(no subject)
This is an email I wrote to my old French teachers class back home about agriculture and how it relates to deforestation and the environment:
Season changes and cultivation are huge parts of the lives of the people in my village. Agricultre is one of the things I get asked most about in my conversations about the states with Burkinabes. They all want to know what we "cultivate" there and are flabbergasted that so few people in the states farm, or that you can get most fruits and vegetables year round anywhere in the country. In Burkina, everything is seasonal. The sky rains mangoes for three months and then you dont taste them again for nine. But its also like this to an extent with all fruits and vegetables. Tomatoes get easy to find and cheap, then all but disappearing in the small villages and you get only get them in the towns. You can only get eggs easily in village during the month of August. Most of the year, you can only get them in the towns.
This, for me, results in a very complicated dance of figuring out how I am going to feed myself each week. Over time, as a foreigner used to getting somewhat of a variety of vegetables and eating packaged and canned food, it is a feat. Normally I buy the vegetable thats available in my village at the moment, stockpile on things like noodles, canned vegetables, canned fish, processed cheese and powdered milk in the towns. Ill buy the vegetables that I cant get in village in Koudougou, and eggs, when I feel like attempting to bike 18k with fragile objects.
But this is not how it is for the villagers who I live with. They dont bike into Koudougou once a week so they can buy eggs and canned tuna. They are, in a very real sense, living off the land. Just as farmers in the states live off the land, only the land in Burkina is very dry, and I suspect has to be coaxed into producing more so than the farms in the states.
They dont have machinery like they do in the states obviously. Once I saw an old broken down John Deere tractor outside someones compound, but really, they cultivate with their hands, they have picks called a dabba, that they use to till the soil. There is a lot of arguments going on about the use of pesticide (and particularly DDT) but I think this is irrelevant on the village level because people do not have the money to buy (harmful) pesticides and even if they did, I would argue that they face greater risks to their every day health than from the dispersion of chemicals. In my village however, some people do use the Neem tree as a natural pesticide. This tree has a bunch of different uses (like the Moringa) such as it can serve as a natural antiseptic (for toothpaste, or soap,) as well as being a pesticide.
For farmers in the states, if they dont use pesticides, they have less crop, so they make less money. In Burkina, if they produce less crop, they risk starvation. Its different.
The soil is getting stripped of its nutrients and the dessert is encroaching on this country because preventative tactics are largely not being taken. This becomes a dire thing when you consider that if they dont cultivate, there will physically not be enough to eat, for them, or for any one else, and on years when the rains just happen to come late or early, wide spread famine is created.
Burkina, as Ive said before, is a dry savannah type climate. Normally, the rains start around May or June and lasts until about October or maybe November. Harvest (la recolte) is in November and December. During rainy season it rains maybe every 2-3 days for an hour, maybe 2. Then there is straight draught.
Because of this, farmers are forced to cultivate their staple crop during the rainy season (which is Millet, which is used actually for bird food in the states, and they make To (circumflex over the o) with. You can also make To out of corn, but that is for rich people.) Picture it, they are farming a big piece of land during this season, they cant water it by hand, so they must rely on natural rains.
During the recolte and after, they process the millet into flower for making the To, this means separating the many inedible parts of the plant from the edible part. It is a long painstaking process that the women and children do. Basically the women do all the work that the men do, (cultivating in the fields with a dabba, basically a pick axe of sorts, to till the soil) and they also pound the millet, cook the To, take care of the children, the laundry, they work sun up to sun down, but the men actually have a lot of spare time.
They put the millet harvest in mud made granaries with thatched roofs.
Then the rains stop, and the dry season starts. They spend this season gardening, though not really in the way we think of it. Basically they shift their production from millet to vegetables. Gardens, at least in my region, are contained around the compound and have wells in the vicinity of each plot. People spend the dry season pulling up water from these wells and watering the crops. So basically they wake up, go water their crops and drink tea of coffee to give them "la force" to work, then they come home and eat one meal of the day before sundown. Sometimes they will eat the left over To in the morning, but mostly they just drink Tea during the day.
They cultivate onions a great deal where I am. They all cultivate vegetables at the same time though because they have to cultivate Millet during the rains, so the price of vegetables, and particularly onions spikes drastically during rainy season and falls a lot during the dry. There are trucks that come by every market day to buy the produce and take them into the towns. Market is every three days for my village. So (usually) a man will go down with a sack of cabbages or onions etc when he has harvested and sell them off, and the women will sell them in small quantities in the market. During dry season there are a plethora of vegetables to buy in the market, during the rainy season, maybe Ill see one vegetable type. During that time, people are mostly selling leaves, maybe soumbala, dried fish, non vegetable products.
This ends up being a big nutrition issue, as people are not eating vegetables for 6 months out of the year.
Rainy season is also referred to as the starving season because your millet is running out (because you fermented it to make beer perhaps) and it is a sprint to cultivate what you can before the rains stop.
When people dont produce food in this country, that is when organizations like USAid come fly in food, and you notoriously have rioting to get to the food (when people are starving). That said, its a common assumption that people are starving in Africa and that the thing to send should be food. The issue is more complicated than this. A lot could be helped if the environment was better protected against deforestation (which means less rain for the crops and soil erosion) however, villagers, often cut off from sources of information in general, are often immobilized against this issue. They do not make the connection.
Though I recently heard about Niger regaining many many hectares of land from the desert because many individuals replanted trees (and the surprising thing was that it was not a government led initiative.) So it is possible anyway.
