September 1996 Sixty or seventy years ago, my Wolof grandmother, being the oldest in her family, would help her mom with the meals by going to catch fish down by the river. She said the fish would
burrow holes under the trees, and she would just reach her hand down under the tree to grab the fish. She said one day, she reached her hand down, and the fish bit her wrist, and she tried to pull her hand out but the wouldn't let go, and the
fish was slapping against the inside of the tree, and she was yelling for someone to come help her, and then finally the fish just let her go. As she tells this story, I look out on a river with no trees on its banks. When she was
a teenager, my Wolof mom, who is now 38, used to net for fish in the river. One day, as she walked toward the net, she stepped on what she thought was the bottom. It moved! She screamed and jumped, and has hardly gone in the water since. She
said that it felt like she had stepped on somebody's back. They used to sometimes catch catfish bigger than people, and that if they caught one, then no one else in the village would have to go fishing that day, and
everyone would eat. Furthermore, many ocean fish would make their way upriver, I've even heard they caught them in Kaedi, and these fish were much more fatty than the fish my villagers eat today. As they cooked the fish, yellow oil came out of
the fish, and they never bought any oil. In addition to the good tasting ocean fish, the villagers' diet was composed of millet, some small tomatoes, fonio, wild rice, melons, meat from cows and other livestock (they also used to
hunt crocodile and other birds, but the crocodiles are gone now, and they say that there used to be many, many more birds.) My family tells how they used to plant their crops in this fashion: "Well, we used to always save our
millet seeds by selecting the biggest and best plants each season and marking them, and at the end of the season, we would put some ashes in a cannery, and then put in the millet stock for next season, and then put in a layer of ashes on top
of it, and cover the cannery. What?!? As Peace Corps Volunteers, we spend hours and years trying to push composting, water conservation, natural pesticides, natural fertilizers, seed propagation, companion planting, nutrition, ad infinitum,
yet we never really seem to make any progress. And I thought they didn't understand anything about that. According to my mom, they never had a problem with bug infestations. As the river would fall, and it used to fall much further back then
than it does now, they would lay the tall reeds (over 3 meters or 10 feet) on the ground, "to keep the ground wet." When they were ready to plant, they would burn the weeds (natural fertilizer) and hoe it into the ground, and they
would then plant their millet, melons, and fonio (like millet but with smaller grains, grows well in poor soils). They did not irrigate at all, because they had enough rain for irrigation. Each family had at least one granary, where they would
store the millet and fonio after each season. Some people had so much grain that their supply could last for up to 2 to 3 years. Incidentally, lots of bats roosted in the granaries, surely reducing the number of mosquitoes.
Approximately 10 years ago, they dammed the Senegal River at the Atlantic Ocean. "They" being a cooperation of Mauritania, Senegal and Mali. Several dams were constructed together, for the generation of hydropower and increased
agriculture. Today, here near Rosso, rice is being intensively grown on the Mauritania side of the river, and sugar cane on the Senegal side. On both sides of the river, the necessary costly industries have been put in place to
properly sustain the massive farming of both crops, including processing plants, hundreds of miles of irrigation canals, pumping stations, crop-dusting, seed, fertilizer and pesticide depots, and easy-to-come-by bank loans for villagers
working with these crops to buy expensive combines and tractors.
