Libya is that rarity, a sparsely populated country. The reason is simple: Although it has valuable natural resources, they’re inedible. The world’s seventeenth largest nation by area but 103rd by population, it has just 6 million people, 90 percent living in a tight band hugging its northern coast, where its Mediterranean ports were once its greatest assets. Today, oil is number one; another commodity, however, may irrevocably limit Libya’s population to its present size, or possibly fewer. That is water.
Because Libya’s northern wells are depleted or fouled by seawater, drinking water for that 90 percent now comes via Muammar Gaddafi’s magnum opus, the “Great Man-Made River”—the world’s biggest network of pipes, connected to more than a thousand wells drilled half a kilometer into a sandstone aquifer in the south. The water they tap accumulated when the Sahara abounded with plant and animal life, a wet period that ended about six thousand years ago when the Earth’s axis wobbled slightly—just as growing populations and their flocks and crops were demanding more water than ever. The unfortunate collision of those events altered northern Africa profoundly. Estimates for when the Libyan aquifer will be pumped dry range from sixty to a thousand years, the high figure possibly more attributable to Gaddafi than hydrology. Whenever it happens, one thing is almost certain: nothing will replenish it anytime soon—neither in human nor geologic time.
The Sahara is as monochromatic and vast as the Arctic—except that the Arctic is shrinking and the Sahara is growing, southward into the semiarid transitional belt known as the Sahel that separates the desert from central Africa’s tropical savannas. Cinched around the upper body of the African continent, the Sahel is six hundred miles thick at its widest point—at least, for now.
In the West African nation of Niger, due south of Libya, Al-Haji Rabo Mamane knows a lot about the Sahel, but he isn’t sure how many children he has, so he reaches for his prayer beads and starts counting.
“Seventeen,” he presently says. Mamane is the chief of Bargaja, a Sahel village of two thousand, twenty kilometers north of the border with Nigeria. He sits on a blue and green woven cotton mat under a thatched awning in front of his mud-plastered home, surrounded by the men of his village. A white-goateed man of seventy, he adjusts his sky-blue djalabiya around his bare ankles, straightens his round embroidered blue prayer cap, and then adds: “Seventeen who are still alive. I’ve lost at least that many.”
The past years have been hard. In 2010, few crops in Niger made it to maturity. Millet, the staple cereal, dried and died on the stalk, as the great heat came early. Same with the groundnuts. Sorghum, usually drought-tolerant, grew but produced no seed. The cattle lacked grass.
“So our children began to die.” The World Food Programme tried to airlift in emergency food for 5 million desperate people, but Mamane still lost three—even though, as chief, he was able to send a wife to the health center run by French doctors in Maradi, the region’s capital. There she watched them die of malnutrition, one after another.
She is his youngest wife. “I married her when she was twelve, when she was fresh. All her babies have died; one was three years, one was two. One died after just a week.”
In 2011, he lost two more. Two of his other wives had been nursing; malnourished, they grew anemic and their breast milk faltered. The babies died of anemia and opportunistic malaria. “My youngest wife was still so upset that I considered divorcing her to give her another chance with another man. But fortunately, she is pregnant again.”
A murmur of approval from the men seated around him.
He doesn’t have a sure count of wives, either. Although the Qur’an allows him up to four as long as he can responsibly care for them, over the years some wives have stayed, some have left. “Some of them died, too.” One, he knows, has three children still living. Three out of nine births.
His oldest son, Inoussa, squatting at the edge of his father’s mat in a dark blue flowing djalabiya and purple prayer cap, adds some figures in the dirt with his finger. “Last year, this village lost a hundred eighty children.” Inoussa, forty-two, has three wives who have borne him eleven children, six still alive. He is considered rich because he farms an entire hectare himself. Fifty years ago, everyone had two hectares, but the land has been so partitioned among multiple sons that the two hectares that once supported a family of twenty now must support sixty or seventy.
“We have these problems we don’t know how to solve,” says his father.
“We have too many people,” Inoussa replies. Frowning eyes turn to him. “Yes,” he says. “We are weeping because we are being crushed by our own children.”
