4/29/2003 Dateline Dakar

I fell in love with Senegal the first time I visited last August. During that visit, I realized that I might have something to offer in Senegal, if nothing else than as a catalyst for change.

I won't bore you with the history of my involvement with Senegal. Suffice it to say that it is the culmination of my abiding passions for organic gardening and agriculture and for medicinal plants, leavened with a large dose of serendipity and being in the right place at the right time, together with a desire for doing some sort of humanitarian work in Africa.

The result is that I am working on a multi-phase project that includes the following:

1. The establishment of organic, village-level community gardens to enhance nutrition, function as centers of community activity and education, and in the future, to be enlarged to grow specialty produce for export to Paris chefs in a project I'm tentatively calling Chefs sans Frontières.

2. Developing the culture of a cluster of plants proven to be effective against malaria, for development of affordable, standardized plant-based anti-malarial medications.

3. Development of a legal structure for safety testing, standardization, and distribution of plant-based medicines.

4. Development of sustainable culture and/or sustainable wild harvesting of indigenous plants with world market potential as nutritional supplements, medicines, teas, essential oils, or cosmetics. Development of industries to transform these plants into value-added, quality-assured and -controlled products ready for export in world markets.

5. Development of an organic certification structure in accordance with international standards and of a trademarked label for all organic products produced in Senegal.

If you're saying to yourself that I have a lot on my plate, you're right. But fortunately, I have the help of a fantastic organization to realize most of these goals. ASNAPP (Agribusiness for Sustainable Natural Plant Products) has been doing just that in many other African countries. Fortunately, they're interested in working in Senegal next.



Right now, medicinal plants in Senegal are sold in crude form in crowded markets like the one pictured at right in Dakar. Knowledge of medicinal and aromatic plants is anecdotal and usually oral. Standardization and refinement or transformation into value-added products is non-existent or nearly so. Leaves, roots, seeds, and bark are being sold in crude form locally. No manufacturing; no export.

Senegal, like most African countries, is sitting on a gold mine of natural product potential. The key word here is potential. What limited export exists is only of crude plant material, which is then refined into finished product in Europe, the U.S., or Asia. Naturally, the profits from that value-added product stay abroad as well. We want to change that.

ASNAPP is a consortium of natural products experts at 5 different American universities and one South African university who are the world experts at natural products development in Africa. They involve existing public and private sectors, NGOs, and farmer groups already active in a given country to whom they transfer the technology and know-how and provide the quality assurance and quality control to help them develop vibrant natural-products industries. Most important, ASNAPP does detailed market studies before launching any project. That way, farmers aren't gambling with their livelihoods growing "unknowns." Rather, they are growing plants for products for which there is already an established market. ASNAPP even negotiates contracts with buyers. As you can see, this is really market-driven development.

My time in Senegal was spent with Dan Acquaye, ASNAPP's regional coordinator for West Africa, and with Dr. Yayé Gassama-Dia. After spending literally every waking minute with them for 9 days, both of them have become my fast friends. Yayé is her country's most eminent botanist, an infinitely warm-hearted person who works tirelessly to confront the health and economic issues facing the people of Senegal. She is so wise that I think she should go into politics. I know that she would probably scoff at that idea, and besides, it would interfere with her life of science. Dan's gentle, low-key manner conceal at first glance his perspicacity, level-headedness, and analytic abilities, all of which earned my deepest respect. Dan has shepherded his own country of Ghana through many of the same changes we wish to effect in Senegal.



That's Dan and me in the photo with the First Lady of Senegal, Mme Viviane Wade. Mme Wade's tireless devotion to alleviating malaria and to the development of organic agriculture make her a force to be reckoned with. Our hats are permanently off to this dynamic, accessible First Lady who always puts her people first. Her support of our efforts was incredible, and she did everything humanly possible to make our time maximally productive.

After a first day of joint meetings with the key players in and around Dakar, we took off for the first of our field visits. Near Fandène, we met with a group of organic growers of medicinal plants. This association of 64 villages are working to inventory, propagate, and grow on indigenous medicinal and aromatic plants both at a central plantation and in their individual villages.



