The Beninese Bush in 360 Degrees

If you haven't heard of Confluence Project, check it out. It's a website that hosts entries from all over the world from people who have visited and documented one of the globe's confluence points (where a line of lattitude and longitude intersect).

The small country of Benin happens to have 9 confluence points, most of which were recently documented by my PCV friend Jim Rybarski. "Confluence Hunting" can be a tricky task when you're trailblazing in Africa bush, and documenting Benin involved some failed attempts for a couple sights. Problems include unexpected bodies of water, unreliable roads, unknown terrain, and trying to convince local motorcycle taxis to do the unreasonable (take you into the bush) for a reasonable price. Here is an index of Benin's confluence points.

One of the points happens to be not 40 km (as the crow flies) from my own Benin town, Nikki. You can get a 360 degree idea of the place here as well as get a synopsis of the couple attempts to locate the point. While I didn't personally make it to the point, I accompanied Jim in his first attempt, which on the day was eventually given up after a decent ammount of meandering in the bush and realizing reaching the target would mean walking in uncharted terrain at least 10km.

Global Food Crisis & African Food Security

For over a year now we’ve been hearing quite a bit about the global food crisis. Though much eclipsed now by attention to the international financial crisis, it remains one of the most pressing global issues today. The problem is that the world is reaching the limits of its capacity to feed itself, and the problem is most dire in Africa.

This is somewhat ironic, given Africa’s vast land resources, however a number of causes render this the reality: the short-sighted trade policies of the more developed nations, but also the paranoid export restrictions of many developing nations, climate changes, commodity speculation, rising fuel prices, and the diversion of important crops (notably corn) into bio-fuels.

Aside from redressing these causes (all very much political in nature), all experts on the matter agree that more energy and funding needs to be put into improving the productivity of the developing world’s farmers, especially “Africa’s 400 million small farmers and their families in Africa who are most vulnerable to hunger,” which represent “80% of the hungry in Africa” (Catherine Bertunini & Dan Glickman). Also very political, this requires that all aid programs increase their focus and funding on agriculture research and development to get to the rural farmer more agricultural inputs (enhanced grains, fertilizers, etc), better equipment and methods, and better access to markets. In a recent Foreign Affairs article, Bertunini and Glickman site that U.S. agriculture aid to Africa has dropped off 85% since the 1980s (at which point the 1970’s global food crisis seemed to be resolved).

On the ground, the global food crisis is expressed by the issue of food security, which has three core elements: the physical availability of food, the physical and economic access to food, and food utilization, all of which must be fulfilled simultaneously and continually for a household or community to have food security. While a healthy productivity is key to the world’s level of food security, in recently in West Africa the food security rub has been price, as high grain prices and general inflation is making it more a more difficult for households to feed themselves. This is the case even when the country itself is producing enough grains to feed its population (as is the case for many West African countries).

Redressing food security really implies a holistic strategy that encompasses many sectors. The Mali government, along w/ other West African countries, has been trying to weave market-based food security into its overall economic growth strategy. Donors and NGOs operating in Mali are also working food security into their programs, and recently USAID allocated quite a bit of money to Mali for food security projects. A small portion of this fundsing is going to Peace Corps Mali, whose nature and mission is in many ways is uniquely positioned to intimately understand and deal with food security issues that rural Malian community face. In the next four years the program will taking a multi-sectoral approach to the food security problem with such goals as the creation of Food Security Community Comities, encouraging the agricultural exploitation using new techniques, the creation of agricultural cooperatives, and assistance in natural resource management.

More reading on Global Food Crisis and Food Security:

• “Farm Futures” by Catherine Bertunini & Dan Glickman – June/July 2009 Foreign Affaires
• “Politics of Hunger” by Paul Collier - Foreign Affairs http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/64607/paul-collier/the-politics-of-hunger
• Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa http://www.agra-alliance.org/
• FAO Food Security: http://www.foodsec.org/
• MSU Food Security Group http://www.aec.msu.edu/fs2/index.htm

Investing in West Africa

An interesting article from the West African Trade Hub.

Getting Settled in Mali

Greetings from Mali! I arrived a couple weeks ago, and my time since has been filled with an assortment of introductions, visits, and briefings as I get acquainted to my new surroundings of Bamako, the capital. All that has included some intensive Bambara language training, which I'm trying to tackle hard in these first months. French is the official language in Mali, but local language definitely plays a more predominant role than it did in Benin.

My job assignment in Mali will be defined more clearly as the first months here progress, but my major work partner is a new Malian company called Karite Mali (www.karitemali.com). As a refiner, marketer, and exporter of Malian shea butter, Karis+ should fill an important gap in the local value chain. Hopefully this will render Malian butter more competative (better quality and price) in international markets, and bring more business and revenu for the women producer groups Karis+ partners with.