When I first was affectated to Breun, one of the first things I noticed was a huge Ford-New Holland combine, used for
harvesting the rice. My reaction, "Damn, where did that thing come from-they run for about a hundred thousand bucks, and here I am in this poor African village." I found that it had not been a gift, but the villagers had together
paid 7 million ouguiyas (or $93,333 at 75um/US$, approximated 1992 money) for it, and was working to pay off the loan. I do not know if the loan has yet been paid off. In addition, the two Breuns each own new Massey-Ferguson tractors, also
bought on credit. On some days, I look across the river to the south and see a gray strip of cloud running from east to west. I drove out to the east of Rosso one Friday hunting with the French military, and realized that the
cloud was actually a stream of black smoke originating from the sugar cane factory in Richard Toll, Senegal. While in Rosso a month or so ago, I noticed in a boutique that they were pouring sugar from a large bag into smaller
"kilo" bags. "Did that come from Senegal?" "No. Holland." "They've got so much sugar across the river, why does ours come from Holland? Does Mauritania just not
want to buy from the Senegalese, so we buy from Holland?" "No, the Senegalese sugar tastes bad. We like the stuff from Holland. Senegalese even come here sometimes to buy our sugar, because they don'
t like the Senegalese sugar either." I assumed that probably from food aid and stuff, that very possibly the European sugar was about the same price or even cheaper than the local sugar, so people just bought it because it
was prettier and tasted a little better. Wrong. The "good" sugar is about 110um/kilo ($0.30/lb), whereas the Senegalese is about 60um/kilo, or ~$0.15/lb. What the hell are these starving villagers doing buying expensive sugar because
it "tastes better," when they can't ever afford to buy a few vegetables or fruit. What is going on here?
On the Mauritania side, we are growing a lot of rice. We
eat rice and fish for lunch, rice and fish for dinner. We no longer grow or eat what sustained us and our environment for centuries, and instead, we are starving ourselves with an unsustainable, environmentally damaging crop of rice that
depends on far too many outside resources to prosper. The nutrients we used to get from fonio, millet and wild rice are missing, for rice has really none to offer. The villagers told me that the government came to them and told them to stop
producing millet, and start growing rice. We used to get our oil free from the fish, but now in all of Mauritania, everyone is using imported European and American oil for all of their cooking needs.
Schistosomiasis, or Bilharziose, is now becoming a serious problem. Because the salty ocean would come upstream during hot season, many bacterial diseases and Schistosomiasis could not survive, nor ever establish themselves here. The salt
water acted as a disinfectant, periodically cleansing the area. A certain type of snail is also needed for Schistosomiasis to prosper, and this snail can not survive in salt water. Perhaps in addition to the salt water, before the dam the
river would have had a current, making it difficult for the worms to penetrate into the skin. Today, the river is really no more than an elongated, freshwater lake, providing ripe conditions for Schistosomiasis in a population that has never
had any experience with it, uses canal irrigation for their newly introduced rice fields (which came with the dam,) and has no other source for bathing or drinking water. My grandmother has told me of her childhood, when the fish would burrow
holes under the trees alongside the river (there are none now, and not so incidentally, Schistosomiasis is a light loving organism, and is not very common in highly shaded waters). Not too long ago, they only used to the trees
that had fallen for firewood and the like. Approximately 15 years or so ago, the government brought the "domaine nationale (national domain)" policy. Before, everyone had a little piece of land and farmed what they could. But the
government came and told them that now the land was for everyone, so the Moors were given some land, which previously only the Wolofs had farmed. The Wolofs used to farm only next to the river, but then the government split up the land and
everyone who was assigned a plot of land went and cut the trees down. Many trees were already dead because of the drought. However, because all of the trees were cut down, there was little left to keep the wind or sun off of the soil. Now, you
can see for miles over barren, hard land. Whatever topsoil there once was is now gone. In other parts of the country, there were forests as recently as the 1980's. An American friend of mine described a trip, which she had
undertaken near the city of Boghé. As she rode in the country, it was just starting to get dark when she noticed some fires off in the distance. She traveled on, and eventually saw some large trucks. What was just previously forest was being
cut down and burned into charcoal, to be hauled off to the rest of the country. In the interests of conservation, the villagers surrounding the forest were forbidden to cut any trees down by national law. As with corruption everywhere, those
laws hardly ever apply to the folks with money and power. Ever since the droughts forced the nomads to move to the cities, the country has been hell bent to sell all of its natural resources as quickly as possible. What will they do when they
have cut down all the trees? Certainly, the charcoal barons will have already made their money, and will rely on electricity or gas to light their fires. What will my family do? 4/16/98 Update I recently spoke
with the World Bank, who informed me that they are researching other forms of crops, as the rice project did not prove to be profitable.
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