Vouchers Give West African Farmers A Boost

By Lane Hartill

After the sun goes down and the heavy West African heat surrenders to evening cool, Rasmata Sawadogo retreats into her crumbling mud hut, lies down on the floor and thinks about two things: the hungry baby kicking inside her, and the fact that she's eaten almost nothing today.

It's at these moments, when she's not in her rice field, when she doesn't have to think about her disabled husband—or where the money he makes disappears to—that other worries awake in her head. That's when thoughts of food start to consume her.

She's 30 years old. She was given to her husband when she was only 17 years old. She's had three children and they latch onto her skirt when they're hungry; they don't go to their father. He's not around much anyway. Rasmata says the 16 cents he makes for each whittled hoe handle he sells usually goes toward dolo, a locally brewed beer made from sorghum. She doesn't really know how much he makes, anyway. Most men in Burkina Faso—from government ministers to sheep farmers—never tell their wives their salaries.

Every day, Rasmata gets up with the sun, fetches water and firewood, tends to the children, scuffs off to the rice fields, bends in half like a safety pin all day weeding and then hikes back home.

Flat-out exhausted and around five months pregnant (she's not exactly sure), Rasmata now faces the worst part of the day: finding food for the children to eat. It's a draining job now that the family's sack of millet, a staple grain here, has been finished for a month.

What Life Has Become

Rasmata and thousands like her have been hit hard by the global food crisis. Last year, flooding in parts of Burkina wiped out crops and grain reserves. Not only do farmers lack backup food to eat or sell this year, they are now forced to buy goods that have shot up in price.

Three major towns in Burkina erupted with riots in February over the high cost of food and fuel. The landlocked country imports many of its goods. Much of it has to be trucked from ports in Ivory Coast, Togo and Benin. The high cost of fuel is passed on to people like Rasmata.

For her, buying food is out of the question. But if she had the cash, she knows exactly what she'd buy. "I'd buy Maggi [a seasoning], soap, meat and tomatoes."

But she doesn't have any money. So she's forced to do something she detests: She humbles herself, works up a little gumption, and sets off for the neighbors. This is what it has come to: begging.

Some neighbors turn her down. Even her father, who is older and poorer than her husband, often sends her away with nothing. If she's lucky, someone will give her some tô, a dish made from corn, or some millet. She adds to this boulvanca sauce, which is made from the leaves of a small, wild plant.

After all this, she can't even take a proper bath. In fact, she hasn't bought soap in a month. She just squats, scoops and throws the water over her head, letting it roll the day's sweat off her back.

She rinses the family's clothes in well water. Her own shirt is stretched and spiderwebbed with wear.

She says she's embarrassed to be around other women looking like this. But she can deal with that. She can ignore the stares and whispers. "The real problem," she says, "is finding food."

What about the scrawny sheep, sniffing the dust in the corner of the compound? Can't she sell them?

"We'll sell those when things get bad," she says, with no hint of irony.

"These are enormous difficulties," she says. "I don't know how to get out of them."

We take a trip to her rice field.

It's a long way off, but in the setting sun, chatting with friends, her spirits lift. When we get to her small lowland plots of rice, Rasmata shows me the brown soil plugged with sparse green rice shoots.

Her plots of rice aren't fertilized and produce a small yield. That's the problem. Most of the rice she sells for cash. Part of the money will pay for weddings and baptisms and funerals throughout the year. The rest she sells to buy millet.

A Boost From Fertilizer

With such small yields, Rasmata has little to sell and the cash doesn't go far. But this year, with Catholic Relief Services' help, Rasmata will receive $22.50 in the form of a voucher she will trade for 55 pounds of nitrogen fertilizer. For her to pay more than $27 for the same amount of fertilizer is unthinkable. The fertilizer she will receive is part of a CRS pilot rice project in Burkina Faso that will help 4,000 small farmers like Rasmata.

"The help CRS will give is welcome," she says, adding that it will surely increase her yield. "It will change a lot of things."

Most West African nations can't come close to producing enough rice to feed their people. Rice imports in 2006 into sub-Saharan Africa were about 9 million tons, costing more than $2 billion. At current rice prices, these imports would cost more than $6 billion.

In addition to the pilot project in Burkina, CRS along with the Africa Rice Center and the International Center for Soil Fertility and Agricultural Development are leading a two-year emergency rice project that will help 10,000 rice farmers in Ghana, Mali, Nigeria and Senegal. The objective: Boost domestic rice production in the four countries by 30,000 tons.

On the way home from her rice field, Rasmata is balancing her way along the dikes between the rice fields. We pass a wild grape tree. Another female rice farmer has already scaled the tree in her bare feet and is tightroping across the limbs, grabbing at grapes and raining them down on Rasmata.

For the first time that afternoon, Rasmata seems happy. She doesn't seem to care that the grapes are mostly pit with a little gelatinous flesh around them. It's fresh fruit, a treat.

But more importantly: It's something to eat.

Lane Hartill is the West Africa regional information officer for Catholic Relief Services. He has visited CRS programs in Burkina Faso, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone. Lane is based in Dakar, Senegal.