0:07      Madi Minges: From the School of International Service at American University in Washington, this is Big World, where we talk about something in the world that truly matters.

0:16      Jesse Ribot: Great crop, the prices tumble. Bad crop, the prices go up a bit, and every year we end up with a hungry season here. A hungry season being a time before the next harvest where they've run out of food, run out of money, and had a month to three months in which they could not feed their families or their children, went down to one meal a day, and they found that very painful.

0:44      MM: That was Professor Jesse Ribot. He joins us today to discuss his research on migration and the Hungry Season. Listed second on the United Nations list of Sustainable Development Goals is the statement "zero hunger." The Sustainable Development Goals aim to end all forms of hunger and malnutrition by 2030. According to the UN, undernourishment and severe food insecurity appear to be increasing in almost all regions of Africa and South America. Today we're talking about what one of our SIS professors found through his research about the roots of hunger and vulnerability, particularly in West Africa. I'm Madi Minges, and I'm joined by Professor Jesse Ribot. Jesse is a professor here at the School of International Service in the Department of Environment Development and Health. Jesse was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2018 and his research centers on the social, political, and economic causes of the precarity and suffering of natural resource-dependent communities. Jesse is also a human geographer of environmental justice and well-being, and his current research focuses on vulnerability and the hungry season in Senegal, which we'll be discussing today. Jesse, thanks for joining Big World.

2:00      JR: Thank you, Madison.

2:02      MM: Jesse, for the last few years, you've been studying vulnerability and migration in West Africa. Can you tell me the story of how that work first came about?

2:13      JR: Yeah. I have been working on vulnerability since the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where I was invited down to work with a group trying to present issues of the world's dry lands to the conference of the parties. This was the first conference of the parties, and through that experience, it became quite evident to me that vulnerability was a very key issue when it came to understanding hunger, famine, dislocation, and economic loss in the face of climate change. And so I began writing about it. I wrote a book out of that experience at the time, "Climate and Social Vulnerability in the Semi-Arid Tropics," and I kept writing about vulnerability as a theoretical topic for many years. I never did any fieldwork on it until much more recently.

3:18      JR: So the fieldwork that we're talking about today came about when, after many years of working in West Africa on questions of rights, recourse, and representation around access to natural resources for forest villagers in the Sahelian region where I work, West Africa, the Sahel, including places like Senegal, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso. In that area, I had worked on other issues, but I wanted to do empirical work now on climate and social vulnerability. And that was in 2015. I had some funds to do some field research and I said to myself, the next major climate crisis that happens, I am going to go where there is a climate event and people say, "Oh, my god, climate change." And I waited, and on April the 19th, 2015, a boat sank off of Lampedusa, Italy, and that boat had 1,100 young migrants on it. There were 29 survivors, and the first thing I saw was the New York Times, Forbes magazine, and lots of other venues saying, "Climate refugees," and I thought, here you go, here is a crisis. It's not what I expected. It's not a weather event, but it's a crisis being attributed to climate change.

4:55      JR: But what was remarkable was that of the thousand plus young men, and they were almost all men, who perished on that boat, a few hundred of them had come from the region of Eastern Senegal where I had worked over the last 30 years. And so I set out for Eastern Senegal to interview the families of these young men, their friends, and other wannabe migrants, and other wannabe farmers who didn't want to migrate to understand one simple question; why did these young people take a very dangerous journey across the Sahara, across the Mediterranean, toward Europe? What were they doing? What were they looking for and what was the role of climate and climate change in their decision to go?

5:59      MM: Based on those conversations that you had when you went and you interviewed the families of the migrants who had left their villages and who had perished on that ship, what did you find when you did that research? What did they tell you?

6:14      JR: Well, I went to Tambacounda, which is the region from which they came, with a former student of mine. He got his doctorate with me, Papa Fai. And we did a bunch of household interviews. We did a thousand household surveys, interviewed a number of people and also authorities in the area like chiefs and local elected officials and what have you. The first thing that was striking was nobody ever mentioned the weather. These were farmers. They didn't mention rainfall, they didn't mention drought. The thing they did talk about most when they said why things were difficult, the immediate question was, "We get really low prices for what we produce. Great crop, the prices tumble. Bad crop, the prices go up a bit, and every year we end up with a hungry season here." A hungry season being a time before the next harvest where they've run out of food, run out of money.

