Harnessing water to fight grain deficits

Authorities in Burkina Faso are counting on the country's ability to harness ground water to end cereal deficits due to poor weather. A small-scale irrigation project recently launched by the government aims to enable farmers cultivate their land throughout the year. Now they can only do so for three to four months each year. The idea is to increase production so as to cushion the food crises the country has suffered for years, agriculture authorities say. "It was realised that farmers do nothing for nine months whereas they need to eat throughout the year," said Alphonse Ouedraogo, leader of the 'Projet petite irrigation villageoise'. "They only work during the three-to-four month rainy season, and spend the rest of the time organising funerals, marriages or markets," he quipped. The project aims to exploit water resources, however small they may be, throughout villages in the country. "The determining element is the availability of surface or groundwater at the end of the rainy season in sites that we have identified," Ouedraogo said. "It is a race against time to exploit the available water," he added. At the launch of the programme, in November in the village of Yakiya, 80 km east of the capital Ouagadougou, ground water was found at about 2.5 metres below the surface. In September, just after the rains, it had been one metre underground. "It's clear that rain-fed agriculture is risky business because either it does not rain much or because of pockets of drought or, yet again, floods," Ouedraogo said. The project will seek to quickly collect and keep the water that falls during the rainy season so that it can be used for out-of-season farming. The traditional planting season is generally from June to September. "The big problem is changing the mentalities of our farmers. Their production habits will have to be changed radically," Agriculture Minister Salif Diallo said. "Efforts will be made over a period of many years to sensitise people so that small-scale irrigation becomes a habit for Burkinabe producers." According to various studies, farming is done on just 3.7 million ha of the 9.0 million ha of arable land that Burkina Faso has. Less than a tenth of the country's nine billion cubic metres of water is used. The authorities hope to obtain three crops a year in some areas by harvesting the water that falls during the rainy season. This year, the project will be conducted on 1,000 ha. Targeted output is 4,000 mt of maize and 400 mt of niebe, a protein-rich bean. The landlocked Sahelian country has regular cereal deficits mainly caused by inclement weather. In the season that has just ended, the shortfall was 442,000 mt or 20.15 percent of the national requirement. The authorities estimate that running the project in half of Burkina Faso's 8,000 villages will allow the country to attain a production surplus of 30,000 to 40,000 mt a year, and a yield per ha of three to four mt. They feel that it could eventually enable the country to cover half its food needs. The project has received startup funds under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries (HIPC)Initiative in the form of a credit line of about US $1.5 million, while the Caisse Nationale de credit agricole (National Agricultural Credit Bank) has agreed to lend farmers a total of 1.5 billion (about US $ 2 billion) to buy pedal pumps and seeds, and make compost heaps. The European Union has promised to help the farmers to get their surplus to markets.