All his life, he’s heard that every birth is a blessing. God provides, although God also takes away. Two years before, after he and his wives stopped working for three days to pray for the soul of the latest child to die, they made a decision. They went to the clinic in Maradi. With his consent, all three wives began to take family-planning pills. Inoussa didn’t try to hide it in the village, and the other men didn’t hide their discomfort over what he’d done. He hasn’t tried to convince them: “Their eyes can see the results. My wives were so thin, but now they’ve gained weight. No one has gotten pregnant for two years. It’s good, because having eleven is a big test of their strength.”
As he explains this, the other men look baffled. In Niger, every woman averages between seven and eight—the highest human fertility rate on Earth. His wives should have borne at least twenty-one among them, but they stopped at barely half that.
In a room a few feet from where the men are talking, two of the chief’s wives sit on the dirt floor near the doorway, listening. Neither weighs more than ninety pounds. In rural Niger, the best food, like eggs, goes to the men. Next the children are fed. In lean times, women barely eat at all. Hassana, the taller, older wife, is nursing a son named Chafiou, four months old. She has two others, a boy and a girl. But a mother keeps score of her losses, too, and she’s behind, four to three.
“The first, a boy, died at four years. The second, a girl, at a year and seven months.” Three and four lived. “The fifth died at age three. The sixth at one year. Those two were also girls.” She sets Chafiou in her lap and wipes an eye with the hem of her flowered hijab. The baby’s own eyes widen as he looks up at her.
She pulls him back to her breast. “It is such darkness to have and lose a child. God gives life, then takes it back. But I can’t go against God’s wishes. Because I know that God can also take my life anytime He wants.” She’s heard about family planning before. It doesn’t interest her. “When a food crisis hits and sweet children die, you have to keep having them while you can. If I stopped, what if the ones I already have don’t survive? I’ll have nothing.”
But wouldn’t only three have a better chance, because there would be more for them to eat?
“If we could guarantee enough food so I wouldn’t have to always have one in my womb and another one on my back, then yes. But this guarantee doesn’t exist.” She glances at her cowife, Jaimila, huddled in the opposite corner, a blue khimar over a batik skirt hiding her pregnancy. “Besides, if there are fewer children and more food, husbands will just race to get more wives, and wives will compete with each other to have more children. Then there won’t be enough food again.”
Chief’s wives, Bargaja, Niger
She married late, at sixteen. Not so Jaimila, who was twelve when she married the chief, and whose three babies have all died. Does she regret not taking the opportunity to find a younger husband, rather than bearing the child of a seventy-year-old man?
“But he is the chief,” she replies, puzzled by the question.
There is a saying in Niger: An old man with money is a young man. Other men’s wives lose even more babies, and faster, because the chief has the most land and animals. Though these days, no one has much. “If I still had my three, or if God gives me three more after this one, maybe I could stop someday. But I would have to go all the way to Maradi for the pills. And he will be old soon, and won’t want to. So I abandon the idea.”
Landlocked Niger is slightly larger than France, Germany, and Poland combined. Directly below Libya and Algeria, the northern four-fifths of the country is mostly uninhabitable desert. Most Nigeriens live farther down in the Sahel, which many still remember as covered with acacia forests, grasslands, and baobab trees. Today, as vegetation shrivels and temperatures average 1.5 to 2°C higher than during the 1990s, they fear it will increasingly resemble the Sahara.
In far southwest Niger, the Niger River, Africa’s third longest after the Nile and the Congo, enters the country for the middle of its 2,600-mile journey. One hundred sixty miles after passing through the capital, Niamey, it reaches Nigeria, whose fertility, averaging slightly under five children per female, isn’t quite as alarming as its neighbor’s. But with ten times the number of people—166 million to Niger’s 16.6 million—Nigeria has the highest population in Africa, more than twice that of second-place Ethiopia. By 2040, Nigeria is expected to double to 333 million, a number that will so far transcend its agricultural capacity—and the continent’s—that no one has any idea what will happen.
In his palace in Maradi, Sultan Al-Haji Ali Zaki is not worrying about Nigeria or 2040, because he has enough trouble here and now. Despite its tragic infant mortality rate, his region also has the highest population growth rate in Niger, which has the highest in the world.
