BusinessDay... the voice of business: West Africa’s growing food crisis

West Africa’s growing food crisis
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Kaye Whiteman  London on 07 May, 2008 02:00:00
 
This is not necessarily media driven, but when Ban-Ki Moon, the UN
Secretary-General predicts the most serious social disturbances the world has
seen for a long time, at the same time as setting up a large new contingency
fund, we are all bound to take note. And all of a sudden the mantra that was so
popular in the development business forty years ago, that agriculture is the
basis of a sound economy, is being repeated on a planetary scale. So, although
the subject was treated in a general fashion in this diary two weeks ago, there
are a few more observations to be made on the particular West African angle. It
is one area of the world where there have been a number of social protests,
mostly in March, and it is clear that some governments are mobilising if only to
protect their position. ECOWAS ministers of trade, finance and agriculture are
due to have a special meeting to discuss the food situation this month, and the
European Union has also convened a meeting. The African Development Bank has
increased its facility for agriculture by $1bn.  Even if rice has become a
widely popular and probably socially aspirational food in the sub-region (mostly
due to the universally approved jollof rice), one can still make the
generalisation that one of the well-known divisions along the coast is into
rice-eaters in the far west, and non-rice eaters. The latter are broadly to be
found in the more agriculturally productive coastal areas of the Gulf of Guinea,
especially the yam belt, although the importance of cassava throughout the area
is now moving much more into prominence, and could prove a source of nutritional
salvation.
Liberia, Senegal….
The whole region is affected by the rocketing of world food prices, but rice,
whose price has more than doubled in six months, is for West Africa the most
significant and potentially alarming. In Liberia, one of the most obviously
concerned countries, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, has set up a programme
with US support for increased mechanised rice production.    In Senegal, a
massive rice importer, which has already experienced riots in March, the issue
is still at the forefront of the country’s volatile politics. Demonstrators on
May Day protested at food prices, and renewed efforts are being made to revive
domestic rice production. When prices are prohibitive, you eat what you can,
even if the local product is considered by public taste buds to be inferior to
the imported product. The ADB has listed particularly vulnerable countries, such
as the Gambia and Guinea-Bissau, both not very secure politically, but the
countries of the Sahel, where food has been a critical problem every  year
(hence the hungry season in Niger), are now also in the political frame as part
of the soft underbelly of the Sahara. This figures in all the international
worries about the spread of ‘terrorism’, which goes hand in hand with
political problems like Touareg irredentism, but the food/politics equation,
seen for example in Cameroon in February, has added a new dimension.
…and Guinea
Without jumping in to the risky business of prediction, one may legitimately
wonder how long Guinea can survive without being sucked into the syndrome, in
view of the major country-wide political crisis experienced in the first part of
2007. The settlement of this plastered over rather than resolved  issue of the
impending demise of the ailing President Lansana Conte’s regime. Guinea is a
major rice importer, and given the already existing extreme public hardship,
there are already new signs of trouble, with demonstrators in Conakry last week
saying: “down with the high cost of living” and “give us cheaper rice”.
The government of prime minister Lansana Kouyaté has set up a crisis committee
and is establishing emergency stocks, and is trying to cope with new social
tensions that have been generated, but this is clearly one to watch.
Irele and Césaire
I feel compelled to return to Aimé Césaire, whose passing was the subject of
last week’s diary. This is mainly to put on record that one of the foremost
international authorities on Césaire’s life and works is a Nigerian Professor
at Harvard University in the USA. This is Abiola Irele, Professor of African and
African American Studies and Romance Languages and Literature at Harvard
University. I first met him in Paris in late 1963, in the offices of the review
Présence Africaine. We were introduced by the Editor Alioune Diop, whom I was
interviewing for West Africa at the suggestion of Basil Davidson. ‘Biola was
in the French capital at the Sorbonne doing a doctoral thesis on the work of
Césaire, the study of whom has been central to his life’s work of exploring
the black creative experience in French. His own tribute to the great man
appeared in an African American called ‘The Root’. In which he said that
Césaire has been the last survivor of a generation of black writers that had
“called into question the French colonial order and challenged the discourse
of empire”. He quotes revealingly from the ‘Return to My Native Land’ ,
which he describes as held as the founding text of Negritude for its exulting
tone and its passion:
My negritude is not a stone, its deafness heaved against the clamour of clay
My negritude is not a film of dead water on the dead eye of earth
My negritude is neither a tower nor a cathedral
It delves into the red flesh of the soil
It delves into the burning flesh of the sky
It digs through the dark accretions that weigh down its righteous patience.
Post-Colonial plays
Irele wrote a profile of Césaire for West Africa, but also an important
article focusing on the poet’s ‘post-colonial’ plays notably La Tragédie
du Roi Christophe set in early 19th century Haiti and Une Saison au Congo set in
the 1960 Congo just after the Belgian departure, dealing with a similarly tragic
figure – Patrice Lumumba. The aim of both he says is to point out the
implications of Negritude in the post-colonial era, or “the specific problems
that beset newly freed men in their hopes and endeavours”. And in a tribute
that Irele paid to Césaire at the conference in Paris to mark the 50th
anniversary of the memorable First Congress of Black Writers and Artists back in
1956, writing of a third play, Et Les Chiens se Taisent (And the Dogs Are
Quiet), he describes Césaire as “the Nietzschean man of resentment, giving
expression to his tragic apprehension of the black condition”.
Symbolic Refusal
Must add a footnote to the story recounted last week of Césaire vs Sarkozy,
and the poet’s celebrated refusal to meet Sarkozy in December 2005. From
further reading on the subject, it seems that Césaire did agree to meet the
Minister of the Interior and future president on March 11, 2006, and subjected
him to a forty minute lecture on the realities of the colonial period. The
symbolic gesture of denial had happened: the point had been made, and then made
again.
17th century quotation
I have been asked about the source of the quotation “the world turned upside
down”, which was the heading of this diary used two weeks ago, in what was on
reflection a somewhat apocalyptic account of the state of the world. It comes
from the title of a book written by the Marxist historian Christopher Hill, a
one-time Master of Balliol College, Oxford, on the subject of radical ideas in
the English revolution. Bizarrely, he took it from the title of an old English
folk-song from the civil war period in the mid-17th century, regretting the
passing of traditional Christmas practices, a pretty innocuous pretext for
global upheaval.
v