7:27      JR: And it's important to distinguish food and money because many of these people are not growing subsistence crops. They may be growing cotton, which you can't eat cotton, but they ran out of food and money and had a month to three months in which they could not feed their families or their children, went down to one meal a day, and they found that very painful and they talked about that as a struggle. But they talked about it in terms of I can't stand seeing my parents running left and right to try and feed us. These were teenagers. And the parents said, "This is the most difficult time that we experience."

8:09      JR: And so we interviewed kids and families quite a bit and found there were a number of other reasons that came up that weren't as articulated directly, and they had to do with, we want to go to help our family. I want to have a role in my family to be able to give them something. But then they would say other families, their kids have gone to Europe, they send back remittances and their families don't have a hungry season. They are seen as having done really good for their families. And here we are, I do work every day. I feel like the family mule and nobody says thank you.

9:01      JR: So these kids were there trying to grow up in a circumstance that was very difficult and it seemed like an option for getting some dignity and recognition was to go and send something back, to go and help the family. The other problem that was happening locally was that families that had migrants and had remittances from Europe already, they were doing much better. And the families who had young women, young girls, they are married off at about 13 years old. They only wanted to marry off the children, their children, to families that had migrants. So the boys in families without migrants couldn't get married, and the kids who had migrated to Europe were married to three or four young women, this is a polygamous society, three or four young women who would be walking around with cell phones and in nice dresses. And there were the boys who were getting older and couldn't come of age, couldn't marry, couldn't have their own families, and that was very painful for kids.

10:20      JR: They didn't want to sit and wait. And so they made the decision to go and they made that decision independent of their parents. Parents, there were parents who said to their children, "Go, it's a great idea," but they were not the majority people knew how dangerous this was. And in fact, the marabouts or Islamic religious leaders were starting to advise kids not to go, and the kids would make a decision among themselves to go as a few friends, usually by the way, not after a poor harvest when they didn't have a lot of food or cotton or whatever it was to sell, but after a good harvest when they had a little bit more income and savings. So it was inversely related to climate. They would go in a good year and they'd have a little more savings that they could go with and they would sneak off in the middle of the night. And they would sneak off, there were these people called coaxers or passer who would help smuggle them across the border and guide them.

11:38      JR: Now, they would go and talk to the religious leaders, and the religious leaders would say, "Don't go." And when you ask them, "Why are you going? And when there's this risk," they would say, "We're in the hands of God. We will. We're going to go, because what happens to us is not our decision." They would say, "Barsa wala Barsakh." Barsa meaning Barcelona, which actually for them meant Europe. All of Europe is called Barcelona or Barsa wala Barsakh, which is a kind of purgatory or death, it's the place you wait for where you're going to be assigned heaven or hell after you die. And I thought, wow, they're really willing to die to go to Europe. And after a while of talking to them, I began to realize that when they said Barsa wala Barsakh, they did not mean death in the desert or death at sea. They meant it is social death to stay here, and that was the sad thing.

12:54      JR: They didn't see a future without some way to bring dignity into their departure by being able to help their families. And every last one of them said, "This is home. This is where I want to be. I don't want to be in Europe. I don't even want to go to Europe. I want to come back here." And so the departure was a departure in order to be where they were.

13:20      MM: Wow. Yeah. That's really, really interesting. It almost seems like some of those issues then were, maybe, structural in a way that it wasn't sustainable to stay where they were, so they were leaving. I'm curious how those initial discoveries, when you started this research 10 years ago, how has that evolved into what you're researching now? I guess, how is your understanding of migration and vulnerability in West Africa, how has that shifted and how has that informed the research that you are currently working on?

