Submitted by crinadmin on
KEIDI, 20 July (IRIN) - Water is as precious as gold in Mauritania's baking hot villages, and probably seems just as heavy for the women and children who trek 15 kilometres or more every day to pump barrels of it out of the ground, hauling it home on their heads and on donkeys. The annual three month rainy season from July to October promises a brief respite from that gruelling job, and a short window to grow food for the year ahead. But as rainfall throughout the Sahel region has plummeted in recent years, a reliable growing season has become more mirage than certainty. In Mauritania, where two-thirds of the country's three million people rely on small-scale farming and breeding goats and sheep as a cash-crop to sell or swap for food, rains failed in 2003 and 2004, leaving villagers dependent on aid handouts. Last year rains came, but so did a plague of locusts that wiped out crops throughout West Africa, again leaving Mauritanians with nothing. The first rains of the 2006 season fell on Saturday night, and aid agencies in the country's capital Nouakchott were quick to point out that even though their projects meant to head off another crisis are worryingly under-funded, there is no need to call an emergency this year - yet. If rains fall hard enough for long enough, food reserves can be filled, and animals fattened up, the agencies say. But even the slightest deviation in the length or amount of rain will send Mauritanians back over the brink. Meanwhile, the agencies warn donors are missing a chance to make Mauritania's villagers more resilient to these cruel fluctuations by jeopardising funds for projects meant to alleviate the troubles. AFTER THE RAIN Water has never been plentiful in Mauritania. Its people have elaborate rituals and customs built around sharing and preserving it, and few crimes are worse than wasting or spoiling a drop. But neither has the precious liquid ever been so scarce before. In some regions, locals told IRIN they could recall when water lay just centimetres below the surface all year round. Today in the same places, the water table has sunk to lower than 60 metres, and easy-to-reach groundwater is never there for longer than four months after the seasonal rains fall. Hisseye Attout, 62, head of a tiny settlement of 160 people deep in the trackless desert 100 kilometres north of the Gorgol regional capital Keidi, and born and raised in the same hut he lives in today, recalled better days. "Before, there were sorghum fields and camels everywhere," he said, gesturing over the rocky, vast and empty plain that dwarfs the village's tiny huts. "We were all cultivators, we had enough food for everyone, and plenty of cattle. In a good year we could make 1,600 kilos of sorghum, sell it to buy tea and fish and meat at the market, and even keep some in reserve." When the rains failed, Attout and the other men in the village trekked miles across the desert, some searching for fresh pastures for the cattle, others cutting wood to sell for cash to buy food. Eventually, it was handouts of oil and wheat from the World Food Programme that kept the villagers going through those lean years, Attout said. Asked if they knew why the rains were failing to come as hard or often as before, Romane's villagers burst out laughing. "Why does the sun rise? Why does the moon come? How can we know that?" they jeered. The villagers rely on fervent prayer to command the rains. Climatologists are not laughing. Studies have shown rainfall patterns shifting away from the continent's interior towards its coasts. In a recent report the aid group Oxfam warned that by 2080 at least 60 million or more Africans from throughout the continent will be menaced by hunger because of changes in their climate. NO WATER, NO LIFE Water means far more than just a much-needed drink in Mauritania. It is the cornerstone of livelihoods for the cultivators and animal breeders, allowing them to grow enough food to eat, to keep some in reserve, and to sell or swap the rest for "luxuries" items like tea and sugar. Without water, fragile livelihoods are reduced to nothing. South of the interior, on the banks of the smooth-flowing Senegal River, the only secure source of water in the country, the head of Guiraye village, Yahya Ohmar Niang despaired for water for his village's abundant land, even as the shimmering river flowed tantalisingly just metres from his sand-blown village. The village's fields are notable for their fertility on a continent wracked by creeping soil degradation and desertification that between them could render 60 percent of Africa's arable land useless, according to agricultural experts. But with no way to get large quantities of water from the river to the fields, the villagers in Guiraye have to wait for heavy rains, like everyone else in the region. "When rain comes, we see shoots within days," Niang said. The air in the fields is quickly alive with the soft rustle of maize and sorghum plants blowing in the breeze. But without rain, "we cannot live." In Guiraye, even though every local person that IRIN met still calls him or herself a cultivator, and there is no regular work except farming, it is buying not growing food that keeps hunger at bay. MARKET ECONOMY As hungry villagers flock to markets, haggling with traders over oil, wheat and sorghum, the villagers get locked into a cycle of poverty as they grapple with the ruthless prerogatives of the free market. "If the harvest is good, the prices fall. If it is bad, it rises, the same every year," Niang explained. May, June and July are always the most expensive months, when traders boost prices, safe in the knowledge that desperate locals, well beyond the end of their reserves, have no choice but to buy, at any price. According to Niang, prices this year are especially excessive because of the bad harvest last year. Local aid workers around Keidi said many villagers who cannot afford the high prices but will starve without the food, are forced to buy on credit, secured against promises to hand over large portions of their harvest at rock bottom prices later in the year. Mariane Sakho, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation's representative in Keidi, understatedly calls this "a cycle of difficulty." HARDEST HIT Children are the most at risk in this miserable cycle. Barely able to scrape together enough to survive, many Mauritanians are compromising on everything except the basics, and especially on food. In Romane, another harsh settlement