It’s a Wednesday in mid April and
there’s a group of children running through a herd of goats under the shade of
a baobab tree at the luomo or market at Kerrpateh in the Gambia’s Northern
Region. The children play without a care in the world, but watching the
activities of farmers and traders here can be a clear indicator of how life is
going in this part of West Africa and this year all the signs are bad. There’s
a crisis and the number one sign is that the market is full of livestock and
it’s all for sale at rock bottom prices. Everyone is selling off their animals,
even the village leader, Mammud Drammeh has resorted to selling his last goat.
“If you don’t have anything to eat, you’ll catch anything running around in
your compound and go and sell it. Goats, horse, sheep, cattle, whatever you
have, you sell it” he says looking over at the animals. Senegalese traders have
made the short journey over the border and are buying up the lot. These traders
and middlemen know how desperate the locals are and with a flooded market, they
can pay such low prices to make the journey worthwhile. Mammud shrugs, “At the
market if you’re selling, you look out for your own interests. If the animal
you’ve brought is worth 10,000, even if they offer you 5,000, you’ll sell it
because you need to get money for food, so you can buy rice. You don’t think
about what the price should be, you just want to get food for your
family.”
The
Gambia has declared this season a total crop failure. Even though it’s a
relatively small country with the powerful Gambia river running through, the
river’s tributaries carry salty water which means that much of the crops here
are rain fed and without those rains, there is little hope for a harvest. This
year the rains didn’t come and because of that, the situation here, as in many
other parts of the Sahel, is about to get much worse. A second sign of such
crisis is that apart from animals, there isn’t much other food on offer at
Kerrpateh market. When asked how this year compares to previous years, Mammud
grimaces a little and shakes his head, “Well, when you have something and when
you have absolutely nothing, how can you compare the two? There’s no millet. No
groundnuts. No maize. In fact by now some people have eaten all they had in
their stores. There’s nothing. No food.” Areas of the market usually teeming
with traders are eerily quiet. Adama Njai stands by his silent milling machine
waiting for customers. “This year we haven’t had any produce because the rains
were so bad. In previous years you couldn’t walk around here because there was
so much produce. But you can see this year there’s hardly anything. People just
bring in small amounts to mill, maybe just enough for a single meal.” And
unlike the animals which are going cheap, what little food there is for sale is
too expensive for many locals like Mammud to buy, “I wanted to buy a bag of
millet today,” says the village leader “but I can’t because its too expensive.
They were selling a kilo for 15 Gambian Dalasi before. Now it’s more than 30
Dalasi and the price will continue to rise.”
There
are still children running about, ducking in and out of the stalls, but crisis
sign number three is evident all around them. Farmers here are selling off all
their equipment and Mammud is no exception “We’ve already sold off all the
farming tools that we had. Most of it went to Guinea Bissau.” His admission
bodes even worse for the future, as without tools, seeds, animals, or
fertilisers, he and his fellow farmers will have no way of growing anything
next season, even if the rains do come.
At
the exit to the market is crisis sign number four. There are firewood sellers
set up at the side of the road in places where they never usually are. People
need money so badly that they’re resorting to cutting down the few remaining
trees to buy food to feed their families. Despite all the sensitization drives
carried out by international aid agencies and local NGOs, people here are
hungry and too desperate to think about the environment.
On
the road from Kerrpateh market to the regional capital Kerewan, a group of
women provide a fifth sign of serious crisis. The women are from the village of
Daresalame and are part of a two hundred strong group who grow rice on two
hundred hectares of land. They point to the rice crop in their field which
stands abandoned because this year they aren’t even bothering to harvest it.
One of the women, Jankeh Fafana explains “The rains didn’t come and so the rice
didn’t mature.“ She pulls at the heads of some rice plants. The panicles have
nothing in them and crumble to dust at her touch. “We‘ve wasted sixty days of
work, preparing the fields, planting and weeding and we have to walk five
kilometres here and back every day to work.” Apart from the labour and energy
invested for nothing, these women have also lost money spent on seeds and
fertiliser amounting to 4150 Gambian Dalasi ($138) each, a huge amount to a
poor smallholder farmer.
Although
no-one is starving yet and children may be still playing in the market, these
five signs of crisis clearly show people on the brink of starvation. The simple
fact remains that if action isn’t taken now another major human catastrophe is
inevitable and then those children will be emaciated and staring at the cameras
of the world’s press.
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