13:57      JR: Yeah, that's a great question because part of what I found really troubling about this rise in migration, outmigration, was that the hungry season, which was a pretext of difficulty, is not new. And I began looking back historically, the hungry season is fairly constant since the pre-colonial period. There was a real famine in 1985 and some really intense droughts and hunger in the sixties and seventies. But overall, good harvest or bad harvest, there has been a hungry season and it has become more of a constant situation of hungry season, bad or good harvest over the years. It's evened out to be just backdrop. So why are these kids leaving at present? And I really don't entirely have an answer to that.

15:07      JR: So one of the things that I began looking at was, well, what is the cause of this hungry season? Why is it constant, and why has the hungry season become a source of anxiety in a way that it wasn't when I first arrived in West Africa 40 years ago, and I spent a year and a half in these forest villages. Now it is now 40 years. I started this project, as I said earlier, when it was 30 years ago that I had begun. So I've been on this for 10 years, and what I began to ask is, what is this hungry season produced by? And I asked donors, people who work on international development in the city of Dakar and work out in the rural areas. And when you ask them, why are these people experiencing the hungry season? You get incredibly anodyne, shallow answers. "Oh, it's climate change."

16:11      JR: Well, it turns out rainfall has been increasing, as have harvests, in this region over the past 20 years. So you can't explain it by rainfall or climate change. Population has not been growing that much given out migration to the cities and the like. And also the food production has kept up with population, in terms of the ratio. So what is going on here is something other than climate change. And I said, so even if it isn't climate change, what are you doing? What do you do to solve this problem? And what people said was, "We need to increase production." So as I talked to people, farmers as well as donor agency people, what I began to learn was that every time the harvest goes up, prices fall. So there's almost no motive to increase production. And in fact, whether it's moments when there was innovation, whether people extended the amount of land they were farming, whether it was a good rainy year, they don't make more. What is that about?

17:30      JR: And my hypothesis is that this is a situation where the prices are being fixed by elite merchants, traders who have monopoly buying power, what we call monopsony or oligopsony, which is a group of buyers who fix the price collusively. And what you end up with is the prices being ratcheted down to below subsistence every year systematically, but brought back up when there's risk of really having a crisis. Because the merchants know that famine, a real crisis, would be politically untenable. Heads would roll. Politicians know this. So they call in aid, they raise the prices up, they cancel debts, they do all kinds of things to avoid the hungry season turning into a famine, but they keep the hungry season going by ratcheting the price down.

18:35      JR: Everybody has heard in the last 10 years of land grabbing, where farmers are losing land to big external corporations. In the area I work in, the land is not worth a hell of a lot. This is dry land, it's rain fed agriculture. I'm calling what I'm seeing, market grabbing. And I think it makes land grabbing look minuscule. And I would hypothesize that it's not just true in the dry lands where I am, but that this market grabbing is taking place everywhere around the globe, and this is why farmers remain poor and precarious and vulnerable.

19:16      JR: How is it that somebody in forestry where forests don't depend on that year's rainfall, they depend on the last average 20 years, they're having a hungry season. How is it that the banana growers who are having irrigated banana growing along The Gambia River in Tambacounda, how come they experience a hungry season? Because the merchants have different ways of controlling the markets. For bananas, it's the control of cold storage and cold refrigeration trucks. In cotton, it's a single monopoly buyer, but it's also tied up in credit arrangements of advancing credit for fertilizers and seeds and pesticides. And then in the end of the year, the farmers are in debt. So it is different in each market, which tells me this is structural. So the fact is that the mechanisms, you can play around with how you grab that market. But there is a political system in which market grabbing is possible either through informal sector collusion or help of the state; licenses, permits, quotas, things like that.

20:42      JR: Why does the government do this? Why does the government allow this? Why does this continue is the topic of my current research program. And I think that one of the reasons government allows this, another hypothesis along this line of reasoning is that over many years, these governments have had to consolidate their territorial control and power by working with elites. They didn't have, the colonial government didn't, and the post-colonial government didn't have enough of a base to really be able to consolidate their power as a government, so they worked with elites. What did they do? They gave elites markets so they could get rich and help the government tax, in order to support the government, but also help vote garnering and things like that. But today we're in a very different situation. There's a new progressive government that has an incredibly broad base, and I don't think they need this anymore, but my hypothesis is that they don't even know that they don't need this.

