The Year the Sahel Traded Its Future for a Bag of Urea
The Year the Sahel Traded Its Future for a Bag of Urea
She is not backward. She is the last living archive of a system that once fed the Sahel without a single imported pound.
In 1973, in a village outside Niamey, a farmer named Amadou watched his neighbour Issa unload a shining white 50-kg bag of urea from a government truck. Issa’s millet had yielded 1,800 kg per hectare the previous year. Amadou’s, fertilised only with cattle manure and ash, had given 680 kg.
Amadou did the maths. His eldest son needed school fees. His wife wanted a corrugated roof. The extension officer promised a loan if he bought two bags. The president on the radio spoke of “marching toward modernity.”
So Amadou sold two goats, bought the urea, and scattered those glittering white granules for the first time.
Across the Sahel – from Senegal to Chad – millions of Amadous made the same calculation in the same season.
No one called it betrayal. Everyone called it progress.
“The biggest obstacle to fertilizer adoption in the Sahel is not price or availability – it is the farmers’ stubborn attachment to their traditional, low-yielding methods. Extension must be used to break this cultural resistance.”
– World Bank internal mission report, Mali, 1974
We Were All Running the Same Five-Year Experiment
Everyone had a perfectly rational reason to open the bag:
| The President | “If cereal production does not rise 5 % a year, the donors will say my country is failing.” |
|---|---|
| The Minister | “My ministry’s budget depends on hitting fertilizer distribution targets.” |
| The Extension Officer | “If I don’t sell my quota of urea, I lose my job.” |
| The Scientist | “In India this exact package tripled wheat yields. The data are undeniable.” |
| The Farmer | “My neighbour harvested three times more than me last year. My children are watching.” |
Every actor’s horizon was five years – the length of a national plan, a research grant, a political term, a childhood before school fees were due.
No one’s job description included thinking in 2040.
The First Decade Looked Like Victory
Yields soared. Politicians cut ribbons at new silos. Newspapers ran photographs of gleaming white bags stacked like modern pyramids. In 1978 ICRISAT’s Sahel report celebrated: “Traditional reliance on manure and ash is finally giving way to scientific farming.”
And then, quietly, the soil began to die.
Left: the new way. Right: the old way. Same village, same rainfall, thirty years apart.
The Hidden Collapse – The Numbers Nobody Wanted to Read in 1985
- Soil organic carbon fell from ~1 % to ~0.3 % in fifteen years (Pieri 1989)
- Soil pH dropped below 5.0 – aluminium toxicity killed roots
- After subsidies were removed (Structural Adjustment, 1990s), the price of a bag of urea rose 800–1,000 % in real terms
- 65–80 % of fertilizer loans went into default in drought years (Oxfam 1996)
- Today, average fertilizer use in the Sahel is back below 10 kg/ha – lower than in 1970
The system that had fed the Sahel for a millennium without a single imported kilogram was gone. And there was no way back.
The Grandmothers Were Right All Along
In 2025 the same donors who once paid extension agents to shame manure use are now paying different extension agents to teach “climate-smart agriculture” that looks suspiciously like… spreading manure, burning crop residue for ash, lengthening fallows, and intercropping cereals with cowpea.
Only now it has English acronyms and PowerPoint slides.
The grandmothers never needed the slides.
They simply kept doing what worked, quietly, on the small plots behind their compounds, while the rest of the world ran its five-year experiment and discovered, forty years later, that the experiment had an expiry date written in disappearing topsoil.
