Food for Thought

It's now two months since I set foot in Africa, as part of a trip with Concern Universal to look at how farmers in The Gambia were battling the effects of climate change and struggling against cheap imports. Both factors affecting UK farmers too, but much, much more devastating in a country as poor as the Gambia and with such a fragile agriculture.

BBC Local Radio expressed an interest in hearing about the trip, as my hometown of Marlborough has well-established links with The Gambia through the Marlborough Brandt Group, an effort set up in the early 1980's with the ethos that, as charity begins at home, international development begins at local community level.

Here's a podcast of the interview on BBC Radio Wiltshire.

So much has happened in the last few weeks I've neglected to get half the material I recorded in Africa out of my notebook.

So here's some more video footage - just to give a feel of what travelling through this tiny West African country feels like. The Gambia is a country of two halves and while crossing the River Gambia isn't quite as dramatic as the Congo or the Nile, it's still a rite of passage when visiting the country.

FW journalist Ian Ashbridge recently returned from The Gambia in West Africa, as part of a visit to see how charity Concern Universal is helping struggling farmers and growers. If, like Ian, you've never visited The Gambia or West Africa before, here's a brief clip to give you a flavour of what the country looks and sounds like.

I once saw a spoof sketch of a TV hospital drama, satirising the peculiar language that TV producers think medical staff communicate in. "Nurse, get me 13 milligrams of BBC1, ITV2 and a C4+1 or he's not going to make it," etc.

But Africa appears to have taken this fine art form to an entirely new level. All the NGOs (that's non-governmental organisations to you and me) speak in an alluring blend of FENCEs, SMILEs FAMILIES and LIFEs, punctuated by quasi-military jargon like "in-country" and "sit-reps" (Situation Reports).

My hometown of Marlborough, in Wiltshire has links to the Gunjur region of the Gambia. So it was a real treat to come and meet people here.

With me is Mr Sandan Bojang, the area leader to rural development agency TARUD. We’re at a 2.5ha market garden at Sanyang village, run collectively by women – men only tend bigger field crops like groundnuts and rice.

This is one of the many womens’ gardens to benefit from the work of Gambia is Good, a marketing organisation set up in partnership with international charity Concern Universal. It helps small farmers and growers find a route to market for their produce and avoid the cheaper imports by directing its efforts at Gambia’s tourist hotels, bypassing middlemen and passing returns directly back to producers. This allows the women to save money through local credit unions.

Heat. Dust. Noise. Fatigue. I’ve only been in Africa for 24 hours and I’m getting to know all four a bit better.

Temperatures of more than thirty degrees centigrade met a man who’d left Gatwick on one of February’s meanest mornings, and a light breeze soon gave way to a blistering midday sun.

I’m writing this from The Gambia, a tiny wedge-shaped country in West Africa. It’s half the size of Wales and surrounded on three sides by Senegal and by the mighty Atlantic on its fourth.

I’m here with a charity called Concern Universal, to look at how they’re helping farmers here develop better access to markets and avoid the effects of cheap imports.

They certainly need it. This is one of the poorest countries on earth, placed at 155 in the UN’s poverty index, which only goes as far as 172. Half the people live on less than 50p/day. Life expectancy is 57.

By Andrew Shirley, FW Business Editor

On Easter Monday, as many of us were tucking into our Easter Eggs, The Times ran a story about how cotton farmers in Burkina Faso, west Africa, are suffering, partly due to US subsidies to its own cotton farmers.

What, you may wonder, does this have to do with farmers in the UK? We don't grow cotton and many of us are struggling just to break even ourselves.

By Andrew Shirley from The Gambia

Think you'll escape the curse of the mobile ringtone in Africa? Think again.

Gambians have been quick to adopt mobile technology and there is virtually nowhere in the country, even the remotest corner, where you can't get a signal.

By Andrew Shirley from The Gambia

Selling livestock at markets in the UK is getting harder as more and more rules and regulations are introduced.

In The Gambia, there's a striking absence of rules. Cattle bought from all over west Africa to the country's main market are slaughtered and butchered on site for a flat fee of about £5. Lairage is just 20p per animal.

But all animals bought to the market are checked by a state vet for serious diseases after slaughter. If the meat is condemned it's the buyer's problem not the farmer's.