The reason is a Niger River tributary, the Goulbi de Maradi, one of Niger’s most important seasonal wadis—“hands of the river” in the Hausa language. The greenest part of its country, Maradi is considered a breadbasket, but its villages, such as Bargaja, are full of dying children. It is Friday; religious leaders gathered here earlier to discuss the crisis, and now village leaders have assembled.
Ignoring his carved throne, the sultan sits in a comfortable stuffed chair, in a gold-embroidered white robe and caftan, white silk turban, and a white lace scarf around his neck. He is elderly but thickset, with large, red-rimmed glasses perched on a broad triangular nose. He is the only man in the room wearing shoes: white leather with golden buckles. Everyone else sits on the thin red carpet, except the four orange-turbaned guards standing nearby in green, white, and ochre robes, with daggers and cudgels ready. The sultan’s right wrist is wrapped in prayer beads. On his left is a stainless-steel Rolex.
“Last year we suffered much hardship,” he says. “Drought killed our cattle. Thousands simply dropped. People starved. Luckily, we were helped by the government and international donors and NGOs. They did their best, but their statisticians can’t predict our needs, because they can’t keep up with our numbers. Nobody can anymore. But we thank them for trying.”
One of the guards shouts his praise of the government.
“And now we are again facing poor rains,” the sultan continues. “The government and the NGOs will again miscalculate the provisions we will need.”
Recently he traveled to northern Maradi, where the Sahel is fast fading to desert. A few areas received a bit more rain this year, but most villages were like one he visited, Mailafia, a silent town with soil baked yellow-white, its women gaunt and leathery, its children sullen, its goats stunted. The big trees were gone, as were the cattle. Their sole concrete-lined well, dug by a French NGO after the 2005 famine, wasn’t enough to water livestock and the people, too.
“In my youth,” said a forty-five-year-old man named Issa Ousmane, after they’d knelt in the sand for prayers, “you wouldn’t have been able to see those houses and granaries, because the trees were so thick. You would need someone to lead you by the hand. There was grass as high as a standing man. Rabbits, deer, guinea fowl, antelope. Now all you see are our poor buildings. The sand is nude.”
The palms, tamarinds, and baobabs were there until more people needed wood than the forest had to give. The few remaining acacia grow poorly, because of the lack of rain and a hotter sun. They were used to drought arriving every ten years. But then it was every five years.
“Then every three. And now last year’s hasn’t ended. We still have no production. We are surviving on the sale of our cattle.”
Four of his nine sons have taken his animals south to sell, including his breeding stock. “Soon, cattle herding will disappear. This is like a disease without a medicine. And it will end our lives.”
“There is no longer enough milk to make porridge,” a mother of eight had added, pounding millet in a wooden churn. “All we want is food so we can produce children.”
Earlier today, the sultan now tells the men gathered before him, he asked the imams about family planning.
“We marry to harvest children,” objects a man in a white djalabiya. “What is life’s purpose other than leaving heirs?”
“My father and grandfather had many wives and many children,” replies the sultan. “I have just seven. My sons have two, three, and four. We are of different generations, and as we become educated, we learn that feeding children is a big burden. We hope for cooperation from the mosques to teach people that it is unhealthy to repeat pregnancies quickly. To leave space between births, for the safety of the mother and the child.”
The men stare at the floor. No one shouts praise.
The sultan leans forward, forearms on his knees. “Allah does not want us to have children we cannot feed or care for.”
“What Allah wants,” says Imam Raidoune Issaka in his study, “is for us to have bigger families, not to bend to any pressure to reduce their size.”
Imam Issaka is thirty-five and smooth-cheeked, with a scrabble of beard below his chin. His djalabiya is gray with silver stripes, his prayer cap white with black embroidery. He is one of thirteen children. The young man in a tall red cap and gold-stitched caftan he addresses is an aide to the sultan.
The imam is seated in a green upholstered chair by a sagging bookcase containing leather-bound commentaries on the Qur’an and loose pages of notes for his sermons. He raises his palm toward these. “The teachings of Islam allow us to space deliveries of children only if there is a known health risk to the mother. To reduce or stop producing children on the pretext of difficulties feeding them goes against a pact between Muslims and God. Allah has promised to provide for all the children.”
