Fury over Senegal’s private land buyers

IRIN: ...A liberal land regime in Senegal over the decade has favoured large-scale acquisitions of arable land by both foreign and local investors. Dramatic changes in ownership have coincided with serious food shortages in the sub-region, a global financial crisis and a growing emphasis on the promotion of bio-fuel, with Senegal heavily promoting the planting of the controversial Jatropha tree, the seeds of which are used for the production of fuel for diesel engines.

Between 2000 and 2010, over 657,000 hectares of land, around 17 percent of Senegal’s arable land, was allocated to 17 private firms. Ten of the firms are Senegalese and the rest are foreign, according to the regional pressure group Pan-African Institute for Citizenship, Consumers and Development (CICODEV).

Under the previous administration of Abdoulaye Wade, the government pushed high profile schemes like the Return towards Agriculture plan (REVA) and the Grand Agricultural Drive for Food and Abundance (GOANA), with an emphasis on promoting agri-business and bio-fuels.

“These initiatives have led to a glut of private operators, including religious leaders and senior state officials moving in on land in rural areas,” complains Mariam Sow, coordinator of the Natural Protection Programme of international NGO ENDA.

In a May 2011 report, the Agricultural and Rural Prospective Initiative (IPAR), a sub-regional NGO which aims to provide “strategic analysis” of rural and agricultural issues, highlighted the volume of land deals in northern Senegal. IPAR drew particular attention to the case of Mbane in Saint Louis Region, where it said 232,000 hectares had been distributed to politicians, religious leaders and private operators with strong political connections under the GOANA project. The IPAR report noted that, at the time of writing, much of the land acquired had yet to be exploited....

A farm in Senegal, image by Richard Melo da Silva, public domain

An alarming outlook for Senegal’s hungry

IRIN: The number of food insecure in the Sahel is expected to grow from 11.3 million in 2013 to more than 20 million in 2014, mainly due to an increase in cases in northern Nigeria, northern Cameroon and Senegal. IRIN went to Louga, in northern Senegal, to find out why the number of hungry is so high.

“Nothing was harvested this year in the fields. Nothing at all,” said Ndjouga Ndianye, a farmer from Diama Nguene, a village about 15km outside Louga, which is 70km southeast of Saint Louis. “In the fields, apart from peanut scraps, there was nothing. Absolutely nothing.”  The number of food insecure in Senegal is slightly higher this year in 2011, the year of a major drought crisis.

Rains were poor - in some cases nonexistent - in 2011, decent in 2012 and poor again in 2013, say farmers in Louga. As a result, even though families built up some stocks in 2012, they were starting this year at a deficit, and many of them were in deep debt, making them highly vulnerable when 2013’s rains came late and ended early.

This dynamic, combined with improved food security surveys that are identifying previously invisible groups of food-insecure people, has caused the number of those classified as hungry to shoot up in Senegal....

UN warns climate change is drowning Senegal

Space Daily via AFP: The United Nations' head of disaster risk warned Tuesday that flooding caused by climate change had become an emergency in Senegal, with some towns finding themselves underwater for large parts of the year.

Margareta Wahlstrom, on a three-day visit as part of preparations for a new global disaster risk-reduction strategy, told AFP she had met mayors of coastal and riverside towns who said their streets were flooded ten months out of 12.

"There is a huge pressure for action. I think particularly the flooding issue is so critical... because it's very acute," said Wahlstrom, the United Nations Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Disaster Risk Reduction.

"Listening to the mayors today, some of them were saying 'we are underwater ten months out of 12'. I think that says everything. That's acute and it's why the country is giving full attention and full priority to flooding. The quicker the cities are growing, the more acute the problem will become."

Wahlstrom, speaking on the sidelines of a news conference in Dakar, said she had witnessed the impact of climate change on a trip to St Louis, a northern archipelago in the mouth of the Senegal River often referred to as the "Venice of Africa"...

A fisherman at St. Louis in the Senegal River, shot by HaguardDuNord, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

Mangroves bring wildlife back to Senegal coast

Terra Daily via AFP: Crabs scuttle among mangrove roots in a dense riverbank forest in southern Senegal, where a major reforestation project is reviving wildlife and boosting the west African country's lukewarm economy.

"Everything you see here has been replanted. Before 2006, there wasn't a single tree," said Senegalese environmental activist and government minister Haidar El Ali in Tobor, a village near Ziguinchor, the main city of the Casamance region.

He gestured toward mangroves tied to stilts bordering the Casamance river, planted by his Oceanium environmental organisation to boost an area that experts said was severely depleted by deforestation, drought and increased salt levels in the water.