By Andrew Shirley from The Gambia

Dried fish, rotting vegetables, fresh vegetables, herbs, spices and some things beyond description. Screaming hawkers and bargaining customers.

I wanted to experience the smells, sounds and sights of Africa again and today I get my wish in an overpowering sensory explosion.

By Andrew Shirley from The Gambia

The Gambia civil service's former farming chief shows me his new egg-producing unit that would not look out of place in the UK.

Trained as an economist at Birmingham University, this man knows his stuff. And he knows that imports of cheap European eggs are hurting the country's economy.

Tourist hotels no longer touch them because of the risk of Banjul belly for their guests, but locals can't afford home-grown eggs and have to take their chances.

A lack of local feed means poultry farmers depend on expensive imports and this means they can't compete with the dodgy imports.

However, Mr Sompo-Ceesay hopes to use his economies of scale and build his own feed mill. Eventually, he reckons he can supply over half the local egg market.

By Andrew Shirley, FW's man in the Gambia

Goose bumps prickle my arms despite the midday sun burning my mad dog skin.

Not the tell-tale signs of a malarial fever, but the realisation that some of Concern Universal's work is really paying off.

This morning some of us debate whether aid really works, whether we really should be here at all. Nobody is sure.

Now I know - in at least some cases - the answer is most definitely yes.

By Andrew Shirley in The Gambia

Beer. One noun that pretty well sums up life for many at agricultural college in the UK.

Hard physical work and the chance to really improve your life. Studying at a Gambian farming college.

Treading a foot-powered water pump for hours on end under the blazing sun is not on the curriculum at home. Here it is par for the course. And there's not a pint to be seen.

By Andrew Shirley from The Gambia

Visit a farm in the UK and you might get a cup of tea. Visit a farm in The Gambia and you'll often be entertained by a riot of drumming and dancing dervishes.

Sometimes the hypnotic beats are just for fun, but often they are performed to get across a particular message, like public health or a new irrigation technique.

By Andrew Shirley from The Gambia

Cornflakes with warm milk to the blaring soundtrack of the ubiquitous CNN, waiters and staff from supposedly the most violent continent in the world gasp in horror at footage of two hoodlums in the US beating up a 100 year old granny.

A typical African breakfast. At least, it seems, in the hotels that cater for the growing number of Europeans looking for some winter sun and possibly more in the Gambia.

The St George's Tavern is just down the road, right next to the Irish bar. I feel right at home, but it's not the Africa I really want to see. I've already passed on eggs for breakfast.

The words from Paul O'Hagan, Concern Universal's West African Director, still ring in my ears. He says most of the eggs in the Gambia are imported from Holland, thousands of miles away.
And some aren't in great shape by the time they arrive here.

In fact, there's a lot of surprising stuff that's imported here. Rice from all over the world when more could be grown here, cooking oils when there's a huge amount of groundnuts that could be processed into oil, vegetables from Europe that could undercut produce grown on the doorsteps of the hotels importing them.

And the eggs, the eggs all the way from Holland. It strikes me as ironic. The same week that the Farmers Weekly reader rages because her latest Waitrose is stocking sugar from cane, not home-grown beet, I am in Africa where desperately poor, really poor farmers are being undercut by farmers in the EU and US.

By Andrew Shirley

A strange, exotic dialect. The squeal of a beaten-up taxi's brakes avoiding certain death. Powerful Afrobeat music blasting from the stereo.

The sounds of Africa surround me and memories of this fantastic, yet exasperating, continent where I spent five years of my life, come flooding back.

Ever wondered what farmers in Africa complain about? Well, having worked with both large and small-scale farmers in East Africa, I can tell you it's exactly the same as here - the weather's never right and prices are too low.

There is a big difference of course. If the grain market here slumps, we might have to tighten our belts but our kids won't go hungry.Too much rain in the UK might mean a washed out harvest, but it won't be life or death - in Africa it could mean just that - we've all seen the pictures on the TV.

I'm Farmers Weekly's Business editor and next Friday (16 March), I'll be going back to Africa to visit The Gambia, one of the world's least-developed countries. I'll be looking at a project run by UK charity Concern Universal that aims to create a reliable income for local farmers and provide them with a sustainable future.

I'll also be asking Gambian farmers, politicians and academics how subsidies for farmers in the world's richest countries could be harming those in the poorest.