Here are some pics from a couple recent sightseeing outings. By the way, w/ much of sahelian West Africa, Mali's had an exceptional ammount of rainfall this year, which explains how green everything is!

From My Dusty Corner of Benin

For some time now I've thought of Nikki as my dusty corner of northern Benin. "Dusty," because it is that (and dirty), especially during the dry season. A "corner," because it's off all the main roads, nestled away to the western corridor of Northern Benin, the country itself normally unknown to your average Western traveler. Nevertheless, this has been "my" dusty corner because for the last two years Nikki has been my Peace Corps post.

Some angles from Nikki. Left: gazing down one of Nikki's main roads one early morning. Right: the king's courtyard. It's Friday, and small local kings are slowly gathering on the "palace" grounds to greet the Barriba kingdom's highest sovereighty.

Living and working as a business volunteer in the somewhat geographically isolated capital of the historical Barriba kingdom has had its unique challenges...this can be a tough spot for the development of business and commerce, even for Benin. Nonetheless, workwise we've done pretty well.

But there's more to life than work, and more to work than a series of projects. These eventually fade away or lose their immediacy, and what always remains is people and how we related to them. Maybe it's cliche to say, but I'll remember Nikki for the people. The infatigable mothers whose joy somehow always seem to surpass their many burdens, the philosophizing old Barriba men who walk around with their canes and umbrellas, the kids whose smiles make you smile.

To you all, "A kwan weru" and "Na siara."

On a promenade, some village paths and people around Nikki.

Combatting Child Trafficking in Benin

Nikki recently hosted Unseen Stories, an American NGO currently working on a couple film projects aimed at stemming the problem of child trafficking in Benin.

Illegal child trafficking is one of Benin's more serious long-running human rights abuses. Although since 2006 there have been laws in the books abolishing child exploitation and illegal displacement, the problem perseveres due to the many factors fueling the phenomenon, especially economically poor and vulnerable households, insufficient rural knowledge of the problem and the law, ineffective law enforcement, and cultural traditions in which certain forms of child displacement and work/study arrangements (both good and bad) have long-been practiced.

Local NGOs working on the problem estimate that hundreds of trafficked children are either sourced from, trafficked through, and/or end up being exploited in Benin. The region surrounding Nikki is particularly vulnerable, due to the district's proximity to the Nigerian border and because of the large, rural, poor, and uneducated populations.

In Nikki the trafficking scenarios vary from case to case, but usually include some common elements. Usually a trafficker goes to a rural area and negotiates either with a family or the child himself, promising either money, goods, or an education in return to the child's labor for a given amount of time, after which it is presumed that the child will be freed of his obligations. Then the child is illegally displaced (usually snuck into) Nigeria, and put to work in an exploitative manner. Boys are often put to work in the fields or rock quarries, and girls end up as domestics, market vendors, or even prostitutes. Most of the time the children are either forcefully or effectively restrained from returning home, even after the end of their pre-agreed time of service.

While in Nikki, Unseen Stories' activities focused particularly on the problem of poor public education. The NGO had put together an animation telling in French the stories of two Beninese trafficked children, and over four days we played the film in six of Nikki's most vulnerable villages. Following each screening was a discussion of the film. Leading these discussions and serving as our local expert on the problem was a development worker from the Beninese NGO APEM. For the last two years our animatrice has been working against the issue of child trafficking with a UNICEF-financed project, and has to date educated thousands of Nikki residents, installed over 60 community vigilance communities, and assisted in the reception and recuperation of trafficked children. Protecting children has trully become a passion for her, and her tireless work that goes beyond the normal call of duty proves that. Our sub-project couldn't have been a success without her.

Our Animatrice.

Unseen Stories also held dozens of similar screenings in communities across Benin. The other major element of their project is ostensibly in its final stages: the realization of a feature-length documentary on child's trafficking in Benin. Once finished this fall, it is set to be screened in film festivals, universities, churches, and other venues across America in order to raise awareness and support for the issue. You can see a trailer from this documentary and track the work of Unseen Stories' at their website.

Unseen Stories Northern Benin Team in one Nikki village.

From China with Love

Remember growing up and buying that toy that was made in China or an electronics device with the same origin, then being dissapointed later to find that it did't seem to last as long as your Fisher Price or Sony purchase? I've read that these days China is working hard to develop a more reputable national label for its manufactured goods destined for the West. Meanwhile, that kind of low quality manufacturing is still happening in Africa.

Every once in a while evidences of this shows up in the international news, but living here you see it all the time, and can't often help but feeling that too many pieces of life are uncontrollably at the mercy of cheap imports. I've had two rather disturbing recent experiences that have driven this point home for me.

