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Adherents of the local food movement argue: buying produce that’s grown nearby is good for the community, good for the planet and good for your health. Some farmers in the West African nation of Senegal are trying to make that case to their fellow countrymen, but it’s not so easy to get people to change their buying habits. The World’s Jori Lewis has the story. (Photo: Jori Lewis) Download MP3
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MARCO WERMAN: Many environmentalists these days are proponents of the local food movement. They argue buying produce that’s grown nearby is good for the community, good for the planet, and good for your health. Some farmers in the West African nation of Senegal are trying to make that case, but they’ve found it’s not so easy to get people to change their buying habits. Jori Lewis has the story.
JORI LEWIS: In the north of Senegal as you near the border with Mauritania, the land becomes progressively more arid and brown, all sand dunes and scrubby brush, and you realize that you are close to the edge of the Sahara. But in the valley of the Senegal River they are growing what seems an unlikely crop: rice. Moustapha Fall comes from a family that’s been farming rice here for decades.
FRENCH SPEAKING
MOUSTAPHA FALL: It’s good quality rice that we can sell and that can feed the country.
LEWIS: Fall smokes non-stop while we drive to his fields in his pickup truck, past rows of green crops surrounded by water canals and dusty lanes. Farm workers take shelter under the shade of a spindly tree. Moustapha Fall says there are lots of challenges to farming here. There’s the price of fuel to run the irrigation pumps. There are the aggressive grain-eating birds. And there are periodic droughts. But he contends that the biggest threat to his livelihood as a rice farmer has nothing to do with the environment.
FRENCH SPEAKING
FALL: The biggest problem is actually selling the rice. Most of it just sits at the mill. You see over there, the mill? There’s a lot of rice stashed away there. It hasn’t been sold.
LEWIS: It’s not that people in Senegal dislike rice. On the contrary, most people here eat rice every day. The problem is that local rice farmers have to compete with imports. In Senegal’s capital, Dakar, I slide through a small doorway into the Tilene Market’s main food hall. Vendors man tables crowded with bags of rice from all over the world, places like Vietnam, the Philippines and India. There’s even rice from the US that comes packed in bags with the USAID logo. That rice is probably part of a US program that allows countries to sell food aid to raise money for development projects.
FRENCH SPEAKING
LEWIS: I ask a vendor if he sells local rice from Senegal.
FRENCH SPEAKING
LEWIS: No, he says. There’s not much at the market. He points me toward someone at another stall who points me toward someone else who points me toward someone else. I can’t find anyone with the local rice. Rice seller Ramadan Ba says that with all the varieties of imported rice to choose from, merchants here just don’t bother to stock Senegalese rice.
FRENCH SPEAKING
RAMADAN BA: The customers don’t ask for local rice. It’s rare. Even if I brought a sack of local rice here, it might sit for months.
LEWIS: He says you have to soak local rice before cooking it so people think its more work to prepare. The quality is uneven. And it tastes different. Not at all like the popular broken jasmine rice from Thailand. The President of Senegal, though, wants to wean his country off imported rice. Relying on imports leaves the country vulnerable to shortages and price spikes, like the ones that happened in 2008 when imported rice was difficult to get. Those shortages sparked riots in Dakar as they did all over the developing world. So the government is now working to boost rice production in Senegal. But Sakura Diop, who works for a group that advocates for Senegalese rice farmers, says, getting locals to buy Senegalese rice will require raising public awareness.
FRENCH SPEAKING
SAKURA DIOP: People who are in Dakar and other major cities just don’t know that we produce rice in the valley. We have said many times that we need to introduce people to it and advertise the local rice that we produce here.
LEWIS: He hopes that this exposure will make a difference. And in Dakar, if you look hard, people are starting to consider local rice as an alternative. At the Tilene market I met housewife Sainabou Diop, who likes to buy the local rice for her thieboudienne, Senegal’s national dish of fish and rice.
FRENCH SPEAKING
SAINABOU DIOP: I really like local rice. It’s a rice that has a certain flavor. It’s good. It’s a little difficult to prepare, but it’s good anyway.
LEWIS: She thinks local rice is fresher and healthier than the imported stuff. And, she says, she tells that to anyone who asks. For The World, I’m Jori Lewis, Dakar.
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