He takes a sip of tea from a cup on the leather hassock by his feet. “He will provide for all their needs, provided that they respect all His rules. But if they go astray from the way that God has drawn for them, they will face His punishment. It will not be a happy result.”
But how have little children sinned? Why should they suffer and die?
“God’s teaching refers to parents who have committed lewd acts and sinned. It is a call to them to return to the path, if they wish their future to be bright.”
The sultan’s man, seated by a small black table that holds a portable radio, does not reply. “Of course it pains us all,” continues the imam. “That is why in the mosque we call on the community to assist the needy.”
He acknowledges that the population is five times what it was when his father before him was the imam of Maradi. The very room in which they sit was once a horse stable outside the town that now surrounds it. “In one sense, this is a symbol of development and advancement. But in another, it is nothing to cheer about. People are not acting to safeguard nature. Our farmlands and pastures are being destroyed.”
Is there no connection between that and soaring population? What will this come to, if this continues?
“Our doom,” he says matter-of-factly. The sultan’s man straightens in his chair as the imam settles back in his, nodding.
“We know the future is alarming. But man cannot hold back doomsday. The Prophet says that God has preordained its time.”
Several dusty blocks away, another imam, Chafiou Issaka, sits on a straight-backed metal chair in the middle of a small, roofless alcove attached to his home. Except for a low wooden bench where the sultan’s aide awaits, it is otherwise completely bare, its mud-brick walls unplastered. The imam wears sunglasses against the glare reflecting off his crisp white djalabiya.
“The Holy Qur’an,” he says, “states that your family’s needs are under God’s control. But it also suggests that there should be a space of two years or more between children, because of the health of the mother and of the children. Look at the problems for the family when a child appears on Earth and the last child is not even weaned. There is no conflict over that.”
Then why do so many families have a mother exhausted and hungry children dying?
“Because people do not respect what the Qur’an says. Allah does not impose on us anything beyond our capacity to support. But men only hear the part about being allowed four wives. Then they can’t afford it, and they get into trouble.”
To have properly spaced children, are women allowed artificial contraceptives?
“We have been campaigning in sermons and on the radio about the need for these methods.”
Maradi now has many mosques; his, with two short minarets, is just across the unpaved street from this house in which he and Imam Raidoune Issaka, who is his younger brother, were raised. In Islam, there is no central authority, as in the Catholic Church, to dictate dogma. Yet how is it that these two brother imams disagree on something so fundamental?
“There are many divisions in religion,” says Imam Issaka the elder. “There are now many people, with many values and with scientific knowledge that is constantly expanding. This brings many conflicting visions.”
Only one-fourth of Niger’s people can read, and just 15 percent of the women. He has seen the NGOs’ studies: less than 1 percent of girls complete primary school, but the few who reach secondary school will usually only have two or three children. Healthy children.
“With education, Niger need not just depend on crops and cattle. It has uranium and petroleum. There is iron. In Maradi, there is even gold.”
Yes, but the sultan’s aide knows what is happening to those resources in his illiterate country. The French take all the uranium. The Chinese are coming for the oil. No one has yet bid to exploit the iron. The gold is mined by some Canadians, with the cooperation of a few rich chiefs. It gets loaded onto helicopters that head straight for the airport in the capital. No one knows what Niger’s share is.
The imam meets with his brother and with other imams to talk about such things, and about what their suffering people need. “And we all seem to understand each other. And yet, after meetings, some decide to not agree with what we all said.”
The sultan’s aide looks perplexed.
The imam raises a hand. “Muhammad, peace be unto His soul, foresaw many branches of Islam, but said that only the right one will be the path to paradise. Of course,” he adds, “every branch thinks it is the right path.”
The east-west road that passes through Maradi is Niger’s main—and nearly only—paved highway. It passes through the comparatively greenest part of the country, home to 85 percent of Niger’s population, but much of it is a bedraggled land of desiccated sticks hung with shreds of black plastic snagged from the wind. Trucks piled twice their height with bundles of corn and rice barrel past camel trains and donkey carts, but most of that food is not destined to stay here. In crowded Nigeria to the south, security has grown so precarious that to avoid bandits and hijackers, grain shippers from Vietnam now use the neighboring port at Cotonou, Benin, instead of Lagos, the coastal Nigerian megalopolis. Trucking their cargo up through Benin to Niger, they let Nigerian1 buyers meet them here.
