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January 12, 2006: Four kilometers off the
main asphalt road connecting the far northeastern towns Bakel
and Matam to the capital, the tiny village of Belel lazes
on the banks of the Senegal River. A couple hundred feet across
the yellowish currents lies Mauritania. A motorized pirogue
loaded down with passengers and cargo plies the water between
the two countries. The minarets of Belel’s mosque rise
high above the floodplain marked only with the occasional
scrubby sump tree (Balanites aegypticum) or jujube
(Ziziphus Mauritania) bushes.
Abderahmane Sow scratches the head of his water buffalo and
motions in the direction of his rice fields. “The land
is fertile here. We have fresh water. We have everything we
need. I knew that agriculture here could work.”
Abderahmane is an unlikely agriculturalist. Born to a Pulaar-speaking
family of merchants, he began his business career as a six-year-old,
working in his fathers shops. Growing up, he watched his brothers,
cousins, and friends emigrate to France, to Italy, to the
US, and to central Africa in search of economic opportunity.
Indeed, some 80 percent of men in the Matam region emigrate,
sending home money to build mosques, schools, and houses.
“Everyone wants to leave, to emigrate. But over there
in France, they’re still unemployed. Some return with
nothing, others with diseases… If you emigrate without
a profession, it’s very difficult. Business there has
become saturated.”
Six years ago, at the age of 30, Abderahmane realized that
he had to do something different. “They say that abroad,
agriculturalists are some of the richest, so why not here,
too? Here, people automatically think you’re poor if
you farm. If you’re looking for a wife, you’ll
have a hard time, because her family will say that you’re
a peasant. But if you make farming a profession, you can make
a real living.”
Defying his critics
At first he thought he’d invest both in commerce and
in agriculture. After six months, however, he realized that
he couldn’t do both. He received a lot of criticism
from his friends, but his father told him to go ahead with
his plans. He purchased land, invested in livestock, and in
a tractor and implements. He now has about 74 acres of land
(or 30 hectares, the metric measure of land area), 50 acres
of which is fenced, and 34 acres under cultivation. “Some
people said, ‘Abderahmane is crazy!’ Others said
that I’d failed in business. But today, Alhamdulillah
[thanks to God], now they say that I’m a big agriculturalist,
that I have a lot of money. I’m not a millionaire, but
I can’t complain.”
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Abderahmane plants 10 acres in seed rice that he sells to
other rice farmers. He also grows bananas that he fertilizes
with the manure from his cattle and water buffaloes. To conserve
moisture he mulches the bananas with crop residues. The addition
of organic matter to his fields has resulted in higher yields.
Additionally, he intercrops his bananas with a variety of
other crops, including sugar cane, corn, cowpeas, sweet potatoes,
and eggplants. The many benefits he sees in this system are
backed up by research worldwide that has demonstrated synergistic
relationships between intercrops such as improved yields and
reduction in pest and weed pressure.
He has also integrated agroforestry on a field scale, by
planting Eucalyptus windbreaks along his field borders. He
selectively harvests these for sale or for construction on
the farm. He plans to integrate more fruit trees into his
production system—mangoes, grapefruit, and cashews.
He attributes much of his success to the inherited business
acumen in his blood that he honed for 30 years in his father’s
shop, but also feels like he could use more marketing and
agronomic training. Because he began working as a young boy,
he never went to school, and only recently attended Pulaar
literacy classes. But he hasn’t let this hinder his
progress. “I’ve always been curious. As soon as
something catches my attention, I follow up on it.”
Success attracts attention
This curiosity has led him to extension agents who have
helped him experiment with various crops, including sorghum,
garlic, peanuts, and tomatoes. He plans to experiment with
sesame this year. His successes once attracted the attention
of the Senegalese national agriculture director with an entourage
of French agronomists. He was even featured in a French television
documentary on West African agriculture. “A friend in
France called me and said, ‘Hey, I saw you TV here in
Europe!’”
During an interview, Abderahmane excuses himself to fish
around in his robes to take a business call on his cell phone,
a classic snapshot of the paradox of development on the whole
in much of Senegal, with its random mixture of the high-tech
and the pre-industrial, where IT filters into rural areas
faster than running water and sewage systems. He is conscious
of the irony, laughing, “Look, a peasant on a cell phone!”
He complains that he lacks high-tech business tools. “If
I had a computer, I could link up directly with buyers.”
Last year he did just this, however, by advertising his seed
rice on the government extension agency’s website. Many
people came to see him immediately and he quickly sold his
entire harvest.
He notes that his success has come by advancing one step
at a time, to reduce the risk of failure. “Mostly I
didn’t want people to think that it’s impossible
to succeed in agriculture. I had to succeed. No one else has
invested in agriculture here. They all invest elsewhere, by
building houses in Dakar. I had to show them it could be done
without emigrating.”
In addition to wanting to stem emigration from the region,
Abderahmane wants to leave a legacy for future generations,
to provide them with the opportunity for professional apprenticeship
in farming, and most importantly to teach them to cherish
the land. He has succeeded on both fronts. To illustrate this
success, he tells of how he played a trick on his 7-year-old
son. “Yesterday I told my son that a tubab [white person
or foreigner] would be coming today to buy the farm for a
lot of money.” His son began to cry, and said, “No,
never sell the land.” Abderahmane smiles and says, “I
was so happy to see how much he has learned to love the land.”
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