First the water, then the harvest

The fields grow staple foods: bush beans and bissap, the hibiscus from which one of Senegal’s national drinks is prepared. There are also fruit trees, an arboretum of native trees and hedges of Moringa oleifera around all the fields. Moringa leaves provide protein, iron and vitamins and have a firm place in traditional medicine.

The bush on the stony laterite soils, where nothing can be farmed, is left standing. It is full of wild medicinal plants that feed into our medicinal plant scheme: kinkeliba, artemisia, Strophanthus gratus and others.

Nothing is processed on site. Seven kilometres away, the organisation Nebeday runs a small organic processing plant where mostly women work, to hygiene standards and on fair terms. We grow for this plant: moringa and bissap to begin with, later other produce such as mangoes. The products are sold through “Maam Nature” in Dakar, the mangoes for example as dried slices or as jam.

At the end of August, two weeks after the bush beans had been sown, the caterpillars came. Like the Very Hungry Caterpillar, they rapidly devoured the plants, which were five to ten centimetres tall. Our advisers, Nebeday’s agricultural specialist and an agroecologist with the Weltfriedensdienst, said: pick them off. A group was quickly organised to pick the caterpillars off the leaves. The damage was contained, just about.

A problem that remains is the herds of livestock. The animals cannot open the gates themselves, but time and again herders help them, and then whatever has grown is eaten. It is a conflict over land use that is getting worse as freely accessible bush becomes ever scarcer because of the building boom.