This close to Niger’s southern border, many cars have license plates from Nigeria. The reason is that Niger, while nearly entirely Muslim, is not a theocracy. Its secular constitution is copied from France, the colonial power here until 1960. Therefore, shariah law is not enforced here, as in Muslim northern Nigeria, so Nigerian men stream north for liquor and prostitutes. This reverses a trend of the 1990s, when international NGOs distributed condoms in Niger to counter HIV. Nigerien women would give them to their truck driver husbands heading to Nigeria so they wouldn’t get infected.
Along the highway, many of the men in ragged linens driving flocks of dromedaries are slaves. Slavery is even more common in Niger’s north, where nomad chieftains live in luxury tents equipped with satellite phones, but it exists throughout the country. According to one of Niger’s most prominent scholars, Dr. Galy Kadir Abdelkader, up to 10 percent of the country is in bondage, even though slavery has been outlawed since 2003.
“Islam says that no man should be anybody’s slave, and the Prophet encouraged people to free slaves. Our religion is protected with ignorance of itself,” says Dr. Abdelkader. “Slaves are told that they must accept fate, that as God is the supreme owner of Paradise, the master is the owner of the slave. Whoever wants to live in paradise someday must respect the will of God, which is reflected through the master whose purposes they serve.”
Among those purposes is producing more slaves, an economic driver that helps to maintain Niger’s unrelenting fertility rates. Children of slaves are also slaves, so masters breed them, frequently to their own siblings or even their daughters. Although slave markets have disappeared since the 2003 prohibition, particularly beautiful slave girls command high bride-prices, should a wealthy men desire to marry one. Or if a man can’t afford to buy and free a woman, he can still enjoy her flesh by marrying her for less than full price, but without releasing her from bondage. Under this arrangement, a pre-agreed number of her children are returned to her original master as slaves.
In every village, women churn out babies, trying to stay ahead of death. The only thing that checks Niger’s world-highest fertility is its fifty-year life expectancy. In the town of Madaoua in Tahoua region, between Maradi and Niger’s capital, Niamey, gray-bearded elders in loose turbans and sweat-stained prayer caps gather under a thatched portico. It is the first meeting with their new mayor, who wears a tall white prayer cap embroidered with a pattern of diamonds. The sultan of Tahoua, resplendent in white and gold, is also present. At a respectful distance behind the men stand women in a rainbow of headscarves.
They are discussing the drought that now never seems to end.
“Forty years ago,” says the sultan, “it rained here five months a year. But since 2000, the climate change caused by Western countries has dried our rains. Children, cattle, even goats have died. People are fleeing to Nigeria, refugees from a war against the Sahel with no enemy to strike back at. What can be done?”
Even in the West, there is no technology to tame the unleashed climate. Have they considered family planning, to reduce the numbers that the lands must sustain?
The men explode with laughter. “Everyone here has more than one wife,” says the sultan, who has four.
“You can’t ask a father to stop having children without a solution for who will work on his farm,” protests a white-turbaned elder.
“If you have children, God answers to their needs,” says the new mayor. “I myself have thirty-three.”
His potency is well known, and admired. But the meeting falls silent, as if it penetrates that this is no longer the land these men grew up in. In the past, there was room and grass aplenty for all the children a man could have. Then, in just twenty years, the trees are gone and only people are left.
“We have entered different times,” says the sultan. “Maybe we have to think differently.”
The traffic in Niamey is sparse: some transport trucks, taxis, oxcarts stacked with yellow plastic jerry cans, and occasional white SUVs bearing the logos of UNICEF, the Red Cross, the EU, and FAO, bristling with satellite phone antennae. The dust hanging over the capital mixes with haze rising off the Niger River, so thick that the sun here resembles the pallid disk above China’s manufacturing cities. But here, there are no factories.
