Sesame (Sesamum indicum) is the crop of the moment for farmers (IIED)

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http://www.iied.org/sustainable-markets/blog/climate-change-winners-and-losers-sahel?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+duesouth+%28Due+South%3A+IIED+Blog%29

Climate change winners and losers in Sahel

by Camilla Toulmin, Director, IIED

Earlier this month, I spent a week in Mali, going back to the villages which I have studied for the past 30 years. While international climate negotiators met in Cancun, Mexico, for the UN summit on climate change, I was keen to catch up on how climate change was affecting livelihoods in the West African Sahel.

This year has brought heavy rain to much of the region and with it, a mixed bag of impacts on yields of the local staple crop, millet. For farmers in the Kala region north of Segou in central Mali, the heavy rainfall has been good for the long-cycle sanyo millet, which takes 6–7 months to mature. But the fast-growing souna millet, which matures in 3–4 months, has performed poorly. This is partly due to impoverishment of soils. “When rain falls heavily you need a lot of power in the soil — that power is supplied by animal dung. That’s what creates the heat that supplies energy to the crop,” says local farmer Ganiba Dembele, showing me the yellow leaves of the souna millet. He and other farmers recognise that their plots need to be replenished with dung each year if they are to produce well, particularly in wetter growing conditions. “We’ve increased the size of our fields so much, we can’t get enough dung from our flocks and herds to keep them well-fertilised. It’s lucky we have sanyo to make up the deficit,” he adds.

Open sesame

But if the picture for millet has been mixed, the sesame story has been remarkably positive. Farmers in Mali have been trying out sesame for the past decade and have rapidly expanded their efforts in the past couple of seasons. This growth has been driven by rapidly increasing sesame prices worldwide, driven by soaring demand for sesame seed as an ingredient in Middle Eastern foods, and as an oil seed in China. Demand has been rising so fast that traders have begun visiting distant villages to search for sesame supplies. This means farmers don’t have to take the crop to market themselves.

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