...The habitat was destroyed through decades of illegal logging in mangrove forests for firewood and building. "There has been nothing here since the 1960s and 70s. Replanting is bringing back the mangrove," said Simeon Diatta, the chief of Diakene Diole village near the Guinea-Bissau border, pointing at riverside vegetation.

Since 2006, reforestation has revived 12,000 hectares (30,000 acres) of mangrove in Senegal -- an area larger than the city of Paris -- mainly in Casamance but also in the north and centre of the country, according to official figures...

Mangroves in Casamance, in Senegal, shot by Ji-Elle, public domain

Behind the rhetoric what is really being done to combat desertification?

Gavin Haines in the Independent (UK): Like most people living along the Sahel – the drylands between Africa’s tropical savannahs and the Sahara Desert – Mustafa Ba is all too familiar with the effects of desertification. Thanks to a combination of overgrazing and deforestation, he has watched the countryside around his Senegalese village, Mboula, turn into a dusty, unproductive wasteland.

“Trees provide us with many benefits,” explains Mustafa, as we sit on a mat in the centre of his village. “They are good for the soil and important for food security.” But in impoverished regions of rural Africa, selling firewood is a source of quick cash and many trees along the Sahel have been felled. Communities have paid a high price for such enterprise; with no trees to protect the land, vast swathes of the Sahel have succumbed to desertification.

According to the United Nations, Mustafa is one of 850 million people – nearly one eighth of the global population – to be directly affected by this process of land degradation. But it’s not just a local problem; desertification has an impact on food production, which pushes up grocery bills around the world (the UN estimates Guatemala alone loses 24 per cent of its agricultural GDP due to desertification). 

To raise awareness of the issue, the UN reserved June 17 as World Day to Combat Desertification, but behind the rhetoric it has also been supporting projects to tackle the phenomenon head on. One of those is Great Green Wall of Africa, a 4,800-mile “wall” of trees that is being planted across the continent between Senegal and Djibouti....

A desert encampment at Lompoul, Senegal, shot by G.No, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license 

UNISDR appoints parliamentary champions for risk reduction

Dizery Salim at the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction:  The United Nations office for disaster risk reduction, UNISDR, today officially welcomed five members of parliament from Bangladesh, Uganda, Cambodia, Senegal and the East African Legislative Assembly as parliamentary champions committed to promoting legislation for disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation.

This month they officially began two-year terms as members of the first Advisory Group of Parliamentarians for Disaster Risk Reduction, solidifying a multi-year initiative by UNISDR to make progress in the realm of national legislation and risk reduction.

The champions are Saber Chowdhury, Chair of Bangladesh’s All-Party Parliamentary Group on Climate Change and Environment; Alex Bakunda Byarugaba, Chairman of Uganda’s Foreign Affairs Committee of Parliament; Saumura Tioulong, member of Parliament representing Phnom Penh, Cambodia, and former Deputy Governor of Cambodia's Central Bank from 1993-1995; Abdou Sane, member of the National Assembly of Senegal and President of the parliament’s Network for Disaster Risk Reduction; and Abdirahin Abdi, former speaker of the East African Legislative Assembly from June 2007 to June 2012.

“Parliamentarians play a particular role. They can put pressure on the executive to think about prevention. They can hold governments accountable,” said Feng Min Kan, Special Adviser to the UN Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Disaster Risk Reduction, Margareta Wahlström, who has nurtured the UNISDR parliamentary initiative since 2008.

“Our role is in developing our capacities,” said Mr. Chowdhury, Chair of the Advisory Group. “What can we do in our own constituencies? How we can get communities involved? We may have grand national plans, but it is at the local level that action is taken.”...

Cattle dying as drought strikes Senegal

Coumba Sylla in IOL News (South Africa): In [Wodobere,] the northeastern nook of Senegal, one of the most stable and developed nations in the drought-hit Sahel region, carcasses of cattle lie in the sun, the fields have withered and food depleted. As scanty rains wreaked havoc across the belt, hitting drought-weary Chad, Niger, Mali and other countries, this west African hub is struggling to provide food to its people and entire villages are going hungry.

“The shepherds and people have told us they feel as if they have been left to their own devices,” said famed Senegalese singer Baaba Maal, who last week toured the Matam region from where he originates. In Wodobere, a town of about 6 000 people skirting Mauritania, Maal - an ambassador for British charity Oxfam - called for urgent aid to avert famine as he toured the region, listening to the concerns of villagers and giving concerts.