21:55      JR: And so that is really the basis of the next research program, which will be looking at, what I call, for agricultural and other rural commodity chains. That is markets, how the product goes from producer to local buyer to transporter to transformation. If it's a product that's packaged or something to wholesalers, to retailers, to exporters and importers and retailers abroad, how does that product travel? What regulatory systems are around it? What enables, what mechanisms enable certain elite individuals to capture large market shares and fix prices at their node of the market? And that, I think, is supported by government in many ways, and that is what is no longer needed.

23:03      JR: But by making it transparent, by doing these studies, it will show peasants why they are getting such low prices because they see themselves as price takers. They say, "Well, that's just the price." They don't know where it comes from, frankly. But if these peasants and the peasant cooperatives and peasant unions, farmers unions had this information, they can negotiate greater income for the farmers. That's one possibility. It's not entirely likely, it would meet with resistance. But I think if the new government, which is quite progressive, also knew about this, they might help in that process of improving the situation of these farmers, unions, cooperatives, and the like. And this government has already stated that it is committed to supporting agricultural cooperatives. So the hope is that these commodity chain studies will create the transparency to enable government to help the farmers to use the new information that they have.

24:16      MM: Jesse, I want to go back to something that you mentioned earlier, and you kind of talked about conversations that you had with aid organizations or NGOs, people who are working on helping the vulnerable, helping the hungry in the world. And from what you said, it almost sounds like there's this profound misunderstanding of the core causes of what is keeping people vulnerable, what is keeping people hungry. Do you think that's a fair assessment or what do you make of that? And if that's the case, I guess, how do you go about changing that perception?

24:54      JR: Well, first you do the studies and show that this is that there are other structural broader causes. I think part of the problem is that lots of the studies done of agriculture are very local. So you look at the producer, you see that they have bad credit arrangements. You see that they can't sell or they have to sell right when they harvest, when the prices are low, and because they have immediate needs for cash. And you explain things by those immediate, easy to correlate kinds of variables rather than trying to understand this in a broader embedded set of hierarchical relations that are not easy to see.

25:44      MM: Jesse, last question. How are you hoping that the research that you're working on now is eventually applied? What do you hope your research can do to bring change?

25:56      JR: It's not an easy thing to make change happen. I think the new government in Senegal, Diomaye Faye, President of Senegal, is very progressive, wants to support agricultural cooperatives. I think that a set of commodity chain studies, maybe 5 to 20 different rural products showing how markets operate at a higher level would at least launch a discussion in policy circles that I think are dedicated to change. Now, it doesn't mean that they're not caught up with the elites just as previous governments have been, but they have such a broad base they don't have to be, and I think they might be able to see that.

26:51      JR: I also think that cooperatives, which have changed quite a bit over the years, it's a long history of evolution of cooperatives, which used to themselves be quite elite controlled, are becoming more popular and more representative. And I think the cooperatives part of the project that I have will train farmers to do commodity chain studies. I'm not just getting PhD students. Farmers will be doing it and they'll stay in the rural areas. They will translate what we learn into local vernacular. And that is to say they'll be able to explain it to their friends the way you and I explain our work to our friends, and not in the way that I could explain it to a peasant farmer. I can try and I probably would do okay, but the cooperative and union folks, they're very smart. They know a lot about what's going on, but I think there needs to be a broader, more systematic study of these markets with that knowledge retained locally so that cooperatives are in a better position to negotiate for the well-being of the farmers. I think that is a way forward.

28:09      MM: Jesse Ribot, thank you for joining Big World to discuss your ongoing research in West Africa. It's been a pleasure to speak with you.

28:16      JR: Thank you, and this has been a pleasure. Thank you for the great questions and appreciate the time.

28:23      MM: Big World is a production of the School of International Service at American University. Our podcast is available on our website, on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you listen. If you like this episode, please leave us a rating or review. Our theme music is, It was just Cold by Andrew Codeman. Until next time.