Sociolingo’s Mali

From Reuters Africa

Saharan salt caravans ply ancient route

Wed 21 Feb 2007, 18:04 GMT

By David Rouge

TICHIT, Mauritania, Feb 21 (Reuters) - Caught between an encroaching sea of sand and a towering rocky plateau, Tichit has been a staging post for more than nine centuries for camel caravans snaking across the Sahara.

Isolated in the most inhospitable part of southeastern Mauritania, the crumbling buildings of the once-prosperous town are relentlessly buffeted by winds.

For nearly a millennium, nomadic traders have crossed this desert, braving sandstorms and searing temperatures, in search of “white gold” — salt from Tichit’s open-cast mine, or sebkha.

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From Reuters Africa

UPDATE 2-Low prices slashing Mali cotton output by 25 pct

Wed 21 Feb 2007, 15:20 GMT

(Recasts with background, details throughout)

By Tiemoko Diallo

BAMAKO, Feb 21 (Reuters) - Cotton production in Mali is expected to have dropped by more than a quarter in 2006 as farmers in the impoverished West African nation give up on the crop in the face of tumbling world prices.

Export earnings in Mali, the leading cotton producer in West and Central Africa, are heavily reliant on cotton, known locally as “white gold”. The government has long blamed U.S. domestic farm subsidies for the slump in world prices.

State cotton company CMDT said cotton output was expected to have dropped to 435,000 tonnes in the 2006 season from 585,000 tonnes the previous year as farmers struggled to earn enough money to maintain their fields.

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This is a telling report about Mali and US cotton subsidies - and they wonder why they are unpopular!

“If BT cotton is so profitable, why do they have to subsidise their cotton farmers with billions of dollars in the United States?” Ms Samake asks.

“Our farmers in West Africa achieve record production using just their digging sticks and regular seeds and they have great difficulty selling what they produce, because subsidies in America and Europe have made the world price for cotton fall.

“So why do they come now with their GMOs and technology to solve a problem that they created? It’s a big farce!” adds Ms Samake, who is a member of the Coalition to Protect Mali’s Genetic Heritage that formed when word leaked from IER about the USAid-funded project on BT crops.”

A recent report shows that copper was imported from North Africa to Mali in the Middle Ages.

Researchers have analysed the chemical composition and lead isotopes of the copper used in medieval West African artefacts. Despite the widespread presence of copper ore deposits in the West African region, metals used by the sophisticated metallurgical industry in sub-Saharan Africa were imported from North Africa, they found. Copper probably fuelled the trans-Saharan trade, providing North Africa with gold. A thousand years ago, after Islam had spread into the Sahel, the trans-Sahara camel caravan trade was flowering. It has been known for a long time that mainly gold and later slaves were the most desired West African products for the Arabs at the Mediterranean coast. So far, historians have argued that salt was the main trade product brought southwards, but new research adds copper to the favourite products of West Africans in the 11th to 16th century.

Read the full report at http://www.afrol.com/articles/18867