Crops have failed across eight countries after late and erratic rains in 2011, and aid agencies have raised the spectre of a food crisis bigger than the one which left millions starving in 2010.

This is the third drought in the Sahel in a decade, and while the previous ones were felt mostly in Niger and parts of Chad, this year it has unfolded across the entire region. In Mbelogne, a hamlet where most of the 450 residents survive off animal husbandry, its chief Ely Hamady Diallo said: “There are problems both with food and water, for people and for the animals...

Guzzling cattle in Senegal, shot by Adama Diop, public domain

Poor legislator - scientist relations to blame for African drought

David Muwanga in East African Business Week: Speaker of the East African Legislative Assembly (EALA) Abdirahin Abdi has attributed the current drought in the Horn of Africa to lack of closer working relationships between Parliamentarians and scientists. "It is unfortunate that the drought we are experiencing in the Great Horn of Africa, which is the worst in over six decades, had long been predicted before it occurred, but nothing was done," he said.

"This is a sign of clear disparity between the scientists and legislators and we urgently need to close ranks and begin working together for the betterment of the communities", he said at two day consultative workshop for parliamentarians on disaster risk reduction (DRR) that was held in Geneva, Switzerland recently.

However participants at the meeting hailed Senegal and Uganda for the positive progress on disaster risk and reduction. According to Mr Alex Byarugaba, Uganda had developed and refined its policy on DRR and was headed towards instituting an Act of Parliament - a first in the EAC region in its quest to meet the Millennium Development Goals.

The objective of the meeting organized by the United Nations International Strategy for Disaster Reduction (UNISDR) was to review progress with regards to UNISDR's initiative on Parliamentarians in disaster risk reduction, exchange views on challenges that Parliamentarians encountered in promoting disaster risk and reduction and identify priorities for the 2012-2013 Action Plan.

It was attended by Parliamentarians from Bangladesh, Cambodia, Uganda, Senegal and the East African Legislative Assembly. He therefore called for building of new bridges between scientists, technocrats and Parliamentarians if meaningful advances in disaster risk reduction (DRR) and disaster management were to be realized....

Scaling up innovative climate change adaptation and insurance solutions in Senegal

AlertNet: The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) and Oxfam America, supported by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Swiss Re respectively, today committed at the Clinton Global Initiative to expand their ground-breaking "R4 Rural Resilience Initiative" to help the rural poor to protect their crops and livelihoods from the impacts of climate variability and change, including drought.

This innovative public-private partnership will be expanded from Ethiopia to Senegal over the next five years. It empowers farmers and food-insecure rural households with integrated risk management tools to develop long-term resilience.

"For the 1.3 billion people living on less than a dollar a day who depend on agriculture for their livelihoods, natural disasters are a constant threat to their food security. The most vulnerable people in the world are being hit by more frequent and intense climate-related disasters. The world knows how to do this: Proven tools have broken the cycle of emergency hunger for millions, building resilience in the face of repeat disasters," said WFP Executive Director Josette Sheeran.

R4 will enable poor farmers in Senegal to strengthen their food and income security by managing risks through a four-part approach - improving natural resource management (community risk reduction), accessing microcredit ("prudent" risk taking), gaining insurance coverage (risk transfer), and increasing savings (risk reserves)...

West Africa experts tested on their disaster response skills

George Fominyen in AlertNet: Picture the scene: terrified, hungry crowds go on the rampage, attacking cars belonging to humanitarian organisations, storming warehouses to steal food and fuel supplies. As a government what do you do? How, when and where do you deploy security forces to restore some order to your streets? How do you coordinate civilian and military players to provide emergency relief?

Those were some the questions facing disaster management officials from the West African countries of Benin, Ghana, Mali, Guinea, Nigeria and Senegal, who took part in a recent simulation exercise aimed at testing the effectiveness of their decision-making. Run by the World Food Programme (WFP), the simulation exercise was held in Senegal's capital, Dakar, and involved responding to a hypothetical influenza pandemic.

West Africa is more used to dealing with natural disasters such as seasonal flooding, so how did their officials do? "We realised that we still had to improve on a lot of things in the area of coordination," Eugene Hountondji, the head of safety and civil protection training in Benin's interior ministry, told AlertNet. The officials were told to imagine a high death rate and the disruption a severe pandemic would cause a society, compared with the relatively localised problems of flooding....

