Windfall by McKenzie Funk

Author:McKenzie Funk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Group, USA
Published: 2014-01-22T16:00:00+00:00

EIGHT

GREEN WALL, BLACK WALL

AFRICA TRIES TO KEEP THE SAHARA AT BAY; EUROPE TRIES TO KEEP AFRICA AT BAY

The main highway out of Dakar, a band of blacktop linking the crowded Senegalese capital and the empty Sahel, was dusty and clogged on a summer day—jammed not only with cars but with people. Young men walked against the flow of traffic hawking peanuts, inflatable airplanes, steering wheel covers, oriental fans, telephone cards, and shrink-wrapped apples. Others stood where the sidewalks would have been, manning makeshift kiosks that sold French-language versions of Yahtzee and Monopoly, posters of sheikhs and imams, and drinking water in plastic sandwich baggies. The highway led to the desert, and the youths of Senegal were doing what they could to go in the opposite direction. Sell enough in a day, and they might be able to afford rice, the national staple, which now cost twice as much as six months earlier. Sell enough in a year, maybe two, maybe five, and they might be able to pay a smuggler to take them to Europe. Every minute or two, a new group approached our jeep, waving their wares expectantly. My host, Colonel Pape Sarr, a thin man who greeted everything else with a cavernous smile, wore a blank expression, staring resolutely ahead into the haze.

I was across the waist of Africa from Heilberg’s Sudanese tracts, some three thousand miles west, in the country that imports more food per capita than any other on the continent. Senegal gets three-quarters of its staples from abroad, including 150 pounds of rice a person each year—even as it, too, is a target of foreign farmland buyers. India would soon announce a 370,000-acre deal with Senegal’s Ministry of Agriculture, while Saudi Arabia’s Foras International would lay claim to 12,000 acres of rice paddies in the fertile Senegal River valley, the first piece of a planned 500,000-acre megafarm. But the scheme that drew Pape Sarr and me to the Sahel, the arid borderland between Africa’s humid tropics and the encroaching sands of the Sahara, was something else entirely: the Great Green Wall, Africa’s own response to climate change, a forty-seven-hundred-mile-long, ten-mile-wide barrier of trees meant to keep the Sahara at bay. If completed, it would cross eleven countries from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea, from Senegal in the west to Djibouti in the east. Pape, a camouflage-clad officer of Eaux et Forêts, Senegal’s directorate of water and forests, was one of its architects. We were driving to see his men put the first seedlings into the ground.

The Great Green Wall was proposed in 2005 by Nigeria, where officials claimed desertification was consuming some 900,000 acres a year, and in 2007 it was officially endorsed by the African Union (AU). But in every country except Senegal, it so far existed only on paper. Standing before the press at the Copenhagen climate conference, Senegal’s president at the time declared that his nation would be like “the old Greek philosopher” Diogenes, “who proposed that you could prove the existence of motion” by standing up and walking.

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