On March 22, 2022, Liberation and the NGO ONE are organizing a special day to challenge presidential candidates on the return of extreme poverty everywhere on the planet and its consequences on the major challenges that await us. On the program: global warming, debt burden, public development aid, food security… Meet at the Théâtre du Rond-Point from 9 am. A special 20-page notebook will accompany this event, in the March 22 edition of Liberation. find in this file these articles.
When, at exactly 7:06 a.m., the sun crosses the dune, hits the solar panel and starts the well pump, the drip starts and the Niayes light up. A routine whose kickoff varies with the seasons. Omar Dia is used to it. Coming from a family of landowners, he farms ten hectares of vegetables at the bottom of a basin with fertile soil: “The work is hard and repetitive, but I wouldn’t trade my place for those who eat my tomatoes in Dakar,” smiles the producer from the village of Tébene, located in the commune of Thieppe, in the heart of the Niayes, this coastal strip subject to the humid trade winds which create a temperate microclimate, from Dakar to Saint-Louis.
The man has seen Europe and Turkey, tried his hand at the fish business and the trade in agricultural equipment, but he returned ten years ago to the region where he was born with one certainty: here , life is sweeter “only in Europe and in the cities”. So we have to preserve it. But since his return, “the level of the water table has dropped”, he laments. His observation on the ground is shared by scientists. The water table, dependent on rainfall recharge, which has been falling since the droughts of the 1970s, is under tension. The 180 kilometers of the Niayes area are threatened.
The cause is overexploitation of aquifer resources by the 10,000 market gardeners who provide 70% of national fruit and vegetable production, but also by village boreholes and the public company Sen’eau, which draws water from the water table to supply the city of Dakar. As nature abhors a vacuum, these multiple punctures do the business of seawater. It rises in the wells as the level of the ocean rises on the Senegalese coast. World Bank projections predict a rise of 20 centimeters by 2030, and 80 centimeters by 2080.
© Provided by Liberation
The water table of the Niayes, dependent on the rainfall recharge which has been falling since the droughts of the 1970s, is under tension.
“On the Atlantic side, in the municipality of Thieppe, the number of boreholes has increased twenty-fold in recent years. And a few kilometers further inland, it goes beyond the limits: some wells of 16 meters do not even find water anymore”, describes Ibrahima Ba. This native of Galdoumel, a village in the municipality of Thieppe, produced a critical report in the summer of 2021 as part of obtaining his BTS in geomatics. In particular, he deplores the lack of climate information available to market gardeners. Ibrahima Bâ has now taken over the family farm and is trying to use his knowledge to raise awareness among colleagues in his commune. “The main obstacle is the lack of education. They do not trust the technical reports or the alerts that we, the young people of the commune, issue,” he acknowledges. In the Niayes, illiteracy affects 84.3% of market gardeners.
However, alarmist studies follow one another. In her thesis defense published in 2019, Amy Faye, a researcher at the Senegalese Agricultural Research Institute, worried: “Climate forecasts that prevent optimism raise questions about the future of horticultural production in the face of a persistent rainfall deficit.” According to her, public policies must urgently “integrate better governance mechanisms for irrigation water resources to ensure their long-term availability for sustainable horticultural production in the Niayes”. As a sign of awareness, the government launched the first phase of the Niayes Eco-Sustainable Agriculture Intensification Project in the spring of 2021. The program takes note of the tensions weighing on the coastal strip. Its first objective is to “mitigating the phenomena of natural degradation” lands. Of course, Omar Dia will be on the front line. “We must organize ourselves, plant trees, raise awareness!” he already explains to the Niayes market gardeners.