A 2005 flood in Dakar, shot by MyriamLouviot, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Adaptation Fund starts delivering

IRIN: In what is being hailed as a breakthrough for a "collective effort" by developed and developing countries, the Adaptation Fund set up by the UN to help poor countries cope with the unfolding impact of climate change has finally become operational. Last week, the Fund's board approved two adaptation projects, one in Senegal - threatened by sea-level rise, less rainfall and high temperatures - and the other in Honduras, which faces increasing water shortages.

The two projects worth a total of about US$14 million are not only the first to be approved by the board but also the first to get money directly from the Fund. Developing countries had been lobbying for direct access, and have now been granted control over how to spend the funds. The decision is good news ahead of more UN climate change talks slated for December in Mexico.

The money for the Senegal project will be used to implement the country's National Adaptation Plan for Action in the areas of Rufisque, Saly and Joal, along the country's west coast, and will cover actions to protect houses from flooding, erosion and sea-level rise. The project also aims to help rice growers and the fishing community in the region adapt to increased salinization.

Honduras will use the funds to improve water management in its capital region of Tegucigalpa. At least 13,000 households stand to benefit….

A 2005 flood in Dakar, Senegal, shot by MyriamLouviot, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Coastal erosion research in Senegal goes unfunded

IRIN: Environmental officials are calling for funds to document the deterioration of Senegal’s coast and take action to save coastal communities. “We need facts and figures about the sea to show people that [the threat of coastal erosion] is not just all talk,” said Sory Diallo, the director of Hydrometeorology and Maritime Meteorology in Senegal’s Ministry of Infrastructure.

The government in 2008 released a strategy to fight coastal erosion, which includes 22 projects. As of February 2009 government officials are still seeking donor funding for 14 of the projects, including research, according to government reports. Researcher Isabelle Niang, a professor at Cheikh Anta Diop University in the capital Dakar, told IRIN there is no money for studies to identify vulnerable areas or the extent of coastal damage.

“There is no research budget at the university; we have to pay for field trips ourselves and it is not easy,” said Niang. “If our scientists are asked for information, they cannot provide it because they cannot carry out the studies.” She said she is worried the Senegalese government has been slow to look for such funding because it does not want to discourage investors from coastal areas, which are popular for tourism projects.

But government officials told IRIN it is in their best interest to halt coastal damage. “The country’s economic and tourist centres and its main inhabited areas are all on the coast,” said Eliman Ba, a government adviser on coastal erosion. “If we find no solution to coastal erosion, a good part of our country will just disappear.”

Senegal’s Environment Ministry estimates that the sea is eroding the West African country’s Atlantic coastline by at least one metre per year on average, but said erosion is up to 10 times worse in vulnerable areas like the coastal town of Saint-Louis, 266km north of Dakar….

Locator map of Senegal by Rei-Artur, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5, Attribution ShareAlike 2.0 and Attribution ShareAlike 1.0 License

Forecasting the future in Senegal's erratic climate

IRIN: In the darkness after pre-dawn prayer a village elder would squint at the sky overhead, tilting his head back until his cap fell off, looking for a cluster of bright stars that signalled the middle of the rainy season. Now many traditional methods are becoming increasingly unreliable predictors of the weather due to climate variability, and African farmers already facing fluctuations need scientific data to help them adapt, farmers and climate experts say.

"You plant your seeds and then the rain doesn't come. So next year you change your approach and you plant later, but the rain comes earlier," said Paul Thiao, a farmer and regional coordinator for the Senegalese Federation of NGOs (FONGS). "Farmers have become gamblers," he said. "The system has been disturbed and now they must take a gamble on when the rain will come. But they are gambling with their livelihoods."

The International Development Research Centre (IDRC), a Canadian organisation supporting scientific research in developing countries, is working with FONGS and other organisations to diffuse scientific and local knowledge to help Senegalese farmers adapt.
Farmers need scientific data on soil fertility levels and adaptive seed varieties in order to assure a good harvest, but traditional cultivation methods and local perspectives on climate change are also vital to maintaining crop yields, said Ndiankou Seye, head of planning and research at the government's regional council of Thiès, 70km from the capital Dakar, told IRIN. "There are things the climatologists cannot tell you and there are scientific facts that are incomprehensible to the farmer," Seye said.

Madeleine Diouf Sarr, who leads Senegal’s climate change committee at the Ministry of Environment, agreed that efforts to adapt to changing weather patterns must combine traditional and scientific knowledge. "Even though the [weather] shifts, the plants do not lie. When plants feel a certain amount of humidity they will bloom. So the indigenous approach is as valuable as the science involved," she told IRIN…..