The variety of hibiscus known in Senegal as bissap, and familiar to most Americans as the tangy-tasting, Vitamin-C-rich ingredient in most red herbal tea blends, was just about the only plant this group was growing with which I was familiar. The claw-like red blossoms are the part harvested for tea. The gentle, quietly knowledgable chief of the group walked us around the plantation, identifying plants and their uses. After about an hour, my head was spinning--not from the new plants, but from the heat! It was 116 degrees in the shade.



With typical Senegalese hospitality, we were invited to feast on a glorious communal platter of food--in the shade, of course. Spoons were distributed and we all dug in.

The following day, Dan and I met with various NGO's active in Senegal, as well as with the head of the Institute for Food Technology. The day after that was the Senegalese equivalent of the 4th of July, so we actually had a day off.



Dan and I took advantage of the break to take the ferry from Dakar to the sun-drenched island of Gorée. Yayé was kind enough to accompany us (you'd think she'd have been sick of us by then), and we spent a pleasant morning wandering the car-less streets of this historic island. Yayé negotiated great deals for me with the many vendors of necklaces for which the island is reknowned. Dancers and musicians in the plaza were helping to celebrate a Day for Women.



We took the boat back to Dakar in the early afternoon and were treated to a wonderful lunch of chicken yassa at Yayé's home, where we had the pleasure of meeting her mathematics professor husband and her darling and precocious little daughter. But dinner that night saw us back at work meeting with someone from USAID.



At 6:00 a.m. the next morning, we were blearily climbing on board a military plane, heading off for the town of Kédougou in the southeastern corner of the country. Two hours of flight and 3 grueling hours in a 4x4 later, we were greeted by these musicians in the remote village of Salémata. We had come to meet with a group of shea butter producers from the area. Some of these ladies (all the producers are women) had walked for two days to reach us. After at least a half an hour of exchanges of welcome and thanks, we began to listen in earnest to the problems faced by these 80 or so women in the extraction of shea butter. The laborious process was demonstrated for us.



Weakened shea trees due to environmental depradations; no means of transporting the shea nuts the several kilometers back to the villages; lack of information on storage techniques; no equipment; no way of getting the shea butter to market; no steady buyers... The list of constraints went on and on. Shea butter is a product with huge global demand, and we were there to evaluate how to support the producers and augment their capacity.

After the meeting, there of course was a splendid communal meal, washed down with vetiver-scented water and followed by the most delicious mangoes I've ever tasted. A wild variety, they had a skin so thin that they were not peeled before eating.



We spent the night in one of the most peaceful spots I've ever been. A hotel consisting of a number of small cabins built in the round, thatch-roofed style of the local cases, it was situated at the end of a long, 4x4-accessible drive right on the Gambia river. The first thing I saw in the morning was a family of hippos worshipping the rising sun (above). The quiet was absolute, except for the warble and whoop of exuberant birds. The orchards were heavy with mangoes and bananas, and the night sweetly scented by the madd vine whose jasmine-like flowers smothered the tree outside my case.



I watched the sun go down over an icy drink in the open-air, deserted bar, where the bartender had run in from gathering mangoes when he saw me approach. When the generator came on at 7, he turned on the radio. It's thin voices and thready music seemed to come from another world. I thought about the shea butter women; the beautiful new hospital in the nearby town of Ninefecha and the people who moved down out of the hills to be near it, but who were afraid to actually go see the doctor there; the naked toddler with kwashiorkor playingwith peanut shells in the dust just 50 yards from the hospital. I thought about the incredible warmth, generosity, and hospitality of all the people I had met.

And I mused about the American woman working in the Air France lounge when I left at the airport in Paris. She looked at my ticket to see if I was qualified to enter. "Oh, you're traveling there alone? Do be careful; you'll be one of the only white people there..." That is honestly what she said. I reflected on the kindness that had enveloped me since my arrival. I hoped that one day she would be as lucky as I.

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