Environment in Gambia Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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Gambia refers to an African river as well as to the country that took its name from one of West Africa’s important waterways. Surrounded on three sides by French-speaking Senegal, The Gambia’s political borders enclose the lower half of a river that begins in the highlands of Guinea and cuts a swath through the country before emptying into the Atlantic. About the size of Connecticut, The Gambia is one of Africa’s smallest nations. It is just 15 to 30 miles (24 to 48 kilometers) wide and less than 300 miles (483 kilometers) long. In this Lilliputian political entity, one is never far from the Gambia River, its most outstanding geographical feature.

Nearly 50 years before Columbus crossed the Atlantic, Portuguese sailors entered the Gambia River, making it part of the expanding Atlantic economy. For more than three centuries, slavers from diverse European nations operated along the Gambia River. The Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, and even a Baltic principality (Kurland) established trading posts to facilitate the slave trafficking. After the Atlantic slave trade ceased in the early 19th century, European nations took their spheres of interest and divided Africa into colonies. The Gambia became British in 1889; it achieved political independence in 1965.

More than 1.25 million people currently live in The Gambia (2004 estimate). About one-third of the population reside near the 36-mile (58-kilometer) coastal strip along the Atlantic. Three main ethnic groups comprise the country’s population: the Mandinka (40 percent), the Fulani (19 percent), and the Wolof (15 percent). One of Africa’ poorest countries, in a continent known for some of the most impoverished nations on the earth, most Gambians make their living from agriculture. The country’s preeminent farmers are the Mandinka, and the environments shaped by the Gambia River profoundly influence the way they farm and the crops they grow. The river, its tributaries, and associated wetlands cover about one-quarter of the land surface; a slightly larger percentage comprises the plateau, where agricultural production takes place only with rainfall. Despite the country’s low elevation, a variety of transitional environments are found between the plateau and river floodplains that draw moisture from diverse sources.

Agriculture

The rural economy and livelihood depend on agricultural practices and crops that are adapted to the distinctive environments of the plateau and wetlands. This in turn influences the way rural households divide work between males and females. On the plateau, men grow the country’s principal export crop, peanuts, in addition to millet, sorghum, and maize for food. These crops are adapted to the four-month rainy season (mid-June to mid-October). However, throughout this region of West Africa, the rainfall pattern (31-43 inches [79-109 centimeters]) is highly variable. It is often badly distributed within a year; one in every four years, precipitation is typically below normal. For this reason, the floodplains and swamps along the Gambia River are extremely important to rural well-being and survival. And it is women who farm them, for rice is traditionally a female crop.

Rice has been grown along the Gambian wetlands since antiquity. The initial species, native to Africa, is separate from Asian rice, which only replaced the lower-yielding African seed over the past half century. Since at least the period of the Atlantic slave trade, rice has been a woman’s crop.

Women’s farmwork in rural Gambia thus takes place in an entirely different ecological setting than that of their husbands. They grow rice and some vegetables in a variety of tidal and lowland swamps that receive water from the Gambia River, its tributaries, and the high water table of the lowlands. Even their agricultural calendar is different from that of their husbands. The wetlands enable cultivation many more months of the year than the plateau, which increases the number of months women farm. In a drought-prone environment, the wetlands are the key to food availability and survival. For this reason, since the 1960s they have received a great deal of attention by development planners.

Increasing Crop Yields

Lying between 13 and 14 degrees latitude north of the equator, The Gambia like many other countries south of the Sahara experiences occasional droughts. Development assistance to the country and its neighbors has targeted the region’s wetlands for pump-irrigation schemes. The goal is to extract available river water to irrigate a dry season crop. The harvests of two annual crops in the wetlands holds hope for increasing production of rice, the regional dietary staple. Some 10,000 acres (4,000 hectares) of wetlands now are developed to irrigation projects out of an estimated 60,000 acres (24,000 hectares) farmed with traditional swamp rice methods.

However, the irrigation technology has largely failed to create a sustainable form of agriculture. In part this is because the high price of diesel has made the operation of irrigation pumps extremely costly in a society where the average per capita income hovers around $450 annually. This also affects the price of fertilizer. The most productive rice varieties demand significant amounts of fertilizer, and in just 20 years its price has quadrupled. Fertilizers are now priced beyond the means of most rural producers. Inappropriate technology transfer also occurred amid misguided attempts of development planners to attract Gambian men to rice cultivation. They awarded the developed irrigated plots to women’s husbands rather than to the traditional female growers. As a consequence, women became laborers on the very fields they previously managed and used for income generation. Conflict between men and women erupted frequently in the implementation of pump-irrigation schemes.

Fortunately, many lessons have been learned. Technologically sophisticated irrigation systems similar to those in California are not feasible for cash-strapped rural populations. New approaches to raising African food production now center on building upon the ecological knowledge already held by rural people in farming diverse environments. One of the crucial lessons of Gambian wetland development is the significance of women’s work and environmental knowledge for raising food production. Any project that aims to improve food availability in rural West Africa now assumes that men and women often work separately, with different crops, and frequently in dissimilar environments.

The Gambia River still defines the country and its people. A river that flows through parched landscapes is being once more returned to its custodians, the female rice growers. Development assistance now helps them level the floodplains in order to restore the river’s natural reach. In improving its tidal reach, the river now flows unimpeded across women’s rice fields, as it seeks its outlet to the Atlantic.

Bibliography:

Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (Doubleday, 1976);
Margaret Haswell, The Nature of Poverty (St. Martin’s Press, 1975);
Richard Peet and Michael Watts, eds., Liberation Ecologies: Environment, Development, Social Movements (Routledge, 2004);
Richard Schroeder, Shady Practices: Agroforestry and Gender Politics in The Gambia (University of California Press, 1999);
Donald R. Wright, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa (M.E. Sharp, 2004).