminants and 800,000 camels.

Livestock farming constitutes the third largest earner of foreign exchange for the country after gold and cotton.

The government said "With this potential, the national production, estimated at 500 million litres per year, is far from meeting national demands," adding that i t spends between 10 million and 15 billion CFA each year to import milk.

The new project will enable Mali promote its local milk production and develop a national milk industry in order to improve the level of milk consumption for it s people, improve revenue earning for the producers and reduce importation.

Afriquenligne

AGRA grants $2.5 million to kick-start Malian agro-dealer network

by Evans Owour

The Alliance for a Green Revolution (AGRA), has launched an ambitious US$2.5 million grant to support 820 rural agro-dealers in Mali who are primary contacts for seeds, fertilizers and other farm inputs that are necessary for increased productivity.

The move follows recognition by AGRA of the declining productivity and incomes of small holder farmers in Mali. An estimated 995,000 families in Mali will benefit from this program, growing their income by 30% while reducing by 30% the average distance farmers have to travel to access improved seed and fertilizer.

It is common for small holder farmers, who dominate Malian agriculture, to travel great distances to purchase seeds or fertilizers. And at the end of their journey they frequently find stores lack the specific items they need or are selling them at unaffordable prices.

“Farmers with poor soil, who cannot afford fertilizer or high yielding seed, and who have no way to get their harvest to market, cannot benefit from higher food prices…” Said Mr. Koffi Annan, chairman of AGRA, recently urging for action to fix perpetual food crisis faced by small holders in Africa.

Explaining the need to strengthen the agro-dealer network in Mali, Dr. Namanga Ngongi, AGRA’s President said, “Improved seeds, fertilizer, basic product knowledge and credit for small holder farmers are immediate requirements if farmers in Mali are to break from the cycle of poverty.”

AGRA will work through CNFA, Inc. to train and transform many agrodealer shop owners to operate small businesses closer to farmers in remote areas. They will sell affordable farm inputs in quantities needed by farmers. The agrodealers will also be transformed into providers of basic extension services - which farmers lack due to the ‘demise’ of public sector extension services in Mali. These dealers will be an invaluable source of knowledge and advice to farmers at the point of sale.

To ensure that shop owners stock up, Credit guarantees will be used to link the agrodealers to seed and fertilizer companies, as well as to commercial banks.

“The Mali program is modeled on highly successful agro-dealer strengthening programs in Malawi, Tanzania and Kenya, Ghana, Zambia and Nigeria, where small holder farmers are already giving testimonies of tripled food production in some countries where the program has run full circle,” said Dr. Joe DeVries Director, Program for Africa’s Seed Systems, AGRA.

In Malawi where this experience was developed six years ago, agrodealers are moving millions of dollars of farm inputs into rural areas, directly to the door steps of farmers. Even more impressive: each dollar invested in a credit guarantee for the agrodealers leveraged sixteen dollars of supply of farm inputs into rural areas by seeds and fertilizer companies - a capita leveraging ratio of 16:1.

“AGRA is helping train and certify thousands of agrodealers to make farm inputs easily available and affordable for farmers” explained Dr. Akin Adesina, Vice President AGRA.

Although every year fertilizer is imported into Mali and disbursed through a bidding method dominated by five large companies, concentrated distribution channels and lack of a functioning agrodealer network prevents inputs from reaching remote rural small holder farmers. In addition, information on new agricultural technologies is not currently well-distributed to agro-dealers or farmers in remote areas.

Africa Science News Service