There's variety of new bus lines that have popped up in Benin in the last year, riding on the advantages of having a large potential client base of people desparately looking for safe, reliable, and efficient alternative modes of overland transport, and secondly the availability of inexpensive Chinese imported buses. Rolled off the dock, the buses are shiny, clean, and airconditioned--all welcome changes to the normal transportation alternatives.

But structurally and mechanically the buses have not proven so appealing. Exhibit 1: Mid march, I'm traveling North and the engine catches fire. Fortunately, all the passengers got out of the cabin before the entire vehicle caught flame, which was in a matter of minutes. (There's a photo of that wreckage in my last blog post). Exhibit 2: Last week I'm making the same trip w/ the same company and in the same bus model and the windshield "suddenly" (without any obviously siginificant cause) shatters into large and small shards, which shower over the first three passenger rows. This was obviously not a shatter resistant window pane. This time there were injuries: three bleeding badly, including the driver himself. Fortunately he didn't panic, and wasn't hit in the face, otherwise the end could have been alot worse for all. (Minutes later, by the way, the back window pane also blew out).

The problem does't just reside in the public transport sector. Late last year you may recall the scandal of one of China's largest dried milk manufacturers essentially lacing their recipe with a main ingredient to pesticides in order to bump up their milk's printed protein count. I remember hearing the story on the news here, that quite a few number of African kids died and thousands more were sick as a result. Earlier there was the antifreeze toothpaste that thousands (or millions?) were using without knowing it. I'm always hearing complaints from neighbors and coworkers about the repairs they're always making on their motorcycles, almost all of them Chinese makes, all purchased w/in the last year ago.

Who's Fault?

I'm not one of those people that labels China a rising evil industrial power, nor do I fear globalization, nor do I get upset necessarilly when I read about China's increasing commercial and financial presence in Africa. I say commerce and competition is always good when the market is honest and fair. In fact, China has improved the quality of life for many poor Africans buy making available cheap goods that do work, and at an aid level by financing many public infrastructure projects across the continent. But I'm all for trying to fix economic inefficiencies when they're there--especially when they have the potential to hurt people-- and there's some to be fixed when it comes to commerce from China to Africa.

The biggest is imperfect information: the African mother doesn't know enough about the milk she's buying to know whether its good for her family. Often the labeling isn't even clear enough for her to know what country it comes from let alone what's in it. Another related problem is that when malfunctions happen there's not really any single and central and accesible mode to complain, nor know about other complaints. I felt the pangs of this problem after my second bus incident--there was somthing significantly and seriously wrong with these bus models, and I wanted "to do something about it," but I felt that I had no satisfactory recourse to voice my complaint.

Of course I complained to the company management my string of "bad luck" with his cars, but will that stop them from buying more? I doubt it, just recently I'm pretty sure I saw at least one new purchase. And new companies are buying from the same place. And so this is another problem...though a product may be risque, African firms continue to buy them because they're cheap, and often neither the government nor the clients will mount enough pressure for change.

So then we can put some on the African governments, who don't regulate their importants nearly as much as they should. When the powdered milk crisis came out last year, a slew of African states banned Chinese imported milk. This reaction was good until the products were proven good once again, but there needs to be more preventative and controlling activities going on too.

How much fault should be accorded to the Chinese producers? Probably lots, but depends on the severity of the deception. With regards to the milk, it was completely the fault of the group of individuals who decided to lace their product with chemical melamine, and furthermore deceive their consumers about it. Perhaps rolling out cheaper buses is a lesser crime, but in my opinion it's still a crime to put on the market buses knowing they have weak windows and malfunctioning engine pieces, and furthermore that they will be put under even further strains in the tropics of Africa.

I should make a couple points to catch some false assumptions that might otherwise be made. One, it's not just Africans that are sufferring from cheap goods--China dumps them on their own people, as well. Chinese infants also died from the poisoned milk incident. (What's more, I've heard reports of entire Chinese communities with whose population suffer physically from the harmful chemical spillovers from careless and accountable-less nearby industrial factories.) And it's not just China dumping it's cheap goods on Africa. There are alot of scary low quality Chinese-made meds sold on the streets of Benin, but alot of them also come from India. And Africa also dumps alot of bad products on itself. And alot of the equipement imported can become dangerous when it's over used and poorly maintained.

I guess what is so unique and potenially frightening about the Chinese cases is the fact that China is probably the biggest supplier of "cheap imported goods" to Africa--and commerce is only going to increase. The other element is that certain of China's manufacturers seem to have the power and intention to put pretty shines on prodcuts that prove inferior once they've been road tested.