On the walls of her ground-floor office in the Niamey building that the UN shares with foreign gold and uranium mining companies, Mme. Martine Camacho has hung posters from projects in all the African countries where she’s worked for UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund. “Equilibre Familial,” one reads. “Had I Known, I Would Have Waited to Finish My Education,” says another. Mme. Martine is French; her current assignment began in 2007, when Niger was pressed by the UN to establish a real population policy after being cited for the world’s highest growth rates. The government appealed to the World Bank, which contracted with UNFPA to do something. Previous programs had been conducted by bureaucrats with anatomical flip charts and videos of people having sex, which they showed to rural Nigeriens who had never seen such a thing displayed publicly. When nurses began demonstrating how to roll a condom onto wooden penises, onlookers would flee.
Until 2007, just 5 percent of Nigerien women used contraceptives, she says. There is still tremendous resistance; women—or their husbands—often believe that birth control and child immunizations are a secret foreign plot to sterilize them and seize their lands when they become too few to defend them. Some women who were interested in spacing births would only use leather talismans containing herbs around their waists, or drink potions pounded from tree roots and drunk from wooden bowls inscribed with Qur’anic verses.
Here in the capital, Mme. Martine has heard educated men ask why having the highest rate of population growth is a problem. Just 15 million people in 1,267,000 square kilometers—Niger is the world’s twenty-second largest country—leaves a lot of land to host more Nigeriens. One study suggested that most people actually wanted more children, not fewer: eight to nine for women, and twelve to thirteen for their husbands.
Contraceptive acceptance is now up to 16 percent, pills being most common, followed by Depo injections. “So we’ve gained 10 percent. The easiest 10 percent. I figure another four hundred years, and we’ll have everyone wanting birth control.”
Unfortunately, the money for this program, called PRODEM, runs out in 2013. Meanwhile, she worries, Muslim extremism here is rising and seems better funded. Yet two of the world’s best family-planning programs, she says, are in Muslim countries, Tunisia and Iran, which are both below replacement rate.
“Tunisia and Iran don’t force twelve-year-old girls to marry.” Lest a girl be raped or grow ripe with desire, Nigerien parents often betroth daughters before they begin to menstruate. “In Tunisia and Iran, they send them to school. Everyone there reads. Most people here can’t.”
Yet HIV has declined, and in a country where female circumcision is still practiced, there is an encouraging project to abolish female genital mutilation by paying the mutilators to put down their knives. Instead of earning the equivalent of US$10 in West African francs—or a goat, or some chickens—for removing a girl’s clitoris and, depending on the skill of the mutilator, slicing off vaginal labia, they’re being given a hundred dollars to set up businesses selling peanuts or livestock. Others are being retrained as midwives. But as for family planning, Mme. Camacho is not very optimistic.
“In all the places I’ve worked—here, Ivory Coast, Rwanda, Burundi, Comoros—I’ve never seen a country ask for this. It’s always initiated by the UN or some Bretton Woods lending institution. They’re not conscious of the threat—only the West is. In Niger, they’ve designed a family-planning program, but deep in their hearts, they feel it’s not their problem. They’ve adopted it without owning it.”
When she arrived, the population director in Niger was a man with three wives and twenty children. “I’d talk to him about it. What kind of message was he giving to people? ‘Faites ce que je dis, mais ne faites pas ce que je fais,’2 he’d reply. It would make me furious, but then I’d think of what we Westerners have done in Africa: pollute, pillage, and teach them to consume. We’re hardly an inspiring model.”
Fifty kilometers southeast of Niamey, the last small herd of a unique subspecies, the West African giraffe, clings to life in a hard yellow desert. As long as the rangers who guard them keep planting the acacia seedlings the giraffes eat in soil they bring from the Niger River’s banks, they may survive, as they have no natural predators left other than humans. In the mid-nineteenth century, Niger still teemed with lions, cape buffalo, monkeys, rhinoceros, and antelope, and all of West Africa was giraffe habitat. When the French colonial period came, so did firearms, and the poaching commenced. Giraffes were killed for meat and leather, and their tongues and genitals were harvested for talismans. Boiled giraffe bones were rendered into a paste to combat fatigue. Girls who reached twenty-five without marrying put giraffe tails in their bathwater to attract lovers.