perched in the Gorgol interior, all three meals cooked every day by the 2,500 villagers are based on cous-cous, made from the sorghum crop which is the most common product in the region, and hence cheapest to buy at market. The evidence of these hardship rations is visible in the faces and physiques of the village's children. They have brilliant white teeth from drinking camel milk, but the painfully swollen stomachs caused by eating sand and not enough else. Propping up Abbar Fahdi, a three year old born in the first year of the recent troubles, 2003, who looks no older than one year old and whose legs are too weak to even support his feeble frame, village chief Bechirou Aly explains the stark dilemma. "Our first concern is water, our second is food. Everything else comes after," he said quietly. "How can we spare water to even wash the children when we do not have enough to drink?" The problems this nutritional apocalypse is making go much deeper than the extreme, final moments of famine that will make it to the world's television screens if an emergency does break out in Mauritania. Saydi Samba is a 15 year-old boy in Romane with the body of a child half his age, due to poor nutrition in his early years. As well as Samba's physical retardation, child health experts warn children starved of food in the first five years of their lives will have reduced mental functions and health problems throughout their lives. Back in Keidi, Tocka Wague, a state doctor who also works with healthcare NGOs in the region, points to a chart showing the number of malnourished children in Gorgol rising steadily through the year. "There is a huge nutrition deficit for more than 55 percent of children here," he said, before breaking away to tend to a limp baby, brought in to his basic surgery ward by sweating, panicked parents. "The situation is definitely getting worse in the countryside as people are just not eating at this time of year. People eat just to eat, not for nutrition. If it rains properly things will level off. If not, we will be looking at another major intervention," Wague warned. PROBLEMS RESPONDING Beating this cycle of poverty and giving Mauritanians back their dignity and stability requires a kind of intervention far more sophisticated than simply addressing the basic problem of a lack of water. Well-meaning projects installed to use modern means to alleviate age-old problems litter Mauritania's countryside. Solar panels, wind turbines, electric and diesel pumps and hydraulic wells all stand useless in the countryside, installed by well-meaning but long-departed NGOs, and unfixable by Mauritania's villagers. People respect the projects - even when they break down they are not picked apart like the abandoned cars that litter the countryside. But they do not want them. Looking disparagingly at a gleaming, fenced off solar-panel water project that he said creates "next to nothing" for the desert town of Moungoul, Lamine Sadias Sarr, the region's only doctor, explained the dilemma. "If we could correct the problem of water we could easily end the problem of malnutrition here," he said. "People would grow a few carrots and tomatoes, eat properly all year round." But the sophisticated water projects are not the solution, according to Sarr. "It is impossible to make these projects last longer than the NGOs have funding and interest. Afterwards, it is impossible for us to use them to get water," he said. Baliou Coulibaly at the British NGO Oxfam in Nouakchott, which has been working on water projects in Mauritania since 1992, said trial and error has shown the best approach is one that supports coping mechanisms locals have used themselves, rather than trying to introduce them to unsustainable new technologies. "There is no need to bring something new to the situation. These people have coping strategies of their own, we just need to support and develop them," he told IRIN. FUTURE SURVIVAL Examples of projects Coulibaly said Oxfam has found to work are providing feed and vaccinations for donkeys, which women use to carry larger amounts of water from distant water holes and wells, providing villagers with strong netting so animals do not eat their crops when they do manage to produce, and giving women tools and seeds to start small market gardens. The UN World Food Programme has taken a similar approach, providing food banks where villagers can buy maize and other basics at fair prices, in quantities as small as one kilogram, and without having to worry about predatory price fluctuations or massive debts. WFP also runs food for work projects, which give people life-sustaining food handouts in return for their work on dam building projects, meant to trap water on agricultural land to give it longer to seep down into the porous rock below. Moussa Ould Balgo, president of the Mauritanian NGO network in Keidi, is enthusiastic about this approach. "People invest their time, effort and resources in these projects, and then feel they have a stake," he said. "These projects can function independently, they do not always need to have someone to watch over them." Despite the enthusiasm for the projects, WFP officials warn their funds are running out, and donors are distracted by problems elsewhere, perhaps assuming that as there is no crisis in Mauritania yet this year, it does not need their help. Some 500,000 Mauritanians, a sixth of the country's population, are still deemed vulnerable by WFP. "We are trying to attract the attention of the international community to the situation. We do not want donors to say that [the nutritional situation] has improved in the country and there is no need for assistance," said Sory Ibrahim Ouane, WFP's director in Mauritania. The agency is short of US $4 million for its community feeding projects, enough money to buy 7.5 million metric tonnes of food, which would be distributed mostly in the central and southern zones of the vast desert country, Ouane said. If the funds do not turn up by the end of July, 350,000 people will find the WFP-provided food stocks they rely on to avoid the exploitative market prices, running out of supplies. Back in Romane village, with its malnourished children and already abominable diet, the suggestion that funds could run out and the small but lifesaving WFP projects the villagers rely on to survive could end is met with blank, incomprehensible faces. "We have not heard that," said village chief Bechirou Aly. "If there is no rain and no food, we will try to leave." [Source: IRIN]