Last week I travelled around northern Senegal, visiting villages where Oxfam works to improve food security. In Bagonde and Baélé, people are pastoralists: they trade their goats, sheep and cows with millet and rice from nearby (a few hours by foot or donkey) markets. Soaring food prices have had a devastating impact: the cost of rice has doubled in less than a year.

“I used to sell one goat for a big bag [50kgs] of rice. Now I must sell two. If the situation does not change, all my animals will be gone”, said Bilaly Moussa Ka, a villager.

Occasionally the radio of our Citroen minivan (setting off I was pleased not to be fulfilling the cliché of an NGO worker in a white 4×4. By the third time I had to push sodding Citroen out of sand so hot it burnt my feet through flip flops, I was less pleased) would splutter to life, bringing snippets of BBC World Service or Radio France International. Every time it did, the news was of fresh catastrophes on world financial markets that felt totally irrelevant. People in Bagonde and Baélé are experiencing a capital crunch, not a credit one. Their losses are not on paper but in the diminishing size of herds built up over generations.

Many people are chronically food insecure: even when times are good they don’t produce enough to feed themselves till next harvest. If it’s not the high price of rice, it’s drought, or floods, or pests eating the crops. Birds have been the biggest problem this year. Apparently lobbying by Japanese bird NGOs stopped their government donating bird-scarers to Senegal. Plastic bags on sticks are not effective scarecrows, but that’s all they have. As the villagers cursed the brightly coloured, beautiful birds that have decimated their crops, I tried to cover my binoculars and Birds of West Africa book with my Panama hat.

“Crisis” is a constant state of being here, so they are used to coping. However, each year that they do makes them less able to deal with crises in the future. Only eating two meals a day with ever-smaller portions, and being forced to sell firewood even though it destroys the topsoil they need to feed their animals takes its toll.

The rains this year were the best since 2000: the grass is long, and animals and children run around having a good time. Those in the village able to afford seeds are about to harvest their millet. “With what I have planted I hope to be able to feed my family for at least two months”, said villager Amadu Diallo. “Of course I worry about the future”, he responded tersely when I asked him.

Ultimately, Amadu will have to do what he and so many others have done before, and migrate to where there’s work: Dakar, Cote D’Ivoire, Gabon or Europe. Many in Bagonde and Baélé already rely on money relatives send home to stay afloat.

It’s not everybody though. An hour down the road I met rice farmers by the river Senegal who talked enthusiastically of buying machinery, expanding production and irrigation systems and finally competing with imported, Asian rice. They’re thriving on high food prices.

In Bagonde and Baélé it felt insensitive to ask people about the credit crunch: why had I travelled for hours down dusty tracks to villages with no electricity to ask about something that bore no relation to their problems?

Humanitarian or financial: these crises are man-made. They happen because no one asks the right questions or takes action early enough. There’s growing concern that the credit crunch will cause aid budgets to be slashed and development to slip off the political radar. The people of northern Senegal aren’t a humanitarian disaster yet, but they’re getting there, as are millions of others across the arid Sahel belt south of the ever-expanding Sahara. Turning our eyes away from the struggles of others risks storing up bigger problems for the future.

For more on the global food crisis, go here.





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