Only 120 giraffes were left in Niger in 1993, when an NGO program to sustainably market deadwood from the surrounding savanna backfired, as people cut thousands of live trees and let them die before selling them. With this loss of food, Niger’s giraffe population dwindled to 50. A French ethologist studying the herd began a campaign to save them; wood cutting was banned, and the Niger herd was also replenished by giraffe refugees fleeing Mali and Nigeria. Today, with tigerbush and acacias slowly recovering, there are now about 250 West African giraffes in Niger. They must coexist, however, with the flocks of goats swarming around them. Once giraffes retreated here because this savanna was uninhabited; today, there is nowhere that their eyes, nearly twenty feet above ground, can scan without seeing thatch huts.
Thirty kilometers south of the giraffe refuge is a five-hundred-hectare experimental farm begun in 1989 by ICRISAT, the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics. After millions of square kilometers of desolation, to enter ICRISAT’s leafy orchards and fields is a photosynthetic shock.
Along with programs to improve millet and peanut production, ICRISAT-Niger is growing drought-tolerant jujube trees from India that bear a small fruit called Sahel apple, as well as Sudanese tamarinds and Ethiopian moringas—whose leaves, boiled with peanuts, provide ten times the calcium of milk and more vitamin A than most vegetables. Under tents of shade cloth, okra, hibiscus, sesame, and heat-tolerant tomatoes spring from the tan Sahel sands, along with heat-resistant lettuce from Israel. Nearby grow papaya and Israeli mangoes. (ICRISAT-Niger’s Israeli director believes that if food can grow in the Israeli Negev, it can grow in Niger.) As proof, they’ve resurrected a delicious native onion that was developed by the French, but lost after colonization ended. There are also cowpeas, oranges, pomelos, tangelos, and stands of Jatropha curcas, a Central American shrub whose oily seeds can be pressed for biodiesel. Lining the paths are Indian neem trees—a source of natural antiseptics and bug repellant.
Under development are desert-adapted grapes and figs. ICRISAT has created this nutritious oasis with minimal insecticide and with only microdoses of fertilizers, injecting directly to the roots of each plant just one-fifth of a typical field’s normal application of nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. It also has fifteen scientists, one hundred field technicians and support staff, and three hundred laborers. And something else, rare in Niger’s poor croplands: deep wells.
As in the Negev, all you have to do to grow food in a desert is add technical know-how, hard labor, and water. Except the rains have all but stopped, or they now fall at the wrong times. After three years, the 2010 drought is being called the one that never ends.
“True,” says ICRISAT hydrologist Navid Dejwakh. “But the western Sahel is on top of an ocean of water.”
There is an immense hydrological potential just below the surface, he says—in some places, barely three meters down. Much is so shallow that the energy of a solar panel is all that’s needed to extract it. “Or a hand shovel. It’s so counterintuitive—you can’t see it based on vegetation, because so many trees have been cut.”
Almost two-thirds of the country would be suitable for producing food, his colleagues believe. In fact, NGOs in parts of southern Niger have tapped this water since the early 1990s to plant some 200 million trees. Although one in five is killed by the rising heat, and this regreening still covers only a tiny percentage of the land, it is proof that the water is there.
This subterranean ocean, says Dejwakh, is from ancient rainfall and from the underground alluvial flow of the Niger River. “It is contained by a sand layer, with very little slope. It’s perfect for filtering rainwater. It is rather amazing to think that there is all this water waiting for these people. They don’t have to starve.”
Dejwakh and everyone at ICRISAT, which is part of the international agricultural research consortium that includes both CIMMYT and IRRI, are certain that, given financing, there is enough water just below Niger’s surface to grow plenty of food for everyone in the country. “Absolutely.”
Everyone—meaning all 16.6 million current Nigeriens?
“Right.”
And in thirty years, when, at the present growth rate, there are 50 million of them?
Dejwakh’s smile vanishes. “Fifty million?”
Right.
“Fifty million,” he answers slowly. “Less rainfall, too.” He purses his lips. “Even with this ocean of water, 50 million people will have serious problems.”