FAO: Burkina Faso

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Villagers in Tougo build shelters from mud bricks, moulded and dried in the sun with their own hands. It’s the building material of the country’s poorest, but when the rains are strong, the mud homes are washed away altogether.

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Daouda Belem Sabilo received emergency seed and fertilizer from FAO for July planting.
“We usually manage to have a harvest every year, but it’s never enough, because the land is so degraded.”
Seed producers sell a bag of seed for less than $2 each, he says, while a bag of fertilizer has never cost so much before, at more than $3.50.

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Savadogo Oumarou has a family of seven children and two wives.
“Last year, the dry spell and then floods destroyed the harvest and our seed stock,” he says.
“Normally we would use fertilizer, but after last year our main concern became the food we need to eat.”“We don’t have enough to eat, and with rising prices, every last bit we earn we use to buy food to feed the family.

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Jean-Pierre Renson, FAO’s Emergency Coordinator in Burkina, explains a dire reality: “We often coordinate our seed distribution programmes with the World Food Programme. WFP provides food rations for the two weeks following a seed distribution.”
“When your stomach aches from hunger, seed can be quite tempting to eat right then and there, instead of waiting three months for a harvest.”

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Poème Belem, owner of the village eatery in Tougo village. “I buy the rice and pasta in town.” he says. “Before a bag of rice cost me about $30, now it’s about $50, and the pasta has gone from just under $10 to $15.”
“I had to raise my prices from 100 CFA (25 cents) to 150 CFA (36 cents), which isn’t good for business, so we also cut down on portions,” he says.
That isn’t good for business either.

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Maurice Ouedraogo Koutou, at his market stall in Ouagadougou. Everything he sells has gone up. “This rice is from Thailand, it has gone from 300 CFA to 400 CFA a portion,” an increase of 75 percent. The vegetable oil he sells has increased at an even more alarming rate. “This used to cost 750 CFA a litre, now it is 1800 CFA a litre,” up 240 percent. Most customers buy minuscule portions at a time, in tiny plastic bags big enough to hold a cherry or two.

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N’Boukaré Ilboudo, 60, lives in Ouagadougou’s Kaar Paala district, not more than a shantytown. “I don’t feel the effects of food price increases or ‘la vie chère,’ since I depend entirely on what the neighbours give to me. They bring me water and they cook me food, and I haven’t noticed they bring me any less.”
FAO is just completing a joint vulnerability assessment in the area with WFP, Save the Children and Unicef, from which N’Boukaré will benefit in social support.

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Zoundi Y. Dramane is a grain wholesaler at Ouagadougou’s Sakayaaré market. “If I had the money and the possibility, I would invest in mechanizing farm production in the countryside. And I would have a network of my own fleet of trucks to transport the harvest from the villages to the cities, paying the farmers too to produce for me.” The two women are just back from a regular trip to Togo, bringing with them cassava flour.

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Truckers cook up a meal of tô, a local dish made from maize flour. Travellers come prepared with anything and everything: travelling from Togo, they were way-laid by a not unusual event: the bridge ahead is impassable, having partially collapsed.
“We’ve been here for a week, and we’ll just wait,” one of them says.
The line of trucks goes as far as the eye can see. Luckily, they are transporting non-perishable goods – cookies and crackers, or ‘bonbons’ as they say.

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In Bagré town an enormous dam feeds the irrigations canals for rice paddies spread across the plains of the Nakambé river.
“If we had machines, we could work much better,” says one farmer.
From harvesting to threshing to the final rice seed, it’s all done on human energy -- men and women, many mothers with a baby slung snugly on the back, sleeping.

Background

Burkina Faso is one of the world's poorest nations, with 45% of the population living on less than a dollar per day. The vast majority of the population lives in the rural areas and survives on subsistence farming on small family plots of land.

Maize, sorghum and millet make up 85-90% of the staple diet of people living in Burkina Faso. In the rural areas these cereals make up nearly 100% of consumption and little is ever marketed.

The prices of all grains have sharply increased this year, with rice selling at more than double its price in Ouagadougou in May 2008 compared with May 2007. Maize for the same period increased by nearly 60 percent.

In August, locally produced millet was up nearly 50 percent compared with the same month a year before.

Rice over the years has become the preferred staple food for city dwellers especially.

FAO Response

Since the Initiative on Rising Food Prices was launched in December 2007, FAO has been able to funnel more than US$ 6.6 million in funding to projects in Burkina Faso to help the country face high food prices amid harvests hard-hit by disastrous weather.

In June, millet, sorghum and cowpea seeds and fertilizers were distributed in the northern and central areas of the country, which had had little harvest from the year before. Seed stocks had been consumed for food and farmers were left with no way to plant. These interventions were supported equally by an FAO Technical Cooperation Programme project and funds from the Spanish government, for a total of nearly US$1 million.

Spain is also supporting policy assistance and strategy development in Burkina Faso.

In addition, the European Commission recently contibuted US$2.2 million to a project targeting extremely vulnerable populations in the country, including malnourished women, children and households managed by women or the disabled.

Some 270,000 people, many of whom receive treatment for malnutrition through other UN agencies, will benefit. They will receive garden vegetable seeds to boost harvests in the next season and to generate seed for the future. In addition to diversifying the diet, families will have an income from selling surplus production.

Another axe of the programme includes training national technicians in quality seed multiplication for cereals, to generate quality seed for the next planting.

In the areas where keeping livestock is the main farming activity, small animals will be provided to restore food security. Due to food shortages and high prices, many families have sold their animals.

In the longer-term, putting in place irrigation infrastructure could also allow rural farmers to boost rice output, mitigating the need to import rice at high prices while profiting for themselves.

Burkina Faso