Season changes and cultivation are huge parts of the lives of the people in my village. Agricultre is one of the things I get asked most about in my conversations about the states with Burkinabes. They all want to know what we "cultivate" there and are flabbergasted that so few people in the states farm, or that you can get most fruits and vegetables year round anywhere in the country. In Burkina, everything is seasonal. The sky rains mangoes for three months and then you dont taste them again for nine. But its also like this to an extent with all fruits and vegetables. Tomatoes get easy to find and cheap, then all but disappearing in the small villages and you get only get them in the towns. You can only get eggs easily in village during the month of August. Most of the year, you can only get them in the towns.
This, for me, results in a very complicated dance of figuring out how I am going to feed myself each week. Over time, as a foreigner used to getting somewhat of a variety of vegetables and eating packaged and canned food, it is a feat. Normally I buy the vegetable thats available in my village at the moment, stockpile on things like noodles, canned vegetables, canned fish, processed cheese and powdered milk in the towns. Ill buy the vegetables that I cant get in village in Koudougou, and eggs, when I feel like attempting to bike 18k with fragile objects.
But this is not how it is for the villagers who I live with. They dont bike into Koudougou once a week so they can buy eggs and canned tuna. They are, in a very real sense, living off the land. Just as farmers in the states live off the land, only the land in Burkina is very dry, and I suspect has to be coaxed into producing more so than the farms in the states.
They dont have machinery like they do in the states obviously. Once I saw an old broken down John Deere tractor outside someones compound, but really, they cultivate with their hands, they have picks called a dabba, that they use to till the soil. There is a lot of arguments going on about the use of pesticide (and particularly DDT) but I think this is irrelevant on the village level because people do not have the money to buy (harmful) pesticides and even if they did, I would argue that they face greater risks to their every day health than from the dispersion of chemicals. In my village however, some people do use the Neem tree as a natural pesticide. This tree has a bunch of different uses (like the Moringa) such as it can serve as a natural antiseptic (for toothpaste, or soap,) as well as being a pesticide.
For farmers in the states, if they dont use pesticides, they have less crop, so they make less money. In Burkina, if they produce less crop, they risk starvation. Its different.
The soil is getting stripped of its nutrients and the dessert is encroaching on this country because preventative tactics are largely not being taken. This becomes a dire thing when you consider that if they dont cultivate, there will physically not be enough to eat, for them, or for any one else, and on years when the rains just happen to come late or early, wide spread famine is created.
Burkina, as Ive said before, is a dry savannah type climate. Normally, the rains start around May or June and lasts until about October or maybe November. Harvest (la recolte) is in November and December. During rainy season it rains maybe every 2-3 days for an hour, maybe 2. Then there is straight draught.
Because of this, farmers are forced to cultivate their staple crop during the rainy season (which is Millet, which is used actually for bird food in the states, and they make To (circumflex over the o) with. You can also make To out of corn, but that is for rich people.) Picture it, they are farming a big piece of land during this season, they cant water it by hand, so they must rely on natural rains.
During the recolte and after, they process the millet into flower for making the To, this means separating the many inedible parts of the plant from the edible part. It is a long painstaking process that the women and children do. Basically the women do all the work that the men do, (cultivating in the fields with a dabba, basically a pick axe of sorts, to till the soil) and they also pound the millet, cook the To, take care of the children, the laundry, they work sun up to sun down, but the men actually have a lot of spare time.
They put the millet harvest in mud made granaries with thatched roofs.
Then the rains stop, and the dry season starts. They spend this season gardening, though not really in the way we think of it. Basically they shift their production from millet to vegetables. Gardens, at least in my region, are contained around the compound and have wells in the vicinity of each plot. People spend the dry season pulling up water from these wells and watering the crops. So basically they wake up, go water their crops and drink tea of coffee to give them "la force" to work, then they come home and eat one meal of the day before sundown. Sometimes they will eat the left over To in the morning, but mostly they just drink Tea during the day.
They cultivate onions a great deal where I am. They all cultivate vegetables at the same time though because they have to cultivate Millet during the rains, so the price of vegetables, and particularly onions spikes drastically during rainy season and falls a lot during the dry. There are trucks that come by every market day to buy the produce and take them into the towns. Market is every three days for my village. So (usually) a man will go down with a sack of cabbages or onions etc when he has harvested and sell them off, and the women will sell them in small quantities in the market. During dry season there are a plethora of vegetables to buy in the market, during the rainy season, maybe Ill see one vegetable type. During that time, people are mostly selling leaves, maybe soumbala, dried fish, non vegetable products.
This ends up being a big nutrition issue, as people are not eating vegetables for 6 months out of the year.
Rainy season is also referred to as the starving season because your millet is running out (because you fermented it to make beer perhaps) and it is a sprint to cultivate what you can before the rains stop.
When people dont produce food in this country, that is when organizations like USAid come fly in food, and you notoriously have rioting to get to the food (when people are starving). That said, its a common assumption that people are starving in Africa and that the thing to send should be food. The issue is more complicated than this. A lot could be helped if the environment was better protected against deforestation (which means less rain for the crops and soil erosion) however, villagers, often cut off from sources of information in general, are often immobilized against this issue. They do not make the connection.
Though I recently heard about Niger regaining many many hectares of land from the desert because many individuals replanted trees (and the surprising thing was that it was not a government led initiative.) So it is possible anyway.