Project aims to enable villagers to grow enough food

A five-year project aimed at helping thousands of people in one of Mali’s poorest areas to attain food security was launched on Saturday, the project’s director said.

The Projet de developpement integral de l’aval de Manantali (PDIAM) involves the irrigation of 1,653 ha of land on the River Senegal downstream of the Manantali Dam, PDIAM’s Abdoulaye Dembele told IRIN on Thursday. Most of it, he said, would be used for growing rice and other cereals.

The project also entails developing semi-intensive livestock farming, and fostering socioeconomic development by helping women’s activities, improving health care and reducing illiteracy. Its beneficiaries include some of the 20,000 people displaced by the construction of the dam, Dembele said.

Manantali, which is some 500 km northwest of Bamako, was completed in 1987. The water trapped behind it submerged about 30 villages, whose inhabitants were resettled downstream in areas that were already inhabited. The then government built some homes, roads, a few wells and schools for them, and gave them food aid for two agricultural seasons but little was done to ensure their economic independence, according to Dembele.

“It’s an extremely poor area,” he told IRIN. “Farmers do not manage to produce enough to live on.” Most, he said, live off remittances from relatives in the capital, Bamako, or abroad.

The US $26-million project, financed by the Islamic Development Bank, the Kuwaiti Development Fund, the OPEC Development Fund and the Saudi Development Fund, began in January 2000. Since then, small-scale activities have been undertaken within its framework: grinding mills have been supplied to women, wells have been sunk and support given to the establishment of small market gardens. Dembele estimates that the main activity, farming rice on irrigated ricelands, will take off around April or May 2002.

The project cannot cater for all the displaced and their hosts, and new studies have begun on another 2,500 ha with a view to expanding it, Dembele said. The next step